People Power Movements and International Human Rights: - Creating a Legal Framework

This monograph develops a novel, people-powered or “demos-centric” approach to international human rights law that acknowledges the role in lawmaking of average human beings, seeing them as both the source of rights and the most e ective means of overcoming the central weakness of international law—namely, its inability to ensure that states and governments comply with the human rights obligations. [...] established by the universal consent among civilized inhabitants of the world” and “all the people.”37 In 1796, US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase pronounced that the customary law of nations is “established by the general consent of mankind.”38 This monograph uses people power to recuperate the natural law aspect of general principles and takes the additional step of arguing that a vague term. [...] After arguing persuasively for the human rights practice of the UN bodies and specialized agencies as an authoritative interpretation of the human rights provisions of the UN Charter, they questioned whether it can be presumed that all of the rights enumerated in the UDHR, as well as new rights like the right to development, can be “said to fall within the ambit of the original Charter provision.”. [...] In the speaking tour she undertook in her defense, she rejected the idea that government had the power to give or take away her rights: “The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states and the organic laws of the territories,” she argued, “all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights.”136 Like the earlier. [...] By their terms, the core human rights instruments refl ect the ends of “freedom, justice, and peace” and set out respect for human dignity as the means, for example, in the “whereas” clauses in the Preamble to the UDHR: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,.