Introduction: An Outline

Summary

Theories of securitisation have been indispensable in shedding light on how governmental security politics operate through discourses or institutions. Key theorists have noted their state-centredness, but they have yet to remedy this. The focus on the state, moreover, has led to a neglect of how virtuous bodies, supra-national bodies, might become mixed up in security politics. This book takes the rare step of applying such theories to supra-national organisations and politics and, importantly, allegedly virtuous ones: judicial human rights in Europe and, to a lesser extent, other regions. It explores how such human rights organisations, devoted to holding state power in check, might be complicit in governmental security agendas to the extent of losing their role as neutral arbiters of state actions to involvement in state-led security politics and, therefore, contributing to the demise of their own animus: the protection of bodily vulnerability. It links the socio-legal study of human rights with the politics of securitisation and with European Studies, re-appraising the aspect of the European Project that anticipated closer harmonisation and integration of nation-states through the operation of supra-national courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

It begins by contemplating the relationship between human rights, embodiment and vulnerability and seeks to foreground the body in human rights. Then it moves on to demonstrate and explain the subordination of international rights to national security through the question of embodiment, the most fundamental of human rights being to protect bodily integrity. When the human body has become an object of securitisation, for example in relation to the veiled woman, where have judicial human rights in Europe stood? While non-governmental human rights organisations have lobbied against repeated bans on the veil by various European countries, without evidence and with deference to states’ ownership of security matters, the ECtHR has contributed to the precarity of veiled Muslim women – signaling a failure to denounce gender-based violence. This is contrasted with the United States, which allows public veiling, but whose destruction of bodily integrity in the name of security has been manifest in other ways, most obviously in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

My aim is to tease out the contextual background to the way women’s bodies (and to a lesser extent, men’s) have been treated by judicial human rights.