HRTS 302: Contemporary Human Rights Issues

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Cornell University Press). Supplementary texts — Samuel Moyn The Last Utopia; Costas Douzinas The End of Human Rights; Shoshana Zuboff The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; Viktor Mayer-Schönberger Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age; Sylvia Tamale (ed.) African Sexualities: A Reader; Makau Mutua Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique; Cormac Cullinan Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice; Sheryl Lightfoot Global Indigenous Politics. Online resources — GDPR (Articles 17, 20); Google Spain v. AEPD (CJEU 2014); UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (2010); Te Awa Tupua Act (New Zealand); Christopher Stone “Should Trees Have Standing?”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on privacy and environmental ethics.

Chapter 1 — Freedom, Rights, and Care: Framing the Debates

Contemporary human rights discourse often treats “freedom” and “rights” as near-synonyms, as if possessing a right simply meant being free of interference in some zone of personal life. The opening move of this course is to resist that easy equivalence. A right, in the technical sense developed by theorists like Jack Donnelly, is a particular kind of normative entitlement: it is held by someone, against someone, to some specific good or treatment, and it is typically justiciable — meaning an institution can be called upon to vindicate it. Freedom, by contrast, is a broader condition that may or may not require the apparatus of rights to exist. Ancient and Indigenous political traditions have long known forms of freedom that do not depend on individual juridical entitlements, and modern critics from Costas Douzinas to Samuel Moyn have pushed back on the assumption that rights are the natural or inevitable container for freedom’s political meaning.

Donnelly’s account begins with the idea that human rights are the rights one has simply because one is human. They are universal in that sense, and they generate claims on the state and on other actors that can be pressed in the name of human dignity. Yet Donnelly himself is careful to distinguish this minimal philosophical commitment from any claim that the specific list of rights currently recognized is itself timeless. He defends what he calls “relative universality,” arguing that at the level of concept human rights are universal but that their implementation and interpretation must be responsive to context. This opens a door that the more critical scholars in this course walk through: if implementation is contextual, and if the concept was formalized in a particular historical moment, perhaps the entire architecture of human rights carries assumptions that should be examined rather than simply inherited.

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia supplies the historical jolt. Against the conventional story that traces modern human rights back to the Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Moyn argues that human rights as a global moral vocabulary really only crystallized in the 1970s. Before that, rights talk was tied up with revolutionary citizenship, decolonization struggles, or Cold War ideological competition. The 1970s brought a new kind of discourse — transnational, individualist, often routed through NGOs like Amnesty International, and deliberately post-political. Human rights became the “last utopia” precisely when other utopias (socialist internationalism, anti-colonial nationalism) had lost their shine. Whatever one thinks of Moyn’s chronology in detail, his broader point lands: the framework we now use to describe universal human entitlements is not ancient, and the very scope of what it captures and what it misses reflects the conditions of its birth.

Costas Douzinas pushes further. In The End of Human Rights he argues that the natural-law tradition from which rights emerged always contained an unresolved tension between the abstract universality of the human and the concrete particularity of the person who suffers or acts. When human rights are reduced to a legal-technical apparatus, Douzinas warns, the emancipatory promise that once animated them risks being hollowed out. Rights become bureaucratic instruments, issued by the same states they were meant to constrain, and the desire for justice that motivated them retreats into a depoliticized humanitarianism. Douzinas does not reject rights; he insists that we must preserve what he calls the excess of the demand — the way a genuine claim for recognition always exceeds the categories the law provides.

Against this backdrop, the course’s opening question — “Is freedom without care possible?” — is not rhetorical. Feminist ethicists of care, from Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto onward, have long argued that the standard liberal picture of freedom, in which the individual is imagined as a pre-social chooser moving through a world of other choosers, ignores the dense relational fabric in which any actual person exists. We are born helpless, raised by others, and we die dependent. In between, our capacity to act at all presupposes networks of care that are themselves unpriced and often invisible in rights discourse. If this is correct, then a serious theory of freedom must build care into its foundation rather than treating care as a sentimental appendix to an otherwise autonomous subject. The same insight surfaces in Indigenous political thought, in African communitarianisms like the Ubuntu tradition, and in much of the ecological literature we will encounter later in the course. The person who is free is the person who is held, not the person who is abandoned to a market.

This framing sets up the rest of the course. We will move across three substantive terrains — the digital world and data, sexuality and the colonial inheritance, and the rights of nature and Indigenous cosmologies — while keeping the same cluster of questions in view. What is a right for? Who is the subject of a right? What does freedom look like once we stop pretending autonomous individuals drop from the sky? And can human rights as presently configured do the work we want from them, or do we need new vocabularies alongside or beyond them?

Chapter 2 — Privacy, Identity, and the Information Age

Privacy is often introduced in textbooks as the right to be let alone, a phrase that Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis made famous in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article. That gloss is useful but misleading. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on privacy distinguishes several overlapping conceptions: informational privacy (control over information about oneself), decisional privacy (autonomy in intimate choices), physical privacy (the inviolability of body and space), and dispositional privacy (the ability to present different faces to different audiences). Each of these conceptions does different work, and each runs into different trouble once we move from the print age to a world in which every gesture — a heart rate, a scroll pattern, a geolocation — can be recorded and stored indefinitely at near-zero cost.

