Human Rights as Sources of Penality challenges a common assumption: that human rights advocacy always reduces state violence and oppression. Contemporary campaigns-particularly against torture and human trafficking-increasingly rely on the state's coercive and penal power to achieve their goals. This book reveals how using criminal law as a moral tool to protect the vulnerable often backfires, inadvertently fuelling more violence, prejudice, and inequality.
The book is structured around two central inquiries. First, it describes, explains, and evaluates the contemporary discourses and practices that underlie or resist the resort to penal solutions in the name of protecting human rights. Second, it traces a genealogy of this phenomenon, revealing how human rights-driven penality emerged and became deeply embedded within the contemporary human rights corpus.
Ultimately, the book exposes the danger of resorting to punitive solutions to safeguard human rights. By operating within a broader penal and carceral context, this approach risks exacerbating the very violence, prejudice, and inequality it aims to eradicate. While the dominant human rights discourse aspires to humanize criminal law, the practice of penality has transformed from a political choice into a moral imperative driven by a Nietzschean ressentiment. This imperative unleashes impulses and drives that outrun any attempts at humanization.
