Standardisation instead of litigation: what can human rights advocates learn from consumer protection at the ISO?

ABSTRACT

Since the late twentieth century, at both the national and international levels, human rights discourse has been a protagonist in condemnations of injustice or in the articulation of alternative visions of a just world. Critical legal scholarship, however, has argued that human rights might offer too little, too late, especially when it comes to issues of economic (re)distribution. In this vein, I explore the possibilities that consumer rights activism offers to both defenders and critics of the international human rights movement. While consumer rights organisations have always felt part and parcel of the human rights movement, perhaps the opposite has not always been the case. Thus, by highlighting the work of Consumers International (CI) at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), I invite human rights advocates to think of technical standardisation as an alternative strategy to push for social justice, which might be more productive than other current approaches—such as socio-economic rights litigation. Albeit depoliticising, the tools offered by consumer rights are not much more apolitical than those offered by contemporary human rights advocates, and perhaps offer new ways to challenge the distribution of resources from within the belly of the beast.

KEYWORDS:

• Social rights
• business and human rights
• ISO
• consumer rights
• standards

Acknowledgements

I thank Juan M. Amaya-Castro, John Tobin, and the participants of the 2018 IGLP Conference ‘Law in Global Political Economy’ at Harvard Law School for their comments on early versions of this argument. Moreover, I am grateful to Ben Golder, René Urueña, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of the AJHR for their engagement with the final manuscript. The usual caveat applies. While some informal conversations with ISO and CI officials in October 2018 were extremely helpful, this article does not reflect their views or those of their institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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106 Quiroga-Villamarín, ‘“An Atmosphere of Genuine Solidarity and Brotherhood”’ (n 15) 94.

107 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Verso 2001); Susan Marks, ‘False Contingency’ (2009) 62 Current Legal Problems 1.

108 Moyn, Not Enough (n 25).

109 Stephen Hopgood, ‘Fascism Rising’ (OpenDemocracy, 9 November 2016) <www.opendemocracy.net/en/openglobalrights-openpage/fascism-rising/> accessed 7 July 2021.

110 Peter Joseph, The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression (BenBella Books 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín

Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín holds a Law degree (with a minor in Public Affairs) from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and a MA in International Law from the Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement (Geneva, Switzerland), where he is pursuing his doctoral degree in International Law (with a minor in International History & Politics).