The information age changes the structure of privacy because it changes the default. In the analog world, forgetting was cheap and remembering was expensive. If you wanted to remember something, you had to write it down, file it, and retrieve it; the friction of memory was built into the medium. Today the defaults are inverted. Digital systems remember by default, and forgetting requires deliberate effort. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete begins from this observation and draws out its implications. When everything is remembered, we live in a kind of permanent present in which earlier versions of the self never recede. A drunken photo from fifteen years ago, a poorly phrased tweet from adolescence, a misdemeanor whose juridical record was supposed to expire — all can be retrieved in seconds by anyone with a search engine. The person who is never allowed to outgrow her past is not fully free in the present.

Mayer-Schönberger argues that forgetting is a social virtue, not a bug. Human reasoning has always depended on it: we simplify, we let go, we move on, and those cognitive economies are the substrate of learning and reconciliation. Societies, too, need forgetting. Truth commissions, amnesty clauses, statutes of limitations, the sealing of juvenile records — these are legal forms of social forgetting that allow individuals and communities to recover from harm without being eternally indexed by it. The rise of perfect digital memory threatens to undo these institutions not by legislating against them but by quietly routing around them. A search result can reinstate what the law has pardoned.

Identity in this environment becomes strange. The self, traditionally thought of as something we build and rebuild in relation to others, is now partly composed of data residues we did not choose and cannot review. Advertisers, insurers, lenders, employers, and state agencies each hold partial dossiers. None of them knows the whole person, but each acts on the slice of the person they happen to see. The philosophical problem this poses is not just about surveillance in the old sense of being watched. It is about being known in a way that forecloses self-revision. If the data about me is more stable than I am, who is the authoritative source on who I am?

These considerations set up the legal and political debates of the next two chapters. The European Union, via the GDPR and the Google Spain ruling, has tried to construct a right to be forgotten that answers, at least partially, to the concerns Mayer-Schönberger articulates. Meanwhile, Shoshana Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism argues that the problem is not merely that data persists but that an entire economy has been built on turning human experience into extractable behavioral surplus. Both accounts converge on the point that privacy can no longer be thought of as a zone of personal life to be fenced off. It has become a political economy question and a question about the very conditions under which selfhood is possible.

Chapter 3 — The Right to Be Forgotten: GDPR, Google Spain, and Data Subjects

In 2010 a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González lodged a complaint with Spain’s data protection authority. When he entered his name in Google’s search engine, the top results included links to 1998 newspaper notices announcing the auction of a property he had owned to satisfy social security debts. The debt had long since been resolved, and González argued that the continued prominence of the old notices in search results harmed his professional reputation without any ongoing public interest justification. The complaint wound its way to the Court of Justice of the European Union, which in May 2014 issued what has come to be called the Google Spain ruling.

The court made three moves that together reshaped European internet law. First, it held that a search engine operator processes personal data when it indexes and returns results, and is therefore a “data controller” under European data protection law. Google had argued that it was merely a neutral intermediary pointing to content published elsewhere, but the court rejected that characterization on the ground that search engines aggregate and structure information in ways that profoundly shape what can be known about a person. Second, it held that European data protection law applies to Google Spain’s activities because Google’s advertising arm within Europe is sufficiently connected to the search operation to bring it inside the EU’s jurisdictional reach. Third, and most notoriously, it held that individuals have a right under European law to request that search engines delist links to information about them that is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes of processing — even when the underlying information remains lawful at its original source.

The court was careful to frame this not as a right to erase history but as a right to resist a particular kind of amplification. The newspaper notices about González’s property could remain in the newspaper’s archive; what changed was that searching his name would no longer automatically surface them. The judgment created a kind of friction, closer to the analog defaults described in the previous chapter. It also created a balancing test. The right is not absolute. Where the data subject is a public figure, or where there is an ongoing public interest in the information, the right gives way. The court left the balancing largely to search engines themselves, which is a striking choice because it effectively delegated a piece of rights adjudication to a private corporation.

The right was then codified in the General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in 2018. Article 17 of the GDPR sets out the “right to erasure,” sometimes called the right to be forgotten, and lists the grounds on which a data subject can require a controller to delete personal data — including that the data is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected, that consent has been withdrawn, or that the processing was unlawful. Article 17 also carves out exceptions for freedom of expression, compliance with legal obligations, public interest, scientific or historical research, and the establishment or defense of legal claims. Article 20 adds a distinct but related tool: the right to data portability, which lets a data subject receive personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format and transmit it to another controller. Portability is not about forgetting; it is about escape. It imagines a world in which users can leave a platform without losing the network and informational value they have built inside it.

Critics of the right to be forgotten press several objections. They worry about its compatibility with freedom of expression and the historical record, particularly when the data subject is a semi-public figure whose behavior is of legitimate interest to others. They worry about jurisdictional overreach when European courts order global delisting. They worry about the delegation of rights adjudication to search engines whose commercial incentives may not align with careful balancing. And they note a simpler practical point: delisting the top search result does not erase the underlying information; a determined researcher can still find it, and in the meantime the newly protected individual may attract the very attention she was trying to deflect — the so-called Streisand effect.

Defenders reply that these objections, though real, should be weighed against the concrete harms of a memory economy in which the past is always one click away. The GDPR does not abolish journalism or archiving; it creates a default in favor of the data subject when the information has outlived any legitimate purpose. That default is closer to the analog norm than the internet’s early default was, and it reflects a considered political judgment about what privacy has to mean in a world of persistent storage. The right to be forgotten is not the full answer — it leaves surveillance capitalism untouched, which is the topic of the next chapter — but it is a useful pressure point at which European law has asserted that the data subject is not simply an input to someone else’s database.

