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University at Buffalo School of Law

Human Rights Law

United Nations

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Standard Setting In Human Rights: Critique And Prognosis, Makau Wa Mutua Aug 2007

Standard Setting In Human Rights: Critique And Prognosis, Makau Wa Mutua

Journal Articles

This article interrogates the processes and politics of standard setting in human rights. It traces the history of the human rights project and critically explores how the norms of the human rights movement have been created. This article looks at how those norms are made, who makes them, and why. It focuses attention on the deficits of the international order, and how that order - which is defined by multiple asymmetries - determines the norms and the purposes they serve. It identifies areas for further norm development and concludes that norm-creating processes must be inclusive and participatory to garner legitimacy …


Hope And Despair For A New South Africa: The Limits Of Rights Discourse, Makau Wa Mutua Jan 1997

Hope And Despair For A New South Africa: The Limits Of Rights Discourse, Makau Wa Mutua

Journal Articles

This article is a critique of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. It explores the assumptions employed by the African National Congress and the international community to construct a post-apartheid society. It argues that the reliance on the law as the key medium for economic, social, and political change was insufficient to transform the legacy of apartheid. Instead, the piece contends that apartheid was privatized and its beneficiaries protected under the new dispensation. It makes the argument that the lot of the black majority is unlikely to be changed such gradualist approach to social change.