Latest in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, religiously motivated terrorism has proven to be a specific human rights issue – not least because it confronts democratic states under the rule of law with the problem to decide how to ‘fight the enemy without becoming the enemy’. The U.S. for example applied enhanced interrogation techniques thereby creating doubts on their commitment to the convention against torture.
So far, academic research has conceptualized the process of norm establishment, for example with the norm life cycle model or the human rights spiral (Finnemore/ Sikkink1998; Risse1999). Yet, only little attention has been paid to how and why dominant international norms erode.
The proposed paper develops a model on human rights, comprising considerations on universality with those on norm classifications, to clarify this process.
Regarding the universality claim, moral and political-legal streams of justification (Forst2011) are considered to clarify on what grounds different deliberations, e.g. for counter-terrorist action, are held. Moreover, ideas on norms in IR are introduced, especially the three dimensions of norm implementation (Wiener2008) – formal validity, social recognition, cultural validation – which underpin the idea of human rights norms being in relation to structure and practices of political arenas.
Finally matching these two sizes results in a model on the dimensions of universality which elucidates on what levels actors argue against or in favour of human rights norms. The model is illustrated by examples from the U.S. governmental actors’ discourse on counterterrorist measures after the 9/11 attacks (Kahl/ Heller/ Pisoiu2012).
The theoretical and practical considerations demonstrate how human rights, also in democratic states under the rule of law, are underlying normative shifts. Accordingly, the common claim that human rights are universal cannot be upheld as such, but must rather be treated nuanced, as a claim of distinct ‘relative’ universality.
