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Abstract
In the midst of concerns about diminishing political support for human rights, individuals and groups across the globe continue to invoke them in their diverse struggles against oppression and injustice. Yet both those concerned with the future of human rights and those who champion rights activism as essential to resistance, assume that human rights – as law, discourse and practices of rights claiming – can ameliorate rightlessness. In questioning this assumption, this article seeks also to reconceptualise rightlessness by engaging with contemporary discussions of disposability and social abandonment in an attempt to be attentive to forms of rightlessness co-emergent with the operations of global capital. Developing a heuristic analytics of rightlessness, it evaluates the relatively recent attempts to mobilise human rights as a frame for analysis and action in the campaigns for justice following the 3 December 1984 gas leak from Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Informed by the complex effects of human rights in the amelioration of rightlessness, the article calls for reconstituting human rights as an optics of rightlessness.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the three anonymous referees, as well as to Lara Coleman, Jane Cowan, Synne Dyvik, Anna Selmeczi, Andreja Zevnik, and to the participants at the 2013 European Workshops in International Studies in Tartu, Estonia and at the 2014 Critical Legal Conference in Brighton, for their critical engagement with earlier versions of the paper.
Notes
1. See Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights.
2. Brysk, Speaking Rights to Power.
3. Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground,” 460.
4. See, for instance, Milne, Human Rights and Human Diversity.
5. Fraser, “Becoming Human.”
6. Beitz, “What Human Rights Mean,” 44.
7. Winston, “Human Rights as Moral Rebellion,” 279.
8. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights.
9. Zivi, Making Rights Claims.
10. Gundogdu, “Rightlessness in an Age of Rights,” 6.
11. Baxi, “Protection of Human Rights,” 385–386.
12. Ibid., 386.
13. The plant was run by Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) a majority owned subsidiary (at 50.9%) of the US multinational Union Carbide Corporation (UCC).
14. Amnesty International contests these low figures and places the immediate death toll at 10,000. See Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice. Following research among the municipal workers who collected the bodies, the International Campaign for Bhopal estimates that between 8000 and 15,000 died within days of the gas leak. International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, “The Death Toll.”
15. Greenpeace International, The Bhopal Legacy.
16. Cummings, “International Mass Tort Litigation,” 111.
17. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity,” 33.
18. Bhopal Survivors Movement Study Group, Bhopal Survivors Speak.
19. Edwards et al., The Bhopal Marathon, 68.
20. Ibid., 45.
21. Quote by Verma, “Bhopal Disaster.” See also, Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice.
22. See the extensive analysis in Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence.
23. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 297.
24. Benhabib, Transformations of Citizenship, 16.
25. Wilke and Willis, “The Exploitation of Vulnerability”; and Pérez, “Human Rights and the Rightless.”
26. Ogle, “State Rights against Private Capital,” 226.
27. Wacquant, “Constructing Neoliberalism,” 1.
28. Cf. the essays on neoliberal constitutionalism in Gill and Cutler, New Constitutionalism and World Order.
29. See Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being.”
30. Cacho, Social Death.
31. Biehl, Vita, 381.
32. Das, Critical Events, 138 (emphasis in the original).
33. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 42.
34. Selmeczi, “‘… We are being Left to Burn’,” 520.
35. Biehl, Vita, 23.
36. Cacho, Social Death, 6.
37. Ibid., 6–7.
38. Khanna, “Disposability,” 184.
39. Yates, “The Human-as-Waste,” 1682. See also, Wright, Disposable Women; and Bauman, Wasted Lives.
40. Khanna, “Disposability,” 184.
41. This denotes an existential ‘readiness to hand’ or availability of beings. See Heidegger, Being and Time.
42. Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology.”
43. Khanna, “Disposability,” 185.
44. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 208.
45. Khanna, “Disposability,” 185–186.
46. Tadiar, “Life-times of Disposability.”
47. National Network of Lawyers for Rights and Justice (India), “Bhopal Gas Leak.”
48. Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice, 27.
49. Cassels, The Uncertain Promise of Law, 112.
50. Baxi and Dhanda, Valiant Victims and Lethal Litigation.
51. Justice Verma, quoted in National Network of Lawyers for Rights and Justice (India), “Bhopal Gas Leak.”
52. See the account given in Galanter, “Law’s Elusive Promise.”
53. Galanter, “Legal Torpor.”
54. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity,” 36. The Bhopal Act was first challenged by survivors with the help of Indira Jaising, now Solicitor General of India. “Indira Jaising.”
