Catholic Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights

"International law has a standard account of the nature of international law and human rights. Thirlway states that 'all subsystems or specialized fields of international law will operate on the basis that they derive their force from the established sources of Article 38 of the ICJ Statute'.1 Therefore, religion does not provide international law with an established source, and 'in principle, the individual legal, political, or religious system of a State does not impinge on its acceptance of, and compliance with, general international law'.2 Further, Thirlway remarks, since 'the waning of the influence of the teachings of the Catholic Church on moral and legal concepts, it has become possible for at least half a century to say that international law is now free from any religious input- that it is 'laicized''.3 The formal sources of international law, which are by in large viewed as a pragmatic agreements founded in a secular positivistic legal science developed since the 19th century, has had to engage again with religion in a manner that was unanticipated.4 That paradoxical arrival of a cosmopolitan Christian and Catholic rights-based tradition in the early 20th century problematises histories of international law and human rights. An historical presentation of the emergence of international law tends to move progressively from Grotius and the Enlightenment period of natural rights, toward the 19th century's classical formulations of international law.5 From there an account of the development of international law from the League of Nations to the construction of the United Nations after World War II and the process of building institutions and international mechanisms, agreeing treaties and establishing Courts to settle disputes, unfolds. In that advancing era for international law and politics, it initiated an alignment of global institutions included the participation of the human rights project, bringing rights ideas into in its normative assumptions.6 Nevertheless, this account creates its own boundaries, setting some normative values at the centre and others to the periphery"--