CIAO DATE: 04/2011
January 2011
Human Rights & Human Welfare (University of Denver)
This paper warns that the human security discourse and agenda could inadvertently undermine the international human rights regime. It argues that in so far as human security identifies new threats to well-being, new victims of those threats, new duties of states, and/or new mechanisms of dealing with threats at the inter-state level, it adds to the established human rights regime. In so far as it simply rephrases human rights principles without identifying new threats, victims, duty-bearers, or mechanisms, at best it complements human rights and at worst it could undermine them. The narrow view of human security, as defined below, is a valuable addition to the international normative regime requiring state and international action against severe threats to human beings. By contrast, the broader view of human security at best repeats, and possibly undermines, the already extant human rights regime, especially by converting state obligations to respect individuals’ inalienable human rights into policy decisions regarding which aspects of human security to protect under which circumstances. The two may be competing discourses, despite arguments by some scholars (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007, 12) that they are not.
Resource link: Human Security: Undermining Human Rights? [PDF] - 297K