Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics

Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.

以人权促进发展:工具性人权论

人权与发展是当今世界两大议题,而长久以来人权与发展在两条互不搭界的轨道上运行,人权与发展的结合能为人类增添更多福祉。人权是发展的目的,发展是为了扩展人权,这是目的性人权论。而人权必须以经济社会发展为基础,且人权能够促进经济社会发展,因而"以人权促进发展"的工具性人权,是人权最终得以保障的最佳路径。工具性人权有着深厚的法理底蕴、现实基础和规范支撑,人权演进的历史其实就是一部工具性人权的发展史,从古代到现代、从美国到中国的实践经验无不表明人权对发展的重大作用,世界人权宪章等国际规范性文件无不论证着工具性人权的重要价值。     

Rights and Rhetoric: The Politics of Asylum and Human Rights Culture in the United Kingdom

No assessment of the state of human rights today could be complete without some consideration of the situation of asylum seekers and the political trends behind it. Four years after the implementation of the 1998 Act, asylum seekers are perhaps more denigrated in rhetoric and harsh practice than they were even before the first promise that rights would be 'brought home' for all 'people' in the United Kingdom. This piece looks at the undermining of the very concept of asylum, dehumanizing policies such as forced destitution, and attacks on access to legal process for those making asylum claims. It goes on to consider judicial attempts at coping with the arena in which high politics and fundamental rights seem in greatest tension. Finally it considers potential implications for the broader aspiration of building a human rights culture in this country.     

Courts, Constitutions, and Labor Politics in England and America: A Study of the Constitutive Power of Law

For most of the 19th century, the labor movements of England and America seemed to be developing along similar lines. Then, in the decades around the turn of the century, both movements were embroiled in a common battle over the political soul of trade unionism. In England, the champions of broad, class-based social and industrial reforms prevailed. In the United States, they lost, and the winners were the voluntarists, who held that labor should steer clear of politics as much as possible. This article suggests that the key reasons for the divergence lie not in the sociology of the working class or labor movement, so much as in the character of the state and polity and the lessons trade unionists drew from experiences in those arenas. The difference between judicial supremacy in the United States and parliamentary supremacy in England combined with other differences in the two nations'forms of government to produce sharply contrasting lessons about the value of state-based reforms.     

Estrangement and Empowerment in Scheingold's The Political Novel

This essay develops an understated argument in Stuart Scheingold's The Political Novel (2010), namely, how narratives of estrangement serve to empower re‐imagination without reinforcing the false promises of modernism. I argue that Scheingold's earlier work in The Politics of Rights and on cause lawyering provides guidance for understanding the character of empowerment to which Scheingold points in his latest work. In addition, I examine three film narratives that treat the “mournful legacy of the twentieth century”—Pan's Labyrinth, Life Is Beautiful, and Everything Is Illuminated. Emergent in these narratives, I suggest, is a way that storytellers point to empowerment by highlighting the largely overwhelming constraints that limit the agency promised by modernism and the strategic, though contingent, choices characters make to confront and cope with their own estrangement.     

The Politics of Adoption: Child Rights in the Brazilian Setting

This paper, centered on adoption policy in Brazil, asks to what extent the open–ended principles apparent in international child rights accords, filtered down through different national laws, adjust to local realities. Ethnographic data on child circulation practices in urban favelas is compared with specific clauses in the 1990 Brazilian Children's Code, as well as with adoption policies in North America, to question the code's way of legislating which children can be placed for adoption, on what terms they should be placed, and who has the power to place them.     

The Politics of the Human Rights Act

The Human Rights Act is the result of post-war changes in Europe. It is the consequence less of the campaigning of dedicated individuals and more of the change in the position of the United Kingdom in Europe and the world. Objections to incorporation of the Convention have given way to the desire to be like the rest of Europe. Traditional views of the judicial role have given way to a perception of the judiciary as the last bastion against an over-powerful executive, unchecked by Parliament.     

Rights as Excess: Understanding the Politics of Special Rights

Although the expression special rights emerged most prominently in the twentieth century as a negative response to the civil rights movement, the use of the term has recently acquired a broader, more ubiquitous doctrinal reach. In this paper we elaborate on the meaning of the term special rights as a political device and a way to mobilize power. As a discourse, special rights inverts relations between majority and minority, threatens a cultural contract that distributes universalistic and particular norms, and alters relations of governance. We apply these ideas to an empirical study of special rights politics in three very different issues in Hawai'i-same-sex marriage, the conversion of landholding from leasehold to fee, and indigenous sovereignty. These case studies demonstrate both the pervasiveness and capaciousness of special rights. We show that the use and impact of this discursive strategy varied a great deal from case to case, as did the responses to the accusations of special rights. Our findings suggest that special rights languuge and its surrogates have become a pervasive part of post-civil rights politics.     