Chapter 4 — Surveillance Capitalism and the Commodification of Data

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism argues that the platform economy rests on a new and historically unprecedented form of extraction. Traditional capitalism, in the account Zuboff develops, commodified labor and nature; surveillance capitalism commodifies something stranger — human experience itself, rendered into behavioral data and then processed into prediction products that are sold in markets for future behavior. The raw material is not something the user explicitly offers. It is collected as a by-product of using “free” services, and much of it concerns aspects of the user’s life that they would never knowingly disclose: micro-timings of hesitation, patterns of movement, emotional tone detected in the voice, bodily markers captured through a fitness tracker.

Zuboff’s book is long and historically dense, but its central conceptual moves can be summarized. First, she distinguishes behavioral surplus — data beyond what is needed to improve the service — from the service itself. Second, she argues that surveillance capitalism depends on unilateral claims of the right to this surplus, claims that were never negotiated and that the legal system has been slow to name, let alone regulate. Third, she shows how the production of prediction products pushes the logic of the system from prediction toward modification: if you can predict behavior accurately, you can also nudge it, and once you can nudge it, the business model becomes more profitable when users are steered toward predictable outcomes than when they are left to their own devices. The political danger is not merely privacy loss; it is the gradual atrophy of autonomous choice in a world saturated with instruments designed to preempt it.

This diagnosis reframes the right to be forgotten. A delisting request removes a particular link from a particular search engine, but it does nothing about the vast infrastructure of data collection and predictive modeling that sits behind the search engine. If the problem is behavioral surplus rather than a specific embarrassing document, then Article 17 is a patch on a much deeper wound. Zuboff herself is sympathetic to data protection law but skeptical that any reform that stays within the framework of individual privacy rights can respond to the systemic scale of the extraction. What is needed, she argues, is a collective reckoning with the very idea that experience should be an extractable resource in the first place.

Several features of the surveillance capitalism critique connect back to Douzinas and forward to the Indigenous and ecological chapters later in the course. Douzinas’s warning about the bureaucratization of rights is vindicated when privacy is reduced to a set of consent checkboxes that no one reads. The rights-of-nature literature raises analogous questions about the commodification of other living systems: when soil, rivers, and forests are treated as resources to be priced and transacted, the underlying assumption is the same one Zuboff identifies in the data economy, namely that whatever is not explicitly fenced off can be taken. A right to be forgotten is a fence around a piece of the self. Surveillance capitalism reveals that the fence is too small.

The political conclusion is not that rights talk is useless but that it must be paired with structural remedies. Competition policy, public infrastructure for search and social networking, limits on behavioral advertising, data minimization mandates, outright bans on certain classes of prediction products, and new collective bargaining forms for data subjects are all candidates. None of these fit comfortably inside the classical liberal picture of a rights-bearer facing the state. They imply a more muscular conception of the public — one that resembles, in some of its commitments, the communitarian and relational conceptions of selfhood that will become explicit when we turn to African and Indigenous scholarship.

Chapter 5 — Decolonizing Sexuality: African Scholarship on SOGI

Sexual orientation and gender identity, often abbreviated SOGI in rights discourse, have become a focal point of contemporary human rights debate. The Yogyakarta Principles, drafted in 2006 and updated in 2017, articulate how existing international human rights law applies to SOGI issues. Yet the very framing of SOGI as a universal rights terrain has been contested — and some of the most important contestation has come from African feminist and queer scholars who insist that the debate cannot be conducted without confronting the colonial history that shaped present-day sexual politics on the continent.

Sylvia Tamale is one of the central voices in this literature. In African Sexualities: A Reader and in her later book Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, Tamale argues that the dominant Western narrative — which positions Africa as uniquely hostile to queer lives and then proposes Western-style rights interventions as the remedy — gets the history and the politics wrong. Pre-colonial African societies were not uniform in their attitudes toward same-sex intimacy, gender fluidity, or non-reproductive sexuality, but the ethnographic record shows considerable diversity, including institutions and relationships that would today be described as queer. Many of the criminal laws that now penalize same-sex conduct in African states are not expressions of indigenous tradition but direct inheritances from colonial penal codes. Britain’s Section 377, originally imposed in India in 1860 and subsequently spread throughout the British empire, is the most famous example. It criminalized “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” and variants of it appear in the post-independence legal codes of countries across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What is often presented as “African tradition” in opposition to LGBTQ rights is in many cases a Victorian tradition preserved long after its metropolitan originators abandoned it.

This historical point matters for rights strategy. If the law being challenged is colonial, then challenging it is not a matter of importing foreign values; it is a matter of decolonizing the legal inheritance. The rhetorical work of some African queer activists has precisely this shape. They reject the framing in which they stand for a Western import against a native tradition, and instead reclaim pre-colonial plurality as their genealogy. Tamale also emphasizes that Afro-feminism cannot simply be a replication of Euro-American feminism on African soil. It must begin from the actual situations of African women and gender-nonconforming people, and it must be willing to critique both the colonial past and the contemporary forces — state, church, market — that continue to shape sexual politics.

Ratna Kapur’s work on gender, alterity, and human rights adds another angle. Kapur, writing from a postcolonial feminist position in India, criticizes what she calls the “victim subject” that dominates international women’s rights advocacy. When women of the global South are represented primarily as victims of tradition or of their own communities, the implicit solution is a benevolent external intervention that preserves the structural conditions under which the harm occurs. Kapur argues for a more complex subject of rights — one capable of agency, of desire, of contradictory commitments — and she presses human rights discourse to make room for the erotic and the performative rather than shrinking sexuality into a protective cage. Her critique complements Tamale’s: both refuse the representational economy in which the global South is a site of suffering that the global North comes to rescue.

