Re-grounding Human Rights as Cornerstone of Emancipatory Democratic Governance

Envisioning democratic and internationalist ways of exercising peoples’ sovereignty beyond local and national borders requires the enrichment of human rights thinking with non-European cosmovisions, normative and legal thinking. Integrating human rights, environmental and climate law and the rights of nature plays a key role in building institutions and policies that can genuinely address the root causes of ecological destruction. Likewise, human rights should be at the forefront of the struggle to re-shape financial capitalism and its destructive economic model. They can guide transition processes towards more sustainable ways of production, distribution and consumption, but also towards the necessary protection of and support for care work. Finally, there is an urgent need for innovation in human rights institutions and practices. This goes from securing funding for independent work and combating corporate capture, addressing the colonial legacy still present in international law and human rights architecture, rebalancing the local, national, sub-regional, regional and international dimensions of human rights work, and finding ways to address the dilemmas of a state-centric human rights accountability and governance which do not fall into the traps of multi-stakeholderism.