International Human Rights Lexicon (review)

Co-authoring is a tricky business. Using one single voice presupposes a previous strong ideological feeling of fellowship and carries with it the careful forging of converging viewpoints. After lots of good will from both sides, the private story of the authors' accords and discords remains forever hidden in their deleted e-mail correspondence, presumed lengthy talks, and crossed out manuscripts. In the end there is one book, twenty-eight short essays on human rights issues in alphabetical order, one voice, and two international legal scholars. She, the pure academician from Cambridge University with a marked taste for political thought, whose post-modernist doctoral inquiry into democratic governance—The Riddle of All Constitutions¹ —gained her wide doctrinal respect that her later work has not diminished. He, the Ph.D. from E.U.I. in Florence who accepted the call of Amnesty International to be their representative before the United Nations in New York prior to becoming a professor at the GIIS in Geneva in the late 1990s and who continues to produce a remarkable record of scholarly writings, including his latest, the monumental Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors.²

Now that the unknowable, the topic, and the characters have been identified, let us focus on the story the book wants to tell. This is a story of commitment for change intermingled with an acute awareness of the limitations that human rights law presently offers. It is by no means the first book that approaches human rights through dictionary lenses,³ Marks and Claphams' work distinguishes itself for having that contemporary air that few of their contemporaries can claim to possess. This is human rights law (and beyond) as seen by two young reputed cosmopolitan legal scholars in the early stages of the twenty-first century.

Now, it would be way too easy to discuss the election of an alphabetical ordering for the display of the twenty-eight human rights-related terms—ranging from a minimum of ten pages (Democracy) to a maximum of twenty-six (Torture)—that compose the book. This acknowledged, the authors could, however, have easily provided the reader with a better-elaborated rationale for their methodological choice than the one offered in the preface: "We planned to organise our discussion thematically . . . but then we could not decide what should go where."⁴ This beginning displays surprising scholarly naiveté! Whatever their motives, once the alphabetical arrangement was decided, it would be inexcusable to classify those same terms thematically for review purposes. I shall, therefore, present a brief overview of the first fourteen chapters in keeping with the lexicon format the authors have adopted. Yet before doing so, a list of terms that they could have considered including should be put forward: poverty, peace, discrimination, gender, security, and war. Against this background, however, it should not go unnoticed that the Clapham and Marks' analysis of the different voices is a transversal and non-linear one that covers a wide range of issues including several of the aforementioned reprises. Eventually, the reader will also be able to identify some of the selected voices as having been already treated, from a different angle, in the authors' respective previous academic work: death penalty,⁵ torture,⁶ democracy,⁷ privacy,⁸ corporate responsibility,⁹ and terrorism.¹⁰

Arms: In a world where "60 per cent of guns are privately owned" and where the "five permanent members of the Security Council account for 88 per cent of all conventional arms exports" (45 per cent in the US alone), one must agree with Clapham and Marks' choice in using this voice to begin their lexicon.¹¹ In analyzing how human rights law has contributed to "[allowing] small arms to become the real weapons of mass destruction" and what it can do now to reverse this tide, the authors present a general view of the "state of the art" by drawing on human rights instruments and related case law to put forward an array of legal interpretative frameworks for procuring...