The human rights framework is heralded as an emancipatory apparatus to promote equality, peace, and representation, based on the assumption that all humans have certain unalienable rights by virtue of being born. Belief in the inherent goodness of human rights has preserved the notion that this framework exists in a celestial vacuum, unsullied by global hierarchies. On the contrary, rights are deeply embedded in power structures, and the perception that they are neutral disguises their role in the perpetuation of injustice. Human rights language has been used to globally disseminate neoliberal economic policies which maintain inequality, forcing postcolonial states into the global market and prohibiting development. Can human rights be redeemed, or are they incongruous with true emancipation and resistance?

NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC IDEALS

Neoliberalism can be traced back to the Mont-Pèlerin Society, founded in 1947 by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, which “sought to re-found liberalism in opposition to the threat of socialist planning”. It believed the global competitive market would be the most effective method to ensure international economic harmony and therefore the role of government was confined to creating and defending markets—“maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state”. There is an emphasis on individual responsibility based on the belief that if everyone has unimpeded access to the market, everyone will benefit equally from it. These neoliberal ideas spread through the West and became the central principle of political and economic government. There is an incentive to disseminate these ideas globally as it enables Western states to retain access to resources in postcolonial states, such as cheap labour and raw materials, because it forces these states to open themselves to unimpeded trade.

ORIGINS OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK

The human rights framework emerged following the Second World War, with the creation of the UN and the signing of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and is based on principles such as freedom, equality, and peace. Neoliberals, predominantly Western leaders and economists, were wary of this framework as they viewed it as a potential threat to the global economic order. Hayek criticised the UDHR for including social and economic rights, arguing that no declaration of rights should guarantee a standard of material welfare. Historian Quinn Slobodian suggests that, “rather than reject human rights outright, the neoliberal tendency has been to undermine social democratic interpretations of human rights and international law while simultaneously co-opting them to cover clearly capitalist prerogatives”. For example, they claimed rights to global free movement of capital, and to keep foreign investments safe, hijacking the language of rights to advance neoliberal ends.

DECOLONISATION AND THE COMPLICITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS

This co-option of rights was particularly pervasive during the period of decolonisation, when many states were emerging from colonial domination and had been economically bankrupted by their rulers. Neoliberals saw the potential for postcolonial states to employ the framework of human rights to pursue economic equality and redistribution of resources, and they sought to create a global economic order that would curtail these demands. They reformed certain rights to fit their agenda, for example the right to economic equality was construed as the right to preserve unequal wealth in the face of demands for redistribution. As political theorist Jessica Whyte argues in her book The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism: “The language of human rights offered them a means to legitimise transformative interventions and subject postcolonial states to universal standards aimed at protecting the international market.” The expansion of the human rights regime internationally has assisted in globalising this economic system in which some states continue to benefit from the exploitation of others.

THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE ORGANIZATION

The International Trade Organization (ITO) was established in the post-war years as a platform from which countries in the Global South attempted to ascertain their right to be exempt from free trade in order to protect domestic industries against foreign competition and to allow domestic development. Neoliberals opposed the ITO, with economist Michael Heilperin writing that it was necessary to prioritise international order—the free-market—over national objectives. The neoliberal challenge was successful—as Slobodian argues, it “outflanked the official government position and helped doom an organisation committed to a level of decision-making parity with the poorer nations of the world”. Neoliberals employed the language of human rights to do so, arguing for the right of free capital movement, which would be restricted if the ITO was successful in exempting certain countries from free trade agreements. The impact of this should not be understated—it resulted in the perpetuation of global economic inequality, as postcolonial states were unable to protect domestic industries from competition in order to promote development, which then exacerbated the global polarisation of resources and economic wealth. Instead of rejecting the human rights framework completely, the neoliberals undermined the language of rights when it was used to pursue economic equality and simultaneously utilised it to enforce the promotion of neoliberal, free-market values—scholar Louiza Odysseos concludes that “human rights belong firmly and fully within the many techniques of neoliberal rule”.

STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMS

The global dissemination of neoliberal values is also prevalent in the sphere of development and foreign aid. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), largely Western-led institutions, promoted “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) from the early 1980s, purportedly with the goal of promoting stability and economic growth. Through the SAPs, countries receiving foreign aid from the World Bank and the IMF were required to minimise the role of the state, privatise state enterprises, and implement fiscal austerity and trade liberalisation. Receipt of foreign aid was therefore dependent on the introduction of neoliberal economic policies that benefitted rich countries and further bankrupted poorer nations, forcing those countries to become reliant on imports from abroad and thus perpetuating poverty and dependency. Foreign aid is often portrayed to be an inherently altruistic act with the goal of increasing economic development and equality, but in reality it masks an insidious perpetuation of global hierarchy.  

ON BEHALF OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Are human rights beyond redemption? They propose a paradox—marginalised groups “are being taught to make cognitive sense of their exploitation by global capital even as the project of consciousness raising is necessarily part of the same systemic violation”. Rights exist within a system that is inherently neoliberal and unjust and have been used to justify policies which preserve this. Simultaneously, human rights have been an emancipatory force, a language through which marginalised peoples have been able to express violence and oppression against them. In order to salvage human rights as a form of resistance, we must acknowledge the processes of inequality and oppression in which they are entrenched and expose their close relationship with global hierarchies of power.

It has been said that “rights function to articulate a need, a condition of lack or injury, that cannot be fully redressed or transformed by rights, yet can be signified in no other way within existing political discourse”. We must be vigilant in our analysis of the motivation behind major institutions adopting human rights as a justification for action and investigate inconsistencies. Perpetual critique may be an exasperating position, but the stakes are too high to resist.

Iona works for a social justice organisation aimed at improving social mobility by teaching key employability skills in schools across London. Iona is an MSc graduate in Human Rights at the London School of Economics, where she focused her studies on postcolonial critiques of human rights, and the contention between citizenship law and human rights law.

LinkedIn