超越国家间政治——主权人权关系的国际法治维度

主权高于人权、人权高于主权，这些观点都是传统国际关系思想在二者关系上的投射。尽管都有其正确合理的一面，却未能清楚的梳理各种现象，更不能指出既面对现实又指出未来发展方向的方案。以国际法治为核心的路径认为主权和人权均可为美好理想，但在现实中皆可被滥用。因此需要法律予以监控和引导。     

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978: The Role of Symbolic Politics

Since 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has governed United States intelligence gathering for national security purposes. Enacted in response to the Watergate–era civil rights violations and revelations of a Senate investigation headed by Senator Frank Church that other presidential administrations had authorized similar warrantless surveillance, FISA established a statutory framework for national security surveillance. Understanding FISA contributes to the study of criminal justice policymaking because law enforcement and intelligence communities view it as an important tool for combatting espionage and terrorism. This article examines the enactment of FISA from the perspective of symbolic politics.     

从应然权利到实然权利:文化权利的著作权法保障机制研究

文化参与、文化分享与文化创新成果利益保护,是国际公约和我国宪法保护的应然文化权利.在文化权利从应然权利到实然权利的保障机制中,著作权法通过调整文化创新成果的创作、传播与利用关系,不仅使文化成果收益权经由著作权保护而得到切实保障,而且通过著作权保护条件、范围等制度设计,为公众文化参与、文化分享权利提供资源保障与行为指引,从而使宪法上应然的文化权利得到具体的部门法保障.著作权法对文化权利的保障机制主要体现在以下方面:其激励作品创作与传播的功能、机制,为个人文化参与和文化分享权利的实现提供内容保障;其作品市场化传播的利益实现机制,为公众文化知识的接触、分享和利用提供现实可能;其合理使用等著作权限制制度,为公众可以自由利用的文化空间提供保障;著作权法对作者和其他著作权人就其作品著作权充分而有效的保护,是公众文化收益权的直接保障机制,是著作权法促进文化权利实现的关键.     

The Application of Human Rights Law to Everyday Civilian Life Under Rebel Control

This article draws upon social science literature to offer a new assessment of the normative value of human rights law vis-à-vis international humanitarian law in territory under armed groups’ control. In particular, the article considers how the two bodies of law can be applied in a complementary manner to regulate the everyday life of civilians who are not involved in hostilities. The article demonstrates that while it might be tempting to imagine that concerns relating to rights such as the freedom of movement, the right to work or protection from common crime are completely displaced by considerations of physical security and survival in times of armed conflict, in reality this is often not the case.

     

The Boycott of the Law and the Law of the Boycott: Law, Labour, and Politics in British Columbia

This article uses a critical theoryllegal mobilization perspective to study the 1987–92 trade union boycott of the British Columbia labour law. The problems encountered establishing a total boycott–one that would eschew all contact with the state–and the subsequent modification of the parameters of the boycott through a selective reliance on the law offer an important case from which to learn more about the role of law and legal rights in highly regulated organizations and how collectives mobilize the law. The author argues that legal rights are important to unions because of their ability to mediate the complexity of labour relations through a decentralization of authority. At the same time, mobilization of the law for this purpose accentuates localized identities and unequal resources that operate in tension with a boycott ethos, necessitating a deliberative politics to legitimize the law. By exploring the tension between these two forms of mobilization around law–one to reduce complexity, another to legitimize broad collective norms–the author analyzes and draws some conclusions about the reproduction of social unionism in British Columbia.     

正义:法律与权利

引论 :正义是人之行为的一种属性我们选用“正当行为规则”一术语来指称那些有助益于自生自发秩序之型构的“目的独立”的规则(ｅｎｄ -ｉｎｄｅｐｅｎｄｅｎｔｒｕｌｅｓ) ,并以此与那些“目的依附”的 (ｅｎｄ -ｄｅｐｅｎｄｅｎｔ)组织规则相对照。前者是内部规则 (ｎｏｍｏｓ) ,而内部规则不仅是“私法社会”〔 1〕 的基础 ,而且也是使开放社会得以形成的基础 ;而后者 ,就其作为法律来说 ,乃是确定政府组织问题的公法。然而 ,我们并不认为 ,所有事实上有可能为人们所遵循的正当行为规则都应当被视作是法律 ,而且我们也不认为 ,每一条构…