Makau Mutua’s Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique offers perhaps the sharpest version of the same complaint. Mutua describes the dominant human rights grammar as a “savages-victims-saviors” story, in which certain states and practices are coded as savage, certain populations as victims, and certain international actors — typically Western NGOs and governments — as saviors. The story is not only morally presumptuous; it is also politically disabling, because it erases the agency and complexity of the people it claims to rescue and it obscures the role that the savior-actors themselves play in producing the conditions they now arrive to correct. Mutua is not anti-rights; he wants rights to be freed from this script. In the context of SOGI, this would mean taking African queer activism as the center of the conversation rather than as a local application of a Western template.

What emerges from this cluster of scholarship is a double task. First, to confront the historical fact that much contemporary African sexual repression is a direct legacy of colonial legal and religious imposition, and to let that fact reshape the story about whose values are at stake. Second, to develop a politics of sexuality that is accountable to the people it claims to serve, which means listening to African queer voices on their own terms rather than deploying them as props in a Northern morality play.

Chapter 6 — Sexuality, Colonial Legacy, and the Anti-Homosexuality Laws

The contemporary politics of the anti-homosexuality laws that have made headlines in countries like Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana is inseparable from the longer colonial history sketched in the previous chapter. Uganda’s 2014 Anti-Homosexuality Act, struck down on procedural grounds by the Constitutional Court and then re-enacted in a harsher 2023 version, built on the foundation of colonial-era penal code provisions. Nigeria’s 2014 Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act operates against the same background. Kenya, Tanzania, and others preserve penal code sections whose language can be traced back to the nineteenth century imperial drafting office.

Two further dynamics shape the contemporary moment. The first is the transnational circulation of reactionary religious networks, particularly American evangelical organizations that have invested resources in supporting anti-LGBTQ legislation abroad. Scott Lively’s involvement in the run-up to Uganda’s 2009 bill is one well-documented example. This is a reminder that the global production of sexual politics is not a matter of isolated national traditions colliding with external liberalism, but an intricate circuit in which actors of different kinds move in both directions. The second dynamic is the use of anti-homosexuality politics by governments themselves as a tool of domestic consolidation, invoking protection of the “African family” against foreign corruption as a way of mobilizing support that distracts from other governance failures. This is not unique to any region; analogous political uses of sexual panic can be observed in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and elsewhere.

Stella Nyanzi’s writing and activism from Uganda bring the human texture of this politics into focus. Nyanzi, an anthropologist and poet, has been jailed for her protest writings against the Museveni government and has long argued that queer pride and dissident speech belong together. Her essays on queer pride and protest emphasize that visibility is both essential and dangerous. Visibility is essential because invisibility allows the state and conservative civil society to pretend that queer Ugandans do not exist, and to legislate accordingly. Visibility is dangerous because those who become visible become targets. Nyanzi refuses the easy resolution that says activists should simply come out, and equally refuses the resigned counsel that says they should stay in. She insists on the political work of protest, including forms of protest — obscene poetry, public insult, bodily exposure — that are calculated to exceed the terms of polite civic speech. In a context where polite civic speech has been captured by a particular religious-nationalist framing, rudeness becomes a method.

Nyanzi’s work raises a question that recurs throughout the course. What does a right to be look like? The course title asks this explicitly. The right to be is not reducible to the right to privacy (one can be visible), nor to the right to freedom of expression (one can be silent), nor to freedom from torture (though the absence of torture is a precondition). It is closer to what Hannah Arendt called the right to have rights — a prior condition of belonging to a political community in which one’s existence is intelligible and protected. When the state declares your existence illegal, it is not only taking away specific entitlements; it is refusing your status as a subject of rights at all. African queer activism often works at this deeper register, fighting to make queer life thinkable in public, and only secondarily pursuing specific legal reforms.

A final point worth making is that the tension between “universal rights” and “local culture” is often overdrawn. The overwhelming majority of African queer people are African, and their claims about dignity, safety, and intimacy are made from within their own societies, not from without. Treating their struggle as a Western import is both an empirical error and a political weapon, and one that the scholars in this chapter strenuously reject. At the same time, they caution Northern allies against the savior posture that can do more harm than good. Solidarity means following the lead of the people whose lives are at stake, funding the work they identify as priorities, and refusing to instrumentalize their suffering in campaigns aimed at Northern audiences.

Chapter 7 — Queer Activism and the Politics of Visibility in Africa

The previous chapter introduced Stella Nyanzi; this chapter widens the lens. African queer activism is heterogeneous, ranging from formal NGOs that engage courts and parliaments, through arts collectives and underground party scenes, to diaspora-led advocacy and academic networks. What unites them is a refusal to disappear.

Several tactical questions structure the work. How much visibility is strategically productive at a given moment, and how much puts people in direct physical danger? When is it useful to engage the courts, and when is it better to build community infrastructure outside the legal system? How should activists relate to international funders whose timelines, reporting requirements, and political assumptions may not align with local needs? How should they respond when their own governments frame them as agents of Western corruption, a framing that can be both inaccurate and politically damaging? There are no universal answers. Different contexts support different strategies, and one of the mature moves in the literature is to resist the temptation to generalize from one national case to the continent as a whole.

