Blog has moved, searching new blog...

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Follow-up post on Amnesties in Uruguay: when popular sovereignty defies human rights actvitists

I'll be posting in Libya in the coming days, but for now a short follow up on the Amnesty law in Uruguay

A while back, I posted on the Uruguay amnesty law which has been universally condemned by rights groups and, at the time, found unconstitutional. In March, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights apparently condemned the law as well and in April, the Uruguay senate voted to overturn the law.

Well, last week, a vote in the House of Representatives to repeal the law failed. Apparently, there is some support for that law in the country, which, as I mentioned in my initial post, was approved twice by referendum.
Whatever one thinks of the law itself, there is clearly a clash of logics here. On the one hand, the universalist approach to human rights and on the other, the question of popular sovereignty. Indeed, this law is clearly not being imposed from the top by a dictatorial regime. It is, as far as I can tell, a reasonably functioning democracy. This certainly raises the question of the limits of outside intervention when a population chooses a certain path for itself and I find it disturbing that, in an era where "local ownership" is the new catchphrase, human rights activists are so adamantly trying to force a certain mechanism on a country which so clearly does not want it.

1 comment:

  1. actually, human rights' main function is precisely to establish a check on popular sovereignty - so, no contradiction there :)

    though, on the substance, i fail to see why the ACHR is so opposed to amnesty laws... the alternative is simply worsening things on the ground and is ultimately untenable in the long run... as we're currently witnessing, e.g., in Rwanda & BiH...

    anyways, my usual two cents ;)

    M-la-maudite-

    ReplyDelete