Casting the Net Wider: Human Rights, Development and New Duty-Bearers

This edited volume brings together scholars and practitioners to address the question as to whether, in our globalized world, the protection of economic, social, and cultural rights should become the duty of actors beyond the state. It explores the role of actors such as transnational business, international financial institutions, supranational organizations, and influential states who are involved in or impact on human rights in developing countries. In adopting a 'responsibilities approach', the book seeks to clarify the nature, content, and scope of their contemporary duties. Casting the Net Wider is important from an academic as well as a social perspective. First, the book pushes the boundaries of legal theory by extending the onus for realizing human rights from developing or 'recipient' states to a range of international actors — industrialized states, donor states, and non-state actors. It also reminds scholars from various disciplines — in particular international trade, finance, and development economics — that there are important reasons for taking human rights into account in their policy analyses. The book develops a moral argument too. The changing global environment — in particular, structural poverty and inequality — ought to lead to a shift in the consideration as to what entities might legitimately constitute human rights duty-bearers. This key relationship between the domestic state as the traditional human rights duty-bearer and any number of external actors highlights the centrality of transnational duties that constitutes the raison d`être of this edited collection.