Project Description

Human Rights Justification (HRJust) is when States use human rights to explain and defend their decision and actions. HRJust aims to examine the consequences of when States use human rights as a governance instrument. Human rights justification is different from how the post-World War design of human rights as a system of legal norms regulating states’ behaviour towards their citizens is intended to be used. The post-World War system is a binary system based on States’ compliance and violation of human rights, not of States using human rights as a governance tool.

When States use human rights to justify their actions and decisions, the function of the human rights regime is renegotiated. It switches from seeing the individual as the rights holder and the State as the possible violator of individual rights to an instrument legitimizing the actions of the State.

We propose that the consequences of Human Rights Justifications for individual human rights protection against State violations must be identified and evaluated.

The risk is that international and constitutional legal development has not kept up with the political use of HRJust. Law still sees human rights in the light of binary compliance and violation, while States use them as governance instruments, leading to possible gaps in individual human rights protection.

HRJust Consortium

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