Dilemmas in promoting global economic justice through human rights law

What is the value of human rights law in the struggle against global poverty and economic inequality? The present chapter offers a critical evaluation of this enquiry, using the case study of an activist initiative concerning the extraterritorial application of international human rights law based on the 2011 ‘Maastricht Principles’ and associated Commentary. It considers some of the dilemmas involved in this project: between hope and reality, between elitism, orientalism and patriarchy, on the one hand, and representativeness in its various forms, on the other, and between statism and globalism/cosmopolitanism. It then looks behind the claims made about the law’s value, to consider how the law’s substantive content is understood, what the merits of this are, and what underlying assumptions about global economic change are embedded in it. In the process it offers broader observations about the potential and limitations of international human rights law for activism