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3 - Rule-of-Law Rights and Populist Impatience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2020

By
Jeremy Waldron
Edited by
Gerald L. Neuman
Gerald L. Neuman
Affiliation:
Harvard Law School, Massachusetts
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Summary

Human rights are a mixed bag, and populist antipathy towards human rights is not spread evenly across its contents. The idea of a human right as such is too abstract to be sustained as an object of political suspicion. Usually it is some subset of human rights or some particular aspect of human rights practice that excites critical attention from populist politicians and the citizens who support them. The subset of rights that I want to concentrate on I will call “Rule-of-Law rights.” By that I mean the cluster of rights in each of the main human rights instruments that protect Rule-of-Law values, particularly procedural values.

Keywords

Populismhuman rightsrule of lawprocedural rightsrights of criminalsBritish Bill of RightsEuropean Convention on Human Rightscultural relativism
Type
Chapter
Information
Human Rights in a Time of Populism
Challenges and Responses
 , pp. 43 - 59
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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