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 Abstract

Excerpted From: Henry J. Richardson III, Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach. By Hurst Hannum. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. Xx, 223. Index, 115 American Journal of International Law 154 (January 2021) (8 Footnotes) (Full Document)

Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach (Rescuing) was published shortly before the outbreak in 2020 of the novel coronavirus and its myriad human rights and class issues regarding equality, discrimination, health, and labor rights of people of color. This was also prior to the concurrent public murder of George Floyd as an unarmed Black man by the Minneapolis police in late May 2020, and the resulting continuing Black Lives Matter massive national and international movement against the deaths of Floyd and others and the history of systemic American racism, including police shooting deaths, discrimination, and brutality against African Americans, particularly unarmed Black men. Such comprehensive street protests have not been seen in America since 1968. They represent, inter alia, the cover of disguises of national racism being publicly stripped away, and the national confrontation with irrefutable evidence of a wide spectrum of systemic rights violations and the deficits of American law and government to ensure African Americans' basic rights. Further, Rescuing was published before it became fully apparent that the federal government's responses to Black Lives Matter, particularly the executive branch, would fan the racial conflicts of national mourning and demands for new justice narratives, rather than healing and unifying for American citizens as a whole, even as these protests were the most diverse in recent memory.

This timing of publication presents a particular challenge when the scholarly work is a human rights treatise, which is subsequently publicized and reviewed amidst such enormous national violations of human rights and backlash from the revealed substrata of aggressive historical American racism, the outbreaks of which the author could not have taken into account in his writing and narratives. Such a challenge, relative to assessing the quality of such a book beset by this timing, may well be unfair in common perceptions of narratives and subjects, but it is likely inevitable. The emerged, massive Black Lives Matter movement and its inherent questions of whether America's status quo ante would yet again absorb and squelch all new videotaped violations and systemic demands--even before the violations are multiplied by the concurrent deadly (over 300,000 American lives, with the heaviest burdens on people of color) and economically destructive human consequences of the current global pandemic--simply cannot be ignored in reviewing a new human rights treatise by a prominent American scholar.

Inevitably, the author's written narratives and future projections about the durability of his and others' doctrinal analysis, resolution of the disputed scope and application of rights will be brought forward into readers' current understandings of historic events about racial justice defining their lives, and of new locations of duties to produce that justice. The book's narratives will in some way pose the question of whether the author, notwithstanding the timing of publication, was nevertheless sufficiently prescient to suggest the new paradigmatic rights issues from the historic confluence of a deadly pandemic and a Black Lives Matter movement. Or at least, to provide durable human rights wisdom to help decision makers charged with building new just human futures from this deadly confluence, to do so a bit more perceptively and equitably in confronting interlocked bundles of urgent issues of rights, rights opposition, and authority.

And so, this challenge of disparate timing must be a backdrop for this Review, at least as the author's rights interpretations and narratives--which heavily focus on narratives defining limits to human rights law--can be identified as seemingly valuable, or as being more deflecting from the intense new rights violations landscape into which this treatise has been released.

[. . .]

Rescuing is a richly sourced, well written, provocative argument about the best formulation of “limits” of modern human rights law. It deserves serious reading. The state-centric jurisprudence of limits and pragmatism by which Hannum intends to rescue international human rights law does, however, raise serious questions. Those questions go to his projected competence of human rights law, “rescued by its limits” even as Hannum proposes it “in moderation.” Will it be competent to confront with justice the systemic public and private chains of aggressive human violations and provide systemic remedies? Will it be competent to prescribe and do all possible, under the rule of law, for ensuring the human dignity, rights, and entitlement to justice for vulnerable peoples, and thus for all peoples, as they live under aggressively rights-violative national governments and Northern tier subordination?

Of the Board of Editors.

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