The politics of visibility also connects to a broader philosophical point about recognition. Following thinkers like Judith Butler, one can argue that identities are produced, in part, by the repeated acts through which they become legible to others. A community of queer pride — marches, gatherings, publications, shared language — is not just a representation of people who are already there in some pre-political sense; it is one of the processes through which being a queer person in a particular place becomes an intelligible social category with weight and texture. Where such processes are suppressed, the category does not vanish, but it becomes harder to inhabit, and those who try to inhabit it are forced into lonelier and riskier positions. This is why the politics of visibility is never only a politics of individual self-expression. It is a politics of collective making.

From a human rights perspective, this has implications for how rights claims should be framed. If the right to be is in part a right to become publicly intelligible, then human rights advocacy on SOGI cannot be limited to defensive litigation against bad laws. It must also include affirmative support for the cultural and institutional conditions under which queer lives become thinkable — art spaces, health services, schools, media — and it must resist the reduction of queer existence to a single legal demand. The best work in this area, as seen in writing by Tamale, Nyanzi, and many collaborators, weaves together law, scholarship, art, and organizing in ways that mirror the thickness of the problem itself.

Chapter 8 — Anthropocentric vs Biocentric Conceptions of Law

We now turn from the digital and sexual terrains to the ecological one. The central conceptual move of this half of the course is the distinction between anthropocentric and biocentric conceptions of law. Anthropocentric law treats human beings as the only entities whose interests count morally and juridically. Non-human nature shows up in such a system either as property — things owned by human beings — or as a resource to be regulated for the sake of present and future human users. Environmental law in its mainstream twentieth-century form is anthropocentric in this sense. It limits pollution not because rivers have standing but because pollution harms people who depend on rivers. When the rights of future generations are invoked, the argument is still ultimately about humans, just humans who have not yet been born.

Biocentric law, by contrast, extends moral and legal consideration beyond the human. The precise extension varies by theorist. Some, like the deep ecologists influenced by Arne Naess, insist on an intrinsic worth of all living beings. Others, like theorists of ecosystem integrity, focus on the flourishing of biotic communities and abiotic systems together. Still others, influenced by Indigenous thought, reject the very dichotomy between human and non-human on which the debate is typically framed. What the biocentric tradition shares is the conviction that an exclusively human-centered law cannot do justice to the living world, either morally or ecologically, and that the climate and biodiversity crises are in part symptoms of the anthropocentric framing itself.

Christopher Stone’s 1972 article “Should Trees Have Standing?” remains a pivotal text. Stone argued that just as earlier legal developments had extended personhood and standing to corporations, ships, and municipalities, there was no principled barrier to extending standing to natural objects. He proposed that trees, rivers, and ecosystems could be legally represented by human guardians in the same way that minors and incapacitated adults are represented. This would not mean that forests filed complaints in their own name; it would mean that injuries to forests could be brought before courts as injuries to forests, rather than being recoverable only as property damage to a human owner or as harm to a downstream human user. The article was taken up almost immediately in a famous dissent by Justice William O. Douglas in Sierra Club v. Morton, where Douglas argued that the Mineral King Valley should have standing in its own right.

Stone’s proposal was initially received as an eccentricity, but it planted a seed. In the decades since, a rich literature and, more importantly, a growing body of legal practice, has developed around the idea of rights of nature. This practice draws on several streams at once. Indigenous legal traditions, which never abandoned the recognition of non-human persons, provided a deep reservoir of conceptual resources. Ecological science, by showing the interdependence of human and non-human systems, undermined the Cartesian separation that made anthropocentrism plausible. And a wave of legal experimentation in Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, India, Uganda, Colombia, and elsewhere has moved the question from the seminar room to the courtroom.

Cormac Cullinan’s Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice provides a useful synthesis. Cullinan argues that the core shift is from law as a system ordering relations among persons who hold property to law as a system ordering a community of life within a shared Earth. He borrows the phrase “Earth jurisprudence” from the cultural historian Thomas Berry, and develops it into a practical program for rewriting governance at every level. Some pieces of this program are familiar environmental regulation; others are more radical, such as the idea that constitutions should recognize Earth’s own interests as a ground of legitimacy. Cullinan does not claim that human interests should be subordinated to non-human ones in every case. He argues rather that the current arrangement, in which non-human interests are entirely absent from the juridical scene except as reflections of human preferences, is indefensible both ethically and practically.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on environmental ethics maps the philosophical landscape. It distinguishes strong and weak anthropocentrisms, biocentric individualism, ecocentric holism, and more recent pluralist or pragmatist positions that refuse to settle the question at the level of foundational theory. For the purposes of this course, the important point is not to adjudicate among these philosophical positions but to see that they push against a common target: the idea that the moral universe ends at the species boundary. Once that target has been identified and credibly challenged, the door opens to the Indigenous, legal, and political materials discussed in the next chapters.

