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The Twilight of Human Rights Law BY ERIC A. POSNER OXFORD, 200 PAGES, $23.95
How important and how useful are human-rights treaties and international human-rights laws? In a coolly devastating analysis, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner goes a long way toward showing that they matter very little. He employs a wide array of evidence to contend that human-rights treaties and laws are some combination of redundant and therefore unnecessary (when they simply require what liberal countries already want to do), feckless (when they command things distasteful to recalcitrant states that have the power and will to flout these dictates), confusing (when they point in different directions or even contradict each other), or unhelpful (when they demand rights, especially "positive" ones, that indigent or incompetent governments cannot deliver). Furthermore, Posner points out, rights have a tendency to multiply and therefore to lose their coherence and force in a thicket of inconsistent requirements.
But Posner does not see this irrelevance of (and the occasional unintended harm done by) international human-rights law as such bad news. This is because he sees human liberty and dignity as still increasing-as being, in other words, correlated with but not caused by the proliferation of international pacts and regulations on human...