Casting the Net Wider Human Rights, Development and New Duty-Bearers

This edited volume brings together scholars and practitioners to address the question as to whether, in our globalized world, the protection of economic, social, and cultural rights should become the duty of actors beyond the state. It explores the role of actors such as transnational business, international financial institutions, supranational organizations, and influential states who are involved in or impact on human rights in developing countries. In adopting a 'responsibilities approach', the book seeks to clarify the nature, content, and scope of their contemporary duties. Casting the Net Wider is important from an academic as well as a social perspective. First, the book pushes the boundaries of legal theory by extending the onus for realizing human rights from developing or 'recipient' states to a range of international actors - industrialized states, donor states, and non-state actors. It also reminds scholars from various disciplines - in particular international trade, finance, and development economics - that there are important reasons for taking human rights into account in their policy analyses. The book develops a moral argument too. The changing global environment - in particular, structural poverty and inequality - ought to lead to a shift in the consideration as to what entities might legitimately constitute human rights duty-bearers. This key relationship between the domestic state as the traditional human rights duty-bearer and any number of external actors highlights the centrality of transnational duties that constitutes the raison d'être of this edited collection.

Arne Tostensen holds a PhD degree in sociology. He has more than 30 years of experience in research and consultancy work. His research interests include human rights; development assistance; governance and democratisation; social security; poverty and institutional analysis; research policy; the research-policy nexus; regional integration in Eastern and Southern Africa (EAC and SADC) and urbanisation (Africa). He has published widely and co-edited several anthologies in the field of human rights, poverty and urbanisation. Between 1988 and 1994 he served as the director of the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway and is currently a senior researcher at the same institute.

Wouter Vandenhole is an internationally recognized expert in transnational human rights obligations and in human rights and development. He has been invited as guest lecturer to universities all over the world. He serves on the editorial board of several international journals, among which the Journal of Human Rights Practice and Human Rights and International Legal Discourse. He has taken up management functions in European research and teaching networks: he was the chair of the Research Networking Programme, Beyond Territoriality: Globalization and Transnational Human Rights Obligations (GLOTHRO), funded by the European Science Foundation (2010-2014); he was the vice-chair of the COST Action The Role of the EU in UN Human Rights Reform (2009-2013); and is a member of the executive committee of the Children’s Rights Education Academic Network, funded by the Life Long Learning Programme of the European Commission (2012-2015). He is the lead convenor of an international summer course on Human Rights for Development. Wouter Vandenhole holds the chair in human rights and the UNICEF chair in children’s rights at the faculty of law of the University of Antwerp since 2007. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University (Veni Grant) from 2005 to 2007, and a senior teaching assistant at the European Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation in 2002-2003. From 1995 to 2005, he was a researcher at the University of Leuven. BA in Philosophy, University of Leuven (Belgium), LL.B., LL.M. University of Leuven (Belgium), LL.M. in Law in Development, University of Warwick (UK); Ph.D. University of Leuven (Belgium).