This textbook looks at the theory of human rights, its historical roots, and goes on to examine several key areas of human rights, including the intersection between human rights and international law, access to treaty-based mechanisms and their practice and case law, international human rights courts and tribunals, including those with a criminal function, justiciability of rights before the courts, civil and political rights, as well as socio-economic rights.

As will become evident through the course of this chapter, development in its human rights context is primarily a value that translates into individual and communal well-being. This well-being may be linked to industrial or other financial development, although the correlation between the two is neither self-evident nor necessary. If this right to well-being is to make a difference in the lives of people, whether in poor or rich nations, it must be susceptible to quantifiable measurement through which one is able to assess its progress and realisation. In the last decade experts have developed a list of detailed indicators which allow us to assess well-being more accurately. At the same time, wealthy nations have abandoned ad hoc unilateral efforts to assist their poorer neighbours to escape perpetual cycles of poverty by entering into institutionalised multilateral commitments to contribute part of their annual earnings to developmental goals. These goals are also vigorously pursued by multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank and the African Development Bank.

This chapter examines China’s differential approach vis-à-vis developing and developed countries in advancing its normative agenda on non-weaponization in outer space before the Conference on Disarmament and the UN General Assembly. Pursuant to the logic of the democratization of international relations, China has gained the majority support of developing countries for its agenda around their commonly shared values of peace and development and through other forms of functional cooperation in their outer space activities – increasing its international legitimacy in their eyes. Conversely, China has yet to gain the trust of technologically advanced – developed – nations in order to give its future regulatory framework governing peaceful relationships in outer space its much-needed normativity. Instead, past disarmament efforts in outer space during the Cold War can guide China’s norm-entrepreneurship where it must seek consensus among the major space powers, the United States in particular, on the basis of trust. Without such a fertile soil, however, any rules on the prevention of an arms race in outer space cannot take root.

This chapter focuses on the debates about development, human rights, and ‘basic needs’ that defined much of the push to craft a decolonized international law during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In particular, it considers the emergence of the international right to development, and the relation between international human rights and poverty-reduction strategies like the ‘basic needs’ approach in New International Economic Order-related discussions, against the background of the rise of neoliberalism and organized human rights movements during the 1970s and early 1980s. It does so partly through a close reading of the two reports produced by the ‘North-South Commission’ chaired by former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Despite its overarching commitment to a renewed form of ‘global Keynesianism’, the Brandt Commission expounded a broadly rights-friendly approach to development that absorbed many of the neoliberal assumptions then on the rise. When US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dismissed the Brandt Commission’s recommendations at the ‘North-South Summit’, held in Cancún in October 1981, the moment signalled the end of the struggle to cultivate an international law of development that would live up to the ideal of an international law of decolonization.

This chapter looks at the direction the debates on social and economic human rights took after the adoption of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1966 and until the late 1980s. The focus is on the United Nations as the debates here reflected larger political questions about the meaning and relevance of social and economic rights as obligations in the unfolding post-colonial world. With decolonisation, the former colonial powers had been ‘liberated’ from the obligations of empire while many rulers in newly independent states used the new-found sovereignty to avoid scrutiny of the broad range of human rights. Decolonisation proved to be the perfect storm for social and economic rights denial. This would be further entrenched by expanding neo-liberal reforms and debt management leading to the ‘lost decade’ for development during the 1980s. Despite social and economic rights being continually neglected, the chapter argues that they always remained central to the problem of human rights.

This chapter explores the extent to which businesses have assimilated in their practice the internationally recognized standards of responsible business conduct and the SDGs framework in an integrated and mutually reinforcing way in an effort to contribute as partners to the realization of sustainable development. To this end, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) will be under focus for two reasons: first, they are cited in Agenda 2030; second, they constitute the most authoritative source among global standards of expected conduct by businesses to address and prevent the negative implications of their activities on the dignity and welfare of affected individuals and communities. Human rights pertain to all three aspects of development as put forward by the SDGs, whereas the latter are suffused with language that reflects clearly the substance and underlying norms of human rights law. Hence, the interplay between the two regimes, i.e. human rights and development, cannot be refuted. As such, the UNGPs are the predominant, until such time as the proposed Business and Human Rights Treaty is adopted, ‘normative’ roadmap for businesses to achieve the SDGs.

This chapter explores altruistic commitments that are specifically between developed and developing countries. In particular, an emphasis is placed on the right to development, official development assistance (ODA), the right to food and particular aspects of the international economic order, as well as the special role played by the principle of solidarity in this context. Indeed, development is central to the contemporary international legal order. As such, this chapter explores the various instruments, institutions and processes that are directed at furthering the cause of development by facilitating the transfer of resources from developed to developing countries.

Chapter 5 explains how the ideology of the postcolonial ‘developmental’ state relies on the language of economic progress and development to undermine the minority question. I offer a critical, in-depth, and multi-layered analysis of the complex interrelationship between minorities, postcolonial states, and dominant international actors with reference to ‘development’ and international law. The analysis is organised under two major rubrics: I first examine the treatment of minorities in the international law of development and then examine how international law discourse on minority and group rights addresses the issue of economic development. In both cases, critically engaging with central themes in the discourse on both ‘development’ and ‘minority rights’ under international law, I argue that international law provides a framework within which international actors and postcolonial states suppress minority interests in the name of economic development and that politically marginalised minorities suffer the most due to such development activities. In this way, international law involvement in the ideological function of the postcolonial ‘developmental’ state not only results in further marginalisation of already vulnerable minorities but also serves to legitimise and gloss over asymmetric power relations that produce such marginalisation. Case studies on the Rohingya and the CHT hill people substantiate my arguments.

The vulnerability of children is rather different from that of other vulnerable groups, in that at different stages of their development they are mostly dependent on others for their survival and cannot (or are not allowed to) partake in social or political life in the same way as adults. Unlike all other vulnerable persons, the well-being of children is entrusted to their parents and guardians and hence many of the issues facing children have traditionally been perceived through the lens of family relationships and family law, as opposed to human rights law.The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its subsequent protocols has somewhat changed this state of affairs by introducing several principles which transform children from objects to real subjects of the law. Unless states take active and concerted measures to prevent and punish the perpetrators (and end-users) of such offences, the exploitation of children will remain a profitable enterprise. Without investment in the lives of children through the use of maximum available resources, states will remain weak and children disempowered. This chapter examines the emergence of a specialised human rights regime for children, as well as the guiding principles found in the CRC. It then goes on to illustrate how poverty and other factors exacerbate the vulnerabilities of children.