Chapter 9 — Indigenous Cosmologies and Earth Jurisprudence

Indigenous peoples’ cosmologies are not a single system, and any honest account must begin with that plurality. Māori, Anishinaabe, Quechua, Aymara, Inuit, Yoruba, Adivasi, and countless other peoples have distinct languages, histories, and political forms. Yet across this plurality one can detect, with care, some family resemblances that matter for the question of rights of nature. Many Indigenous traditions recognize non-human beings — rivers, mountains, forests, animals, ancestors — as persons in the sense of moral and political interlocutors rather than mere resources. Relationships to land are often framed in kinship terms. Governance includes obligations to more-than-human relatives, and harm to those relatives is a harm that calls for response. Time is frequently understood multi-generationally, and decisions are weighed against their effects on the unborn.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything argues, on the basis of a wide archaeological and ethnographic survey, that the story of human social development as a linear progression from small egalitarian bands to large hierarchical states is wrong. Their evidence suggests that humans have experimented with a wide range of political forms throughout prehistory, that significant societies have been organized around principles of liberty, equality, and care that differ sharply from the Hobbesian pictures inherited by mainstream political theory, and that Indigenous intellectual traditions have long had sophisticated critiques of European political arrangements. The Wendat philosopher Kandiaronk’s eighteenth-century critique of French society, for example, was a live source of the European Enlightenment’s self-critique, even though it has been largely forgotten in standard histories. For the purposes of this course, The Dawn of Everything functions as a reminder that Indigenous political thought is not a relic to be preserved but a living intellectual tradition that has always been in dialogue with, and often ahead of, Western political theory.

Sheryl Lightfoot’s Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution traces the slow, deliberate, and still incomplete process by which Indigenous peoples have reshaped international law. Her argument is that Indigenous politics has produced a subtle revolution not by overthrowing the state system but by rearticulating its terms from within. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007 after more than twenty years of negotiation, is the most visible artifact of this process. UNDRIP affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination, to their lands, territories, and resources, to the protection of their cultural heritage, to free, prior, and informed consent on matters affecting them, and to the practice of their own legal and spiritual traditions. It is not a binding treaty in the formal sense, but its normative weight has been considerable, and it has been invoked in courts and legislatures around the world.

Lightfoot argues that UNDRIP and related instruments do not merely add a new category of rights-holders to the existing list. They also press human rights discourse toward a more relational understanding of what rights are. Indigenous self-determination is not only about a group being free from external interference; it is about a people being able to sustain their relationships with land, ancestors, and non-human relatives. Where Western rights discourse tends to begin from the separate individual, Indigenous discourse often begins from the network, and the person appears as a particular node in a web of obligations. This is not a denial of individuality but a different ordering of emphasis, and it is one of the reasons Indigenous thought resonates so strongly with ecological and feminist critiques of liberal individualism.

Earth jurisprudence, in its strongest form, asks legal systems to take seriously the reality that the moral universe includes more than humans, and that it has done so in many Indigenous legal traditions all along. The innovation of rights of nature in Western-inflected law is, from this angle, less an innovation than a translation — the importing, into a juridical vocabulary shaped by property and contract, of insights that Indigenous systems have preserved despite centuries of suppression.

Chapter 10 — Rights of Nature: From Stewardship to Trusteeship

The language of “stewardship” has long been used, particularly in Christian and liberal-environmentalist vocabularies, to describe a responsible human relationship to nature. The steward is entrusted with something belonging to another, and her job is to manage it well for that other’s sake. In theological versions, the ultimate owner is God; in secular versions, the beneficiaries are humanity, including future generations. Stewardship is a step beyond crude exploitation, but it retains the structure of ownership. Nature is still something to be managed. The steward may be benevolent, but she is not placed inside a community with her non-human interlocutors. The relation remains vertical.

Trusteeship is a stronger formulation. In legal trusteeship, a trustee holds property on behalf of a beneficiary and owes fiduciary duties that can be enforced by the beneficiary or by a court on the beneficiary’s behalf. If states are conceived as trustees of the atmosphere, the oceans, or a particular river, then their duties are not discretionary policy preferences but legal obligations that can be challenged in court. This structure has been invoked in public trust doctrine cases, including in the United States, where the doctrine has been used to argue that state governments have an obligation to protect common resources like coastal waters for public use. Trusteeship is stronger than stewardship because the beneficiary is someone with standing to sue, which shifts power away from the trustee’s discretion.

Rights of nature pushes one step further. Where trusteeship keeps human institutions at the center and assigns them duties toward a passive beneficiary, rights of nature treats the natural entity itself as an active legal subject with its own interests and standing. The shift is subtle but significant. A trustee can still think of the river as something managed on behalf of other humans. A legal guardian of a river that holds rights of its own is thinking about the river as a subject whose interests must be consulted, and about her own role as giving voice to those interests rather than merely balancing them against human ones.

Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, passed in 2010 and expanded into a framework law in 2012, is one of the boldest legislative enactments of this idea. It declares Mother Earth (Pachamama) to be a collective subject of public interest with specific rights, including the right to life, to the diversity of life, to water, to clean air, to equilibrium, to restoration, and to live free of pollution. The law also creates a defensoría (ombuds office) for Mother Earth’s rights. Its practical effects have been uneven; implementation has been constrained by extractive economic pressures, including Bolivia’s reliance on mineral and hydrocarbon revenues. But the law’s symbolic and normative importance is considerable. It translates Andean cosmology, and specifically the concept of Pachamama, into formal legal language, and it offers one model for how a constitution or statute might recognize non-human interests.

Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution did something similar, becoming the first national constitution to explicitly recognize rights of nature. Article 71 declares that “nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and realized, has the right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate.” The constitutional language has since been invoked in court cases protecting cloud forests and rivers. Like Bolivia’s law, Ecuador’s provisions have been tested against the pressures of extractive industry, and the results have been mixed. What matters for this course is that the experiments exist and that they represent serious attempts to do in law what Earth jurisprudence proposes in theory.