55. Hanna, “Bhopal,” 495.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 498. At the time, ‘none of the groups of victims that had been formed by then realised the enormous implications of surrendering vital decision-making powers to the UOI.’ Jaising and Sathyamala, “Legal Rights and Wrongs,” 106–107.
58. Sheela Thakur, gas survivor, cited in Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal, 81.
59. Hanna, “Bhopal,” 494.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid; and International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, “The Death Toll.”
62. Greenpeace International, The Bhopal Legacy.
63. See Cowan and Billaud, this volume; and Goodman and Pegram, Human Rights.
64. National Network of Lawyers for Rights and Justice (India), “Bhopal Gas Leak”; and Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice, 78.
65. Meeran, “Tort Litigation against Multinational Corporations,” 3.
66. Cummings, “International Mass Tort Litigation”; and Darmody, “An Economic Approach.”
67. Kapur, “From Human Tragedy to Human Rights,” 2.
68. Meeran, “Tort Litigation against Multinational Corporations,” 4.
69. Kapur, “From Human Tragedy to Human Rights,” 3.
70. Fleischer, “Regulatory Arbitrage.”
71. Jones, Corporate Killing, 17. Recall the cynical statement of a senior World Bank employee that, ‘the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable’. Lawrence Summers, cited in Mukherjee et al., “Generating Theory,” 152.
72. Shrivastava, Bhopal, 54.
73. Kapur, “From Human Tragedy to Human Rights,” 13–14.
74. Ibid., 4, 33, 21.
75. Whelan and Donnelly, “The West,” 915.
76. Deva, Regulating Corporate Human Rights Violations. See also Baxi, “Geographies of Injustice”; and Gonsalves, Kaliyug.
77. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, 144–156; and Gill and Cutler, New Constitutionalism and World Order.
78. D’Silva, The Black Box of Bhopal, 25–26.
79. Hanna, “Bhopal,” 493. Cf. Everest, Behind the Poison Cloud, 45–64.
80. Khan, “Citizen’s Letter,” 18–19; and Keswani, “Bhopal,” 14–15.
81. Hanna, “Bhopal,” 493–494.
82. Ibid., 494.
83. Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal, 84.
84. Das, Critical Events, 139.
85. Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal, 84.
86. Hanna, “Bhopal,” 504.
87. Biehl, Vita, 37.
88. Rorty, “Human Rights,” 80.
89. Bhopal Survivors Movement Study Group, Bhopal Survivors Speak.
90. Michael Reich, cited in Das, Critical Events, 142.
91. Sadhna Karnik Pradhan’s testimony, in Bhopal Survivors Movement Study Group, Bhopal Survivors Speak, 148.
92. Jolly, “Life/Rights,” 4.
93. Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 203.
94. For a broader philosophical treatment, see Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”
95. Cited in Edwards et al., The Bhopal Marathon, 104.
96. Biehl, “Ethnography,” 581.
97. Foucault, “The Subject and Power”; and Odysseos, “Governing Dissent.”
98. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence, 137–138.
99. Khanna, “Indignity,” 258.
100. Young and Perelman, “Rights as Footprints,” 27, 31.
101. See Coleman, this volume.
102. Merry, “Human Rights and Transnational Culture,” 58.
103. This is not to imply that activist practices have become limited to the law. See the careful accounts of Zavestoski, “The Struggle for Justice in Bhopal”; and Mukherjee, Surviving Bhopal.
104. Anderson, “Litigation and Activism,” 186.
105. Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue, 9–11; and Odysseos, “Governing Dissent,” 447–452.
106. Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground,” 461; and Odysseos, “Human Rights,” 754–766. For a contrary perspective, see Selmeczi, this volume.
107. Stammers, Human Rights and Social Movements; and Levitt and Merry, “Vernacularization on the Ground,” 461.
108. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 195.
109. Meeran, “Tort Litigation against Multinational Corporations,” 3.
110. Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice, 27.
111. Ruggie, Guiding Principles.
112. Om Wati Bai testimony, in Bhopal Survivors Movement Study Group, Bhopal Survivors Speak, 175.
113. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity,” 27.
114. Amnesty International, Clouds of Injustice, 35.
115. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29, 246–247.
116. Estévez, this volume.
117. Fortun, Advocacy after Bhopal, 148–149.
118. Ruggie, Guiding Principles, 13.
119. See Anderson, “Challenging the Limited Liability of Parent Companies.”
120. Amnesty International, “Dow Chemical must comply with New Indian Court Summons.”
121. Baxi, “Protection of Human Rights,” 405.
122. Sokhi-Bulley, “Governing (through) Rights.”
123. Baxi, “Writing about Impunity,” 35–36.
124. Das, Critical Events, 196.