Fichamento "The end of human rights"

UNISINOS - PPG DIREITO

DIREITOS HUMANOS

Marcelo Andrade de Azambuja

1. Introdução

Segue-se o relatório de leitura do texto “DOUZINAS, Costas. The end of human rights: critical legal thought at the turno f the century. Oxford: Hart, 2000” com especial à análise das críticas feitas por Edmund Burke aos Direitos Humanos, situada entre as páginas 147 e 157.

2. Sobre o autor

Costas Douzinas é um Professor de Direito grego, Diretor do Instituto para Humanidades de Birbeck da Universidade de Londres e membro do Parlamento Grego. É conhecido internacionalmente por suas investigações sobre direitos humanos e estudos críticos do direito, sendo também editor da Law and Critique: The International Journal of Critical Legal Thought.

3. Trechos de interesse

If the eighteenth century declarations are the foundation of the discourse of rights, Burke's and Marx's reflections on the French Revolution are the foundational critiques of rights. Later critics have developed and expanded their main points in a number of directions but have not added much new.

Burke's main criticism is that rights discourse suffers from metaphysical idealism and rationalism. The proponents of rights follow a clumsy political metaphysics, they are metaphysical rationalists or, "speculatists", the worst insult in Burke's rich vocabulary of abuses Speculatism is the belief that political practice , the art of the possible, should be guided by theory, that the intricate web of political life and the complex and ancient patrimony of legal duties and entitlements, should be re-arranged according to some plan conceived by human reason and carried out by radical action. (...) Political practice and practical wisdom or prudence, differ from theoretical speculation; the former is concerned with the particular and the changeable while theory with the universal and immutable. No aspect of politics can be conceived in the abstract.

Rights are not only cognitively wrong in their conception; they are also morally wrong in their application which tries to make life follow the orthopaedics of reason. Political prudence, on the contrary, computes, balances and works with compromises, calculations and exceptions; it requires delicate and subtle skills, a discernment honed through long experience and practice rather than through abstract thinking and the study of treatises.

What is the use of the abstract right to life or to free speech and press to the victims of fa mine and war or to people who are cannot read through lack of education facilities? What is the use of proclaiming the right to health care in a place like Haiti where one basic hospital covers more than two million people and AIDS patients are routinely turned away because they cannot be treated due to the lack of resources? Burke's comments, made some two hundred years ago, sound prophetic in light of the burdens placed on the developing world by huge debt and the mismanagement, corruption and inefficiency that has followed humanitarian aid.

Burke's second criticism addresses the abstract nature of the subj ect of human rights. The man without determination of the declarations is not only