Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law: A Critical Legal Argument

Human dignity is not just gloss. Rather, its protection and amplification should be understood as the overall end to which international human rights law aims. This book provides both a descriptive account of how human dignity and international human rights law have been linked in the past, as well as sustained theoretical and practical arguments on how to make the link even tighter and more valuable. It successfully demonstrates the value of understanding human dignity as the end to which international human rights law strives through a number of prominent case studies and institutional analyses. Most innovatively, it links these themes to the critical legal studies tradition. Critical legal studies has long been known to eschew constructive moral arguments in favour of critique. This book argues that it is that in an age of post-modern conservatives such as Donald Trump and Victor Orban, internationalists and progressives need to provide more comprehensive and inspiring projects.