The critics of rights of nature come from several directions. Some worry about conceptual incoherence: if rivers can have rights, which rivers, at what scale, and on what principle are their interests adjudicated when those interests conflict with each other or with human needs? Others worry that rights of nature could be captured by powerful actors who speak in the name of nature for their own ends. Others still argue that the real work of ecological protection lies in regulation, enforcement, and infrastructure investment, and that rights language is at best decorative. These are legitimate concerns, and defenders of rights of nature take them seriously. The counter-argument is that the same concerns could be raised about any rights claim, and that the point of rights of nature is to shift the default of the legal imagination rather than to produce a magic bullet.

Chapter 11 — Legal Personhood for Rivers, Forests, and Mountains

New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, passed in 2017, is often cited as the clearest legal instantiation of rights of nature combined with Indigenous co-governance. The act is the outcome of a long negotiation between the Crown and Whanganui Iwi, the Māori people whose relationship to the river goes back centuries. The central innovation is the legal recognition of Te Awa Tupua — the river and its tributaries from mountains to sea — as a single indivisible legal entity with the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. The act uses explicitly Māori framings: Te Awa Tupua is described as “an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements.” It is not a metaphor grafted onto a Western legal concept; it is a translation of a Māori ontological commitment into a form that the colonial legal system can register.

The act establishes two guardians for the river, called Te Pou Tupua, one nominated by the Crown and one by Whanganui iwi. They act together, and their role is to be “the human face” of Te Awa Tupua, speaking for the river in legal and governance contexts. A broader advisory body, Te Kōpuka, brings together iwi, local authorities, and other interested parties to develop a strategy for the river’s health. The legal personhood is not simply symbolic; it changes how decisions that affect the river must be made and how they can be challenged. It also ends a longstanding grievance about the inadequacy of earlier legal frameworks to recognize the river as the Whanganui people understood it.

Other jurisdictions have moved in similar directions. In 2017 the High Court of Uttarakhand in India declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to be legal persons, citing the Whanganui example. That decision was later stayed by the Supreme Court of India on practical grounds, but the reasoning remains in circulation. Colombia’s Constitutional Court has recognized the Atrato River as a subject of rights, requiring the state to protect it from illegal mining and environmental degradation, and a later decision recognized the Colombian Amazon as a subject of rights with a duty on the state to halt deforestation. In Bangladesh, a court declared all rivers legal persons in 2019. Each of these moves has its own character and context. Some are led by courts, some by legislatures, some in alliance with Indigenous or local communities, others without. Taken together they form a transnational current of experimentation.

The philosophical question worth pausing on is what it means for a non-human entity to “have” rights in the first place. One traditional view, associated with will theories of rights, holds that only beings capable of exercising choice can hold rights, which would seem to exclude rivers and forests. A competing interest theory, developed by theorists like Joseph Raz, holds that a being can hold a right if its interests are of a kind that can ground duties on the part of others. On the interest theory, rivers can straightforwardly hold rights: they have interests in maintaining their flow, water quality, sediment balance, and associated biotic communities, and those interests can ground duties on the part of humans. The interest theory fits rights of nature better than the will theory, and much of the jurisprudential work in this area implicitly relies on something like the interest view.

Another important consideration is representation. If a river cannot literally speak, then someone speaks for it, and the choice of representative matters enormously. Te Awa Tupua’s dual guardianship structure reflects one answer: representation should include the Indigenous people whose traditions recognized the river’s personhood long before the statute. Bolivia’s defensoría reflects a different answer, an administrative ombuds model. In other cases, representation has been by NGOs or citizen groups. The design of representation is where rights-of-nature law is most vulnerable to capture and most in need of thoughtful institutional design.

Chapter 12 — From Property to Life: Reconceptualizing Relationship

If the previous chapters traced the emergence of rights of nature, this chapter steps back to ask what it would mean to reorganize legal thinking itself around the notion of life rather than around the notion of property. Western legal traditions have long been structured by the Roman law distinction between persons and things. Persons are rights-bearers; things are objects of rights. The distinction is useful for many purposes, but it has always been unstable at the edges. Slaves were forcibly assigned to the category of things; corporations were unnaturally raised to the category of persons; animals have hovered ambiguously in between. Indigenous legal traditions, as noted earlier, often do not rely on the person/thing dichotomy at all, and instead think in terms of relationships of varying types among a diverse community of beings.

The move from property to life asks us to consider the legal consequences of taking those relational traditions seriously. One consequence is that ownership becomes harder to defend as a fundamental category. If land is not primarily property but a member of a community of relations, then treating it as alienable at the will of an individual owner begins to look strange. The point is not to abolish all private property or to romanticize communal alternatives; it is to notice that the absolutism with which property has been defended in modern Western law is itself a particular choice rather than a natural fact.

Another consequence is that commons become respectable again. The enclosure movements that privatized common lands in early modern Europe were justified by an ideology of efficient individual ownership and have their echoes in contemporary debates about data, genetic material, seeds, and traditional knowledge. Contemporary commons scholarship, led by figures like Elinor Ostrom and extended by newer work on digital commons, shows that collective governance of shared resources is often more stable and more sustainable than either pure privatization or pure state control. The rights-of-nature conversation fits naturally inside this broader commons revival, because both refuse the story that rational management requires private ownership.

A third consequence is that care resurfaces at the center of law rather than at its margins. If the law is about sustaining a community of life, then the work of care — tending, feeding, healing, teaching — is not a private matter that law merely enables from the outside. It becomes a subject of law in its own right. This brings the course back to its opening question about freedom without care. A law that takes care seriously cannot treat freedom as the absence of relationship. It must understand freedom as the condition in which one can participate meaningfully in the relationships that sustain life. This is closer to what feminist care ethicists have been arguing all along, and it converges in striking ways with Indigenous political thought.

