Human Rights Transformed: Positive Rights and Positive Duties by Sandra Fredman
| Published date | 01 November 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.00780_1.x |
| Date | 01 November 2009 |
a decidable series of true or false propositions about what these other texts‘really
mean’.Rather thanviewing the book as a possiblydefective‘said’, it can be viewed
as an honest ‘saying’ that attempts to uncover, for Ben-Dor and his readers, some-
thing like an event of thinking. As I read it, the author of this book sincerely
attempts to utter, in his own particular way, what has genuinely called on him to
think during his obviously intense and sustained struggles with texts written by
Levinas, by certaincritical legal theorists, and above all, by Heidegger.
Of course, this book will not appeal to the sort of analytical philosopher who
would neverdeig n evento open a book whose cover contained Heidegger’s name.
Even more intellectually omnivorous readers might be tempted to agree with
Adorno’s famous argument, in Negative Dialectics (1966), that ‘Heidegger’s cult of
being’is a sort of opium of the academic masses, distracting them fromthi nking
about the concrete misery of existing social conditions and ways to overcome
them. Although the main points of disagreement among Adorno’s, Levi nas’s and
Heidegger’s kinds of philosophising will probably never be resolved to the satis-
faction of all sides in the debate,Thinking about Law in Silencewith Heidegger is to be
recommended for giving us a passionate, undiluted and able twenty-¢rst century
defence ^ or rather demonstration ^ of the Heideggerian point of view as applied
to law and legal theory.
LouisE.Wolcher
n
Sandra Fredman, Human Rights Transformed: Positive Rights and Positive
Duties,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 261 pp, pb d24.99.
More than ten years after the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998 the
caricatures of human rights remain safely in placein British public life.In sections
of the popular press, the Act is linked to a range of societal ills and viewed as an
unwelcome imposition from Europe. This political mood has encouraged the
Conservative Party, for example, to call for the repeal of the Act, and its replace-
ment with a nationallygrounded British Bill of Rights andResponsibilities.The
current Labour government (with a more positive o⁄cial view of the Human
Rights Act) is also advancing a discussion of a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
for the UK.
Much of thehostility to the Act is intrinsic to, and informed by, neo-conserva-
tive critiques of rights i nge neral, and appears to re£ect a measure of disquiet with
the universalist, as well as European,tradition thattravels with human rights.The
latter surfaces in the view that the Act was never e¡ectively embedded within the
British constitutional tradition, and therefore does not fullycapture the particular
circumstances of the society in which it must function.The Act continues to be
subjected to a form of citizenship test. Repeated attempts to explain just how
involved Britain was in drafting the European Convention on Human Rights
have failed to shift this perception. Interestingly, both main political parties in
n
Universityof Washington School of Law
Reviews
104 4 r2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation r2009 The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2009) 72(6) 1035^1056
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