On Human Rights
Dignity Jurisprudence: Building a New Law On Earth
in Just Ideas series ed. by Drucilla Cornell and Roger Berkowitz (Fordham University Press, 2013)
South African dignity jurisprudence is part of a revolution under way in constitutional thought. The revolution revolves around the guarantee of human dignity as the constitutive right underlying modern legal systems. Article 1 of Germany’s 1948 postwar Basic Law makes human dignity an inviolable right. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes the inherent human dignity of all persons as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. In the 1960s, the International Conventions on both Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and Social Rights both employ human dignity as the backbone of modern human rights. The 1992 Israeli Basic Law on Human Dignity makes the protection of dignity a fundamental value of the Israel legal system. The Canadian Supreme Court has, throughout the 1990s, increasingly come to see “the idea of human dignity” to be at the core of “almost every right and freedom guaranteed in the [Canadian] Character.” Finally, dignity has come to the fore as the central and constitutive ground norm in the 1996 South African Constitution. In both national and international law, the idea of an inviolable human dignity has emerged as a revolutionary idea that is transforming constitutional jurisprudence.
Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
in The Handbook of Human Rights (Routledge, 2011)
This article explores Hannah Arendt’s critique and reformulation of human rights in three parts. Part One offers a summary of Arendt’s critique of human rights as she develops it in the central chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Part Two explores the intellectual foundations of Arendt’s reconstruction of human rights as the “the right to have rights” in her concept of natality, the core condition of human being. Finally, Part Three, engages Arendt’s effort in Eichmann in Jerusalem to think clearly about how international law might meaningfully understand the crime of “crimes against humanity.”