Brave New World?: Human Rights in the Era of Globalisation

Globalization is the meta-narrative of our age.1 Few, if any, contemporary social phenomena, whether migration, global warming, or the present global economic crisis, are deemed intelligible outside the easy, intuitively appealing explanatory shorthand of globalization. As one of the other pervasive discourses of the post-war years, the subject of human rights has not escaped the gravitational pull of ‘globalization speak’, although it is fair to say that human rights scholars, like lawyers in general, have come somewhat late to the debate.2 Indeed, writing earlier on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UDHR,3 Philip Alston noted that globalization ‘poses a variety of challenges which demand our attention but have not been receiving it’.4 Thankfully, the literature on globalization and human rights has since burgeoned, generating a variety of perspectives, both optimistic and pessimistic, about the relationship between globalization and human rights.5 It is the aim of this chapter to contribute to the development of this discourse, by offering a snapshot of the impact which globalization has had to date on human rights, and to assess what future obstacles and opportunities globalization presents for the realization of the UDHR promise