The Human Rights Impact of the World Trade Organisation by James Harrison
| Date | 01 July 2008 |
| Published date | 01 July 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2008.00710_3.x |
tribuna ls makes this more than a nother doctoral thesis pol ished up and
published. Although a little repetitive in places, the book makes a signi¢cant
contribution to international criminal law and procedure. It points out some
obvious de¢cienc ies, and analyses others that might not be so appare nt tot he casual
observer. A sig ni¢cant threat to the fairness of such trials remains the inequality
in resources between the parties, and the Milosevic trial was no exception.
Nevertheless, while Boas concluded the trial was fair, he is all too aware of the
waning international public support for such long drawn out processe s. To
this end, he exhorts the prosecution to cease ‘throwing the book’ at those it charges
in internationalcriminalproceedings.The trialshould be a forensic processto deter-
mine truth or i nnocence and should not be used for broader poli tical purposes.
Perhaps he is correct in calling for an abandonment of the preoccupationwith the
common law/civil law divide.The book leaves much for the reader to ponder and
should be studied by all those involved in the international criminal law process.
Ray Murphy
n
Jame s Harr ison, The Human Rights Impact of the World Trade Organisation,
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2007, 276 pp, hb d50.
ItmaycomeasasurprisethatThe Huma n Rights Impact of theWorldTrade Organisation
by Dr James Harrison, lecturer in law at the University of Warwick, is the ¢rst full-
length schola rly monograph on the topic of trade and human r ights. As such, it is
an over-due addition to a literature which has so far consisted almost exclusively of
journal articles, publications from NGOs and IGOs, and an abundance of edited
collections. Perhaps because of the absence of a sustained treatment of the subject,
the literature on trade and human rights is still in the process of searching for a
secure conceptual and theoretical footing, and it is one of the achievements of Har-
rison’s work that he helps to move that process in a numbe r of signi¢cant ways.
In the ¢rst of three substantive Parts of the book, Harrison sets out the ques-
tions that the book addresses, and establishes and justi¢es the framework within
which he intends to approach them. At heart, the book is concerned with the
‘social justiceimpact’ (3) of the international trading system ^ andHarrison makes
explicit that at somefundamental level this is what he means when hetalks about
the ‘human rights impact’ of international trade. At the same time, he is ad mirably
aware that this elisio nbetween human r ights and‘social justice’ is not self-ev ident
^ nor is it self-evident that the language of human rights is t he best language to
use to talk about questions relating to international trade.The ¢rst three chapters
therefore seek to justify this approach, and to explain why a human rights frame-
work is a usefuloptic. Of mostinterest are the fourrationales whichHarrison sets
out in Chapter 3 for adopting a n explicitly human rights approach to t rade issues.
The ¢rst is that a human rights approach ‘focuses on those distribu tive social
justice issues that are not easy to identify utilising a welfare economics model’
n
Irish Centre for Human Rights,National Universityof Ireland, Galway.
Reviews
653
r2008 The Author.Journal Compilation r2008 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(200 8) 71(4) 641 ^661
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