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Article: What is international human rights law? Three applications of a distributive account.(McGill Law Journal Annual Lecture Series/Conference Annuelle de la Revue de Droit de McGill)
- Article from:
- McGill Law Journal
- Article date:
- September 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 McGill Law Journal (Canada). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The standard account of international human rights law is that its overarching mission is to protect universal features of what it means to be a human being from the exercise of sovereign power. This article offers an alternative account of the field, one that locates its normative dimensions in its capacity to speak to distributive injustices produced by how international law brings legal order to international political reality. On this account, human rights possess international legal significance not because they correspond to abstract conceptions of what it means to be human but because they monitor the distributive justice of the structure and operation of the ...