I Book Review: Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response
| Published date | 01 June 2005 |
| Date | 01 June 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/016934410502300211 |
| Subject Matter | Part C: DocumentationI Book Review |
to introduce new articles based on the concepts of jus cogens and obligations erga
omnes to replace the regime of international crimes. Although the author indeed
mentions this turn, it is quite regretful that he did elaborately discuss and correctly
criticised this normative category, which at the time of publication of the book, has
become legal history. It probably might have been more useful to extensively
elaborate on the new approach of the International Law Commission and to
scrutinise its merits. The concluding chapter gives a good summary of the
arguments developed throughout the whole book with a clear figure indicating
which norms fall under the various normative categories and lies in its concluding
observations the emphasis on the potentiality of jus cogens and obligations erga omnes.
Properly, the author concludes that the normative categories of jus cogens and
obligations erga omnes respectively will play an important role in the emerging of a
constitutional international order in the international community and a better
enforcement of human rights.
Concluding, the book of Ian D. Seiderman, Hierarchy in International Law, The
Human Rights Dimension is a good opus: it tackles the issue from different
perspectives, gives a good insight in the different normative categories and, apart
from the more difficult theoretical chapter, offers an accessible reading.
Furthermore, the author has the courage to depart from traditional opinions and
to present new insights in this still somewhat controversial subject of the existence of
hierarchy in human rights law. The book certainly merits a place on the shelf of the
practitioner of public international law and human rights law.
John Shattuck,
Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s
Response
, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and
London, 2003, 390 p., ISBN 0-674-01162-7*
John Shattuck was assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and
labour under the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1998 and United States
ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1998 to 2000. In the former capacity he was
in charge of the execution of US human rights foreign policy. He is now chief
executive officer of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston.
The book contains what amount to be his memoirs serving in the former
capacity. He deals more in depth with the cases of Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia and
Kosovo, and China. It is also a record of considerable frustrations, when he tried to
further the cause of human rights, but was held back by constraints of an
international or domestic nature. The frustrations of this ‘human rights hawk’ as he
calls himself, came to a head in 1994, when President Clinton decided to let most
favoured nation status in foreign trade with China prevail over human rights
considerations. In the weeks that followed that decision, Shattuck thought seriously
about resigning:
In the end I chose to stay. I felt I could do more to advance the cause of
human rights by continuing the battle to shape policies inside an administra-
tion that was struggling with the new realities of the post-Cold War world (...)
[A] successor would be chosen who would be more malleable and less likely to
take risks. (p. 281)
I Book Reviews
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, Vol. 23/2 (2005) 305
* Peter R. Baehr, honorary professor of human rights, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
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