Divided against itself: Aspiration and reality of international law

Introduction Various human rights are widely recognised in codified and customary international law. These human rights promise all human beings protection against specific severe harms that might be inflicted on them domestically or by foreigners. Yet, international law also establishes and maintains institutional structures that greatly contribute to violations of these same human rights: central components of international law systematically obstruct the aspirations of poor populations for democratic self-government, civil rights, and minimal economic sufficiency. And central international organisations, like the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, are designed in ways that systematically contribute to the persistence of severe poverty. We know, or certainly should know, that even today about a third of all human deaths – some 18 million annually – are due to poverty-related causes such as malnutrition, perinatal and maternal conditions, measles, diarrhoea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, or malaria (WHO 2008, 54–59, Table A1). Most of this annual death toll and the much larger poverty problem it epitomises are avoidable through minor modifications in supranational institutional arrangements that would entail only slight reductions in the incomes of the affluent. Such reforms have been blocked by the governments of the affluent countries that, advancing their own interests and those of their corporations and citizens, are designing and imposing a global institutional order that, continually and foreseeably, produces vast excesses of severe poverty and premature poverty-related deaths.