Impact Of Globalization On Human Rights

L.M. SINGHVI ESSAY ON “HUMAN RIGHTS”

TOPIC: Contemporary issues of challenges of human rights in the era of globalisation

SHILPA NAG C.T.

OT CODE: A30

Different people currently see human rights in a different way. For some, invoking human rights is a heartfelt, morally justified demand to rectify all sorts of injustice; for others, it is no more than a slogan to be treated with suspicion, or even hostility. Human rights law is special as it often suggests that other law is inadequate or unjust. Playing the ‘human rights card’ can be persuasive, sometimes even conclusive, in contemporary decision making; this is one aspect of what makes the moral force of human rights so attractive. Human rights are considered a special and narrow category

It can be argued that globalization has helped to advance collective and indigenous rights, women’s rights, and children’s rights. Scholar Sumner Twiss addresses this question in his article “History, Human Rights, and Globalization” (2004). He employs a heuristic developed by Richard Falk to elucidate his case: globalization-from-above and globalization-from-below. The former refers to economic and political collaboration among big powers such as state actors and financial and corporate agents, and the latter refers to social, political, and cultural collaboration among local, national, and international agencies (e.g., non-governmental organizations, United Nations organs) interested in advancing or changing the quality of civil societies across the world, perhaps even forming a global civil society (Twiss

While the term itself is relatively new, and has had a generalised currency only since the 1990s, the phenomenon of transboundary interconnectedness with which it is considered is clearly very old. Political boundaries have always been accompanied by crosscutting frontiers mapped by systems of belief, circuits of trade, financial flows, zones of famine and disease, and patterns of migration. World history can be told as a story of interconnectedness. At any rate, it can be widely recognised that contemporary globalisation has crucial features that make it distinctive in relation to earlier periods. This essentially means that contemporary globalisation involves a stretching or an extension of social, economic and political action across national boundaries, such that events, decisions and activities in one part of the world affect people in distant locations. Contemporary globalisation also involves an intensification of transboundary interactions and flows, so that they become more systematic and regular. Contemporary globalisation also involves an acceleration of the speed at which people, goods and people, ideas, information and symbolic forms move around the world, carried by new modes of transportation, diffusion and