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1 Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 1 (2001)
Too Many, or Too Few, Human Rights

handle is hein.journals/hrlr1 and id is 13 raw text is: TOO MANY, OR TOO FEW, HUMAN RIGHTS? Upendra Baxi* OVERPRODUCTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS? Is it the case that the Christian Twentieth Century 'suffers' from an overproduction of human rights standards and norms, to wit that it entails a policy and resource overload which no government or regime, howsoever conscientious, can bear? Does 'overproduction' entail a belief that each and every major human social problem can be best defined and solved in terms of human rights (through the talismanic property of human rights enunciations)? Should concentrations of economic power be allowed to harness these talismanic propertiesT In addressing the thesis of overproduction, one of course makes many ideological assumptions. For example, one assumes a distinction (to which Baudrillard draws our attention2) between production and seduction, the former making the invisible visible and the latter making the visible invisible. Anyone familiar with the manner in which the United Nations discursivity is produced needs no instruction in the ways in which the final texts render invisible the original, and even often lofty, aspiration. There is also the dimension of narcissism of producers, be these the authors of international human rights, the makers of modem constitutions or the NGOs who shape (or think that they shape) many a new enunciation. In a sense, then, human rights production also entails patterns of seduction: a loss of order of reflexivity of what is being produced and at whose cost, and for whose gain, indeed to the point of being alienated production. Similarly, the 'overproduction' metaphor conceals from view the authorship of the violated. When the production of human rights normativity is seen primarily, or even wholly, as an act of collective labour of the bleary-eyed draftspersons and negotiators who must somehow marshal in the early hours of the morning the eleventh-hour consensus on a phrase regime, one is looking at the process of * Professor, School of Law, University of Warwick. This article is taken, with minor modifications, from the text of a chapter in Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (Delhi: Oxford University Press, IBN 0-19-565289-4, to be published in 2001). Oxford University Press permission to print the text is gratefully acknowledged. As is the case with the assorted interest groups of international airlines, hotels, travel agents who assiduously lobby the UN to proclaim a universal human right of tourism? And when a group of predator investment organizations produce a Draft Multilateral Agreement on Investment? May the aggregations of capital and technology be disabled always from acting upon the capitalist belief that protection of its rights as human rights is the best assurance there is for the amelioration of the life-condition of the proletariat? 2 Baudrillard, Mirror of Production, trans. M. Poster (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975). Human Rights Law Review - Volume 1, Number I - 2001

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