Evading International Norms: Race and Rights in the Shadow of Legality

✍ Scribed by Zoltán Búzás

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 320
• Series: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

"This book argues that the violation of human rights norms continues after legalization under the cover of technical legality. Its starting point is that human rights are embedded in and guide action through both laws and norms. Although laws and norms interact and overlap considerably, they mirror each other selectively, engendering norm-law gaps. Because of these gaps, law compliance and legality on the one hand and norm following and normative appropriateness on the other often diverge. Most relevant for our discussion, actions that are technically legal may be normatively inappropriate. The book provides a two-part theory of norm evasion. The first part focuses on norm evasion as a strategy and explains why and how states engage in it. Different domestic and international groups compete to shape state policy. In this stylized account, one side favors policies that comply with human rights laws and norms, whereas the other favors policies that violate human rights laws and norms. When the two groups are similar in strength, obeying both laws and norms or transgressing both can be very costly. Instead, the more attractive options are mixed strategies: follow norms but violate laws or comply with laws but violate norms. When officials deem law violations costlier than norm violations, the state will exploit norm-law gaps to violate norms in a technically legal fashion. This strategy, which the author labels norm evasion, allows the state to satisfy groups opposed to human rights while lowering the legal costs of doing so. The second part of the theory focuses on norm evasion as an outcome of a complex interactive process between the state and other relevant agents. After the state chooses an action, human rights supporters will contest its legality in court and its appropriateness in public and private discourse. The state and human rights opponents will defend its legality and appropriateness. The less often that courts rule against the state's action and the more discourses characterize this action as inappropriate, the more it becomes constructed as norm evasion. Another way to put this is that when the state wins the competition over the legality of its actions and loses that over appropriateness, its actions are constructed as norm evasion. He illustrates the argument in original and rich case studies of the French expulsion of Roma immigrants (2007-17) and the Czech segregation of Roma children in schools for those with mild mental disabilities (1993-2017)"--