Scholars, States, and Human Rights

A Comparison of Third World Approaches to International Law with Diverging State-Actors’ Stances in the UN Human Rights Council

Abstract

This article investigates the similarities between different critiques towards the international human rights system from academia and state-actors. On the one hand, there are the critiques from scholars of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement. On the other hand, there are critical points raised towards the international human rights system by China, Cuba, and Egypt in the reports from the first three cycles of their respective Universal Periodic Review (UPR) within the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Through a literature review, the TWAIL critiques were first categorized and then worked into a framework of three basic pillars: the culture critique, the rhetoric critique, and the model critique. This framework was subsequently applied to the reports by way of a simplified Qualitative Content Analysis in order to extrapolate the similarities of the critiques from these two unlikely groups of actors.