The Violent Law of Human Rights: An attempt to analyze the problematic nexus between law, rebellion, and human rights discourse

Abstract: Rebellion is a seldom accomplished attempt aiming to bend the law to counterweight the sovereign power or to overthrow the sovereign in a given legal order. Either way, it contests the boundaries of the law. The thesis at hand aims to investigate the problematic relationship between the human rights discourse, law and the concept of rebellion. For this purpose, while discussing whether a rebellion can claim legality in accordance with international human rights law discourse, this thesis also aims to investigate the shift which notion of human rights has undergone in its relationship with the concept of rebellion. In order to scrutinize and apprehend the notion of rebellion within international human rights law discourse in the thesis, this study is divided into three main parts. In the first part, a working definition for the concept of rebellion has been set, and the integral sine qua non-components of rebellion is defined. Therefore, the term rebellion is defined precisely and coherently while being differentiated from other social and political movements. In the second part, four different positive legal documents from the 18th century were compared to the modern international human right law sources in the context of rebellion, and the legal and contextual differences amongst these legal documents are ascertained. With this comparison, it is claimed that the concept of rebellion was deliberately obliterated and discredited in the modern international human rights law discourse. In the fourth and last main chapter, in light of the findings from the first chapters, modern international human rights law's approach towards the concept of rebellion were evaluated in the context of the law, violence and justice as they are discussed in the article by Walter Benjamin named Critique of Violence. It has been concluded that rebellion, as a concept, can never claim legality under the current understanding of the contemporary international human rights law discourse. However, it is argued that a legitimate rebellion could be defined if and only if the correlation amongst justice, violence and law is purely displayed. Consequently, it has been asserted that rebellion as a concept should be considered as a norm which is deeply rooted within the human rights idea and that the idea of human rights can only preserve its aim through this assent. The thesis is concluded by claiming that the shift in the positioning of the human rights notion, which is a highly comprehensive notion, regarding the concept of rebellion has resulted in an ontological change within the human rights concept itself.