Upendra Baxi - Sovereign Debt, Human Rights, and Global Impoverishment

Abstract:

Much of the mainstream globalization discourse bypasses financial globalization and its relation with, and impact upon global impoverishment (conditions of extreme poverty) and human rights.

State borrowing from various sources (including most poignantly private creditors) is often presented as an incident of sovereignty and even as a collective right of states enabling them seek conditions for better fulfilment of human rights. Set against this are arguments that such debt contracts and ways of their enforcement result in massive, flagrant, and ongoing human rights violations further aggravate the conditions of extreme poverty in ways that almost repudiate an emerging global consensus concerning human right(s) against impoverishment.

In this context, I briefly revisit

• The conceptions of ‘odious debts’ in public international law – debts incurred by governance regimes, and in the full knowledge of creditors of the fact that such debts are ’contrary to the interests of the nation’ and its peoples, and further violative of the principles and purposes of the UN Charter and contemporary international human rights law norms and standards

• The regimes of ‘disciplinary’ and ‘regulatory’ economic globalization manifested by the International Financial Institutions programs of structural adjustment against which Global South continually protested, and which now reach the shores of Euro-politics via insurgent mass protest at ‘constitutionalizing austerity’ amidst the Eurozone crises

• Ways in which ‘collective memory’ narratives of the ‘Great Inflation of Weimar Germany’ even today seem to uncannily influence the German policy stances concerning new forms of EU Strukturwandel

• The place and role of the movement for cancellation of high global indebtedness of Global South countries and peoples

• Some future narrative emplotments, thus conditioned, of the nascent discourse concerning global justice.

Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Upendra Baxi, University of Warwick, em.

Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Recht als Kultur”

Zur Person:

Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Upendra Baxi ist einer der renommiertesten indischen Rechtsgelehrten der Gegenwart. Nach dem Studium in Rajkot und Mumbai erwarb er den Master- und Doktortitel an der Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall), wo er den Rechtswissenschaftler und österreichischen Verfassungsarchitekten Hans Kelsen kennenlernte, der ihn in zahlreichen Gesprächen nachhaltig inspirierte. Zum Zeitpunkt seiner Habilitation war Upendra Baxi der jüngste Professor Indiens und wurde 1971 an die University of Delhi berufen. Sein weiterer wissenschaftlicher Weg führte ihn an die Universitäten von Durham (Duke University), Sydney, Surat, New York, Toronto und Warwick.

Nach einem ersten Forschungsaufenthalt von April bis November 2011 ist Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Upendra Baxi seit Juli 2012 erneut als Fellow am Käte Hamburger Kolleg „Recht als Kultur“ tätig.

 

Publikationen (Auswahl):

• Outline of a Theory of Practice of Indian Constitutionalism, in: Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution. Herausgeber: Rajeev Bhargava, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays. Oxford University Press (India), 2007.

• The Future of Human Rights. Oxford University Press, 2002.

• Inhuman Wrongs and Human Rights: Unconventional Essays. New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1994.