Literary accountability and the future of human rights protection

Human rights are increasingly described as in crisis. One reason for this is that current accountability mechanisms cannot adequately deal with intricate and multi-layered human rights violations that occur in rapidly changing and vastly complex social contexts. Against this background this presentation explores the relationship between accountability and literature as an avenue for revisiting questions of what counts as a human rights violation, who holds human rights duties and how to actually deliver human rights accountability. It proposes the notion of literary accountability as a means to (a) re-center the debate around the normative objectives of human rights accountability, (b) offer modalities for ensuring some form of responsibility attribution where legal accountability is not possible or deemed insufficient, and (c) push the boundaries of the paradigm of legal accountability. What each of these three manifestations of literary accountability have in common is that they foreground the need for a more forward-looking and multi-dimensional approach to accountability that seeks to reconnect the normative reality of human rights on one hand, with their imbrication in the concrete worlds of law, politics, and practicalities on the other.