It is worth being cautious here. There is a real danger of romanticizing Indigenous traditions, treating them as solutions to problems they did not create and as resources to be mined for Western use. The scholars cited in this course are careful about this. Lightfoot, Tamale, and others insist that the goal is not to absorb Indigenous or African insights into a renovated Western universalism; it is to create conditions under which Indigenous and African peoples can flourish on their own terms and under which their intellectual traditions are treated as interlocutors rather than as decoration. That is a more demanding requirement than a theoretical nod. It requires material resources, political recognition, and the willingness of Western-educated scholars to step back.

Chapter 13 — Decolonization, Feminism, and the Future of Human Rights

We close by drawing together the methodological threads that have run through the course. Four critical lenses — feminist and queer theory, theories of indigeneity, anti-racism, and decolonization — have shaped how we read the texts and evaluated the rights claims. Each of these lenses is itself internally plural, and they sometimes argue with one another. But together they point toward a particular stance on the future of human rights, which we can state as follows. Human rights are worth keeping as a political vocabulary, but only if that vocabulary is willing to be transformed by the encounters it has had and is having with traditions and communities that it has historically ignored, misrepresented, or attacked.

Feminist theory contributes, among other things, an account of the relational self. We have seen this contribution in the opening chapter on care, in the critique of surveillance capitalism as a threat to autonomous selfhood, in Ratna Kapur’s defense of a complex rights subject, and in the resonance between feminist care ethics and Indigenous relational ontologies. A feminist human rights discourse is not one that adds “women’s rights” as a topic and leaves the rest of the framework alone. It is one that revises the framework so that the connectedness of lives is built into the theory of the subject and of freedom.

Queer theory contributes a critique of the normalizing move by which rights recognition sometimes comes at the cost of becoming more like the dominant form. Scholars like Lisa Duggan have criticized what they call “homonormativity” — the demand that queer life make itself respectable in exchange for rights. Stella Nyanzi’s insistence on vulgar and dissident speech, in the African context, is partly an answer to this pressure. Queer theory also challenges the stable identity categories that rights claims tend to require, pushing us to think about rights that can accommodate fluidity, contradiction, and performance.

Theories of indigeneity contribute the recognition that legal imagination is bounded by the traditions that shaped it, and that other traditions exist which can do conceptual work that the dominant ones cannot. Lightfoot’s subtle revolution, Cullinan’s Earth jurisprudence, Te Awa Tupua, Bolivia’s Pachamama law, and UNDRIP itself are not just policy outputs. They are sites at which Indigenous legal thought is teaching Western legal thought. The teaching is not always welcomed, and it is frequently resisted by extractive interests, but its direction is clear. Any future-facing human rights discourse that ignores this teaching will be intellectually impoverished.

Anti-racism and decolonization contribute the insistence that the universal subject of rights has historically been imagined as white, male, propertied, and metropolitan, and that the apparent universality of rights language has often masked a particular set of interests. This does not mean that human rights are intrinsically Eurocentric; many decolonial scholars, including Tamale and Mutua, preserve rights discourse precisely because they see its emancipatory potential. It means that the discourse must be prepared to confront its own history and to accept contributions from those it has historically marginalized, not as an optional addition but as a condition of its own credibility. Makau Mutua’s savages-victims-saviors critique remains the shortest way to name the habit that still needs to be broken.

Putting these together, what would a human rights discourse adequate to contemporary issues look like? Several features can be sketched. It would begin from a relational subject, not an isolated individual, and it would take care seriously as a political category. It would distinguish rights from freedom and would not assume that more legal rights automatically mean more freedom in any given context. It would expand the community of rights-holders beyond the human, without pretending that all the conceptual problems of doing so have been solved. It would take Indigenous legal traditions as interlocutors and would support the political and material conditions under which those traditions can continue to develop. It would confront the political economy of data and surveillance with structural remedies and not only with individual consent checkboxes. It would center the voices of the people affected by particular struggles, especially in contexts where external narratives have tended to flatten them. It would acknowledge the historical role of colonial power in shaping the laws it now seeks to reform, and it would use that acknowledgment as a resource for change rather than as an excuse for paralysis.

None of this is easy, and none of it is settled. The contemporary human rights issues surveyed in this course — privacy in the information age, surveillance capitalism, the right to be forgotten, SOGI rights and the colonial inheritance, the rights of nature, legal personhood for rivers, the relationship between property and life — are not problems with neat solutions. They are living political and philosophical questions, and the best a course can do is equip its readers to enter those questions with sharper tools and clearer vision. The cluster of scholars introduced here, from Donnelly and Moyn to Tamale and Nyanzi, from Zuboff and Mayer-Schönberger to Cullinan and Lightfoot, offers precisely such a set of tools. They disagree with one another in important ways, and those disagreements are themselves part of the education. Reading them against each other, rather than choosing a side in advance, is the most useful orientation.

The final word belongs to the question that opened the course: is freedom without care possible? The honest answer, after thirteen chapters, is that it is not. Freedom without care is a picture of the human condition that erases the conditions under which human life is actually lived. The rights that matter are the ones that sustain the networks of care in which persons and communities become themselves, including networks that cross species, generations, and the boundaries drawn by colonial history. The project of contemporary human rights, if it is to mean anything, is the project of building law and politics around that understanding. That project is old in some places, new in others, embattled almost everywhere. It is also the work that this course has tried to prepare its readers to join.