Just Criticism? Human Rights, Inter-State Relations and the Ethics of Finger Pointing

Author: Frédéric Mégret

Abstract

The conditions of what constitutes just criticism of other states’ human rights records in international relations are ill understood. This article seeks to contribute to the conceptualization of an ethics of such criticism by drawing on a variety of sources, including inter-personal ethics, just war theory and ethical foreign policy. Contra an ethics of sovereign indifference or an ethics of universalist interference, this article suggests that the most useful approach is to view human rights criticism as embedded in the complex workings of international society. The article, then, looks at some criteria that might help us assess the ethicality of any given criticism from the point of view of the content of such criticism and the position of the state behind it. Finally, it is suggested that we will not make headway until we conceptualize the ethics of human rights criticism as being part of a relational encounter with the state that one purports to criticize. This dialogical conception of human rights criticism allows us to transcend the solipsism and self-referentiality of the ethics of foreign policy to better understand the contextuality of all criticism.

Resume

Frédéric Mégret is a Professor and the holder of the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University. Part of this article was written during a term as the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor, Columbia Law School.

Recommended citation

Frédéric Mégret, “Just Criticism? Human Rights, Inter-State Relations and the Ethics of Finger Pointing” (2025) 13:1 Can J Hum Rts 1, online: <https://cjhr.ca/download/3314/?tmstv=1764605586&v=3315>.