6 - Conclusion

Summary

The purpose of this book is to make the views of four jurists more accessible to Anglophone audiences and to provide material for reflection and discussion about important issues in human rights theory. It is not my role as editor to analyze or criticize their views in detail. However, it may be helpful to provide some suggestions about how they relate to each other, where they fit into a broad picture of scholarship about human rights, and how the project of making the ideas of “Southern” thinkers better known might be extended. A symposium in Belfast about this project and Dembour's framework for comparing human rights theories provide two convenient starting points for this purpose.

A symposium on “Human Rights: Southern Voices” was held at the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI) in Jordanstown, County Antrim in June 2008. All four of the subjects of this book attended and for two days discussed their ideas on human rights and debated with each other. They were known jocularly as “the four tenors”, but they did not sing from a single hymn sheet. Indeed, this occasion brought out rather clearly some significant differences in perspectives and emphasis of four human rights scholars and activists, who all belong to the same post-Independence generation and whose early development involved similar traditions of legal education and shared reactions against colonialism, racism, and injustice.

Some of the themes that emerged from very wide-ranging discussions and informal conversations deserve comment.