From Governing (Through) Rights to Governing (Despite) Rights?: Sokhi-Bulley’s Governing Through Rights

Bal Sokhi-Bulley adopts a Foucauldian approach to the discursive and institutional framework of human rights governance at the national, regional and global level. She examines policies and strategies of different actors involved in the promotion and protection of human rights as ‘technologies of governmentality’, that is to say, as means through which a set of norms or standards defining acceptable human rights practices are developed, and with respect to which various forms of agency are evaluated. Sokhi-Bulley’s objective is not to question the sincerity of ‘the good guys’ who engage in human rights advocacy, nor is it to expose any hidden agendas behind their actions. Her aim is rather to develop a critical analysis of unintended consequences of the structure of what we may term ‘the global discourse of human rights’: to explore how different human rights ‘experts’ determine what counts as a human rights violation and what doesn’t, to examine how they set the criteria for ‘good governance’ with respect to human rights, and to analyze the manner in which those who deviate are disciplined.

This approach, as Sokhi-Bulley argues, reveals the ‘dangerousness’ of the discourse of human rights. As she seeks to demonstrate, related tactics of governance privilege some forms of agency and exclude or marginalize others, such that certain instances of human suffering ‘qualify’ as human rights abuses deserving attention and action, while other (and no less severe) forms of deprivation are not defined by ‘experts’ as violations of human rights and so remain unaddressed. In turn, Sokhi-Bulley provides a tentative outline of a ‘counter-narrative’ of rights which would consist in having ‘a right to contest rights’ (14) and in adopting an attitude described as ‘a permanent state of dissatisfaction’ (140) in the service of ‘a complete re-imagining of how we are governed’ (139) or an ‘other world’ in which, borrowing Foucault’s dictum, we would not be ‘governed quite so much’ (140). The key contribution of this work consists in demonstrating that, contrary to a common perception, today the notion of human rights is not only a means to combat oppression but also one of the devices through which we are governed. Its weaknesses, however, lie in overstating the significance of the challenges to human rights that are discussed in the book, as well as in overlooking the continued relevance of individual rights as a means of resistance.

After a general introduction provided in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 of the book analyze human rights governance in the European Union (EU) and in the realm of global civil society (focusing mainly on Human Rights Watch (HRW)). At the heart of the analysis is the manner in which various human rights ‘experts’ (country specialists, lawyers, reporters, activists, academics, and so on) contribute to transforming human rights ‘from being primarily a discourse of resistance against power’ (17) into an apolitical technical issue – a set of ‘objective’ measurable indicators of the human rights performance of various actors. By these means, human rights discourse is ‘coopted into a discourse through which ... power operates’ (Ibid). As regards the EU, the implications of such a technical approach are discussed with reference to policies adopted by its Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), with a particular emphasis on FRA’s approach to the rights of the child and the rights of migrants. In both cases, the arbitrary nature of the indicators used is exposed. Thus, as regards the rights of the child, experts prioritize the focus on family and define the child’s best interests primarily in terms of family-related quantitative indicators, such as, for example, the percentage of judges, prosecutors and law enforcement staff in each Member State trained on international instruments on parental responsibilities, and the percentage of child participation in family proceedings. These statistical indicators assume that child justice is ‘something that can be calculated and calibrated’ using ‘accurate and objective’ measurement (30), and, as a result, the rate of child participation in court...