On 6 October 2016 León Castellanos-Jankiewicz defended his PhD dissertation in International Law, entitled “Minority Protection and the Foundations of Human Rights”, at the Graduate Institute. Professor Andrew Clapham presided the defence committee, which included Professor Andrea Bianchi, Thesis Director, and Professor Alexis Keller, from the University of Geneva. The thesis argues that international human rights originate from group protection standards developed during the interwar period. World War II is usually identified as spurring the contemporary human rights regime, but Mr Castellanos-Jankiewicz shows that the key developments occurred immediately after World War I.
Why were you drawn to the history of human rights?
Human rights are ubiquitous in contemporary legal discourse, yet their origins are surprisingly elusive. Scholars usually underline the Holocaust as being their main catalyser, along with the famous declarations made during the American and French revolutions. But these events are historically far removed from each other, and their circumstances are fundamentally distinct, so their conflation seemed somewhat artificial to me. This led me to unravel their meanings and contexts in order to better understand the progression of human rights.
Furthermore, I believed that the disproportionate reliance on the concept of individual dignity was insufficient to explain the success of human rights overtime. Although human dignity certainly played a role, the over-emphasis on individual rights is especially puzzling considering that the recognition of group-based claims has played a significant role in the levelling of societies by phasing out status and class, which in turn has reinforced equality among individuals.
What are your major findings?
My research reveals that group protection played a key role in the internationalisation of rights after World War I. The 1919 minority protection instruments and their application by the League of Nations laid the foundations of the contemporary human rights edifice by placing national, religious and linguistic minorities on an equal footing with majorities. These are the first multilateral treaties where entitlements for individuals are guaranteed by an international organisation. Surprisingly, the wide-ranging civil and political rights under the League’s guarantee covering national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe are hardly considered as legacy precedents of human rights today. We must also bear in mind that many emancipatory claims behind the American and French revolutions were also group related, and that their ideological underpinnings were espoused by national minorities during the nineteenth century. My thesis therefore argues that human rights are consecutive to group rights in substance. It also advances that “equality before the law” was first developed as an international legal standard of group protection, and was only later transposed to the individual sphere with human rights law.
After World War II, the Universal Declaration of 1948 merely expanded the scope of application of the previous regime to all individuals equally regardless of group membership, and individual equality acquired a prominent role in all human rights instruments. The underlying premise of my thesis, therefore, is that the radicalism of human rights resides not just in the idea of inherent equality among individuals, but also in the abolition of status-based distinctions associated with group membership.
These avenues of research have seldom been travelled because individual rights overtook group-based concerns after 1945. But the rationale of group protection predates individual rights in law by at least a century, so it is odd that commentators bend over backwards to label individual rights as timeless when previous experiences prove the exact opposite. An important objective of the study was to disambiguate these events by circumscribing the research to the interwar law and practice that has been somewhat neglected in this context.
Can you give us an example of a topical issue showing the relevance of your research?
There is a need to come to terms with group-based identities in order to protect the many facets of individual expression. International human rights law does not protect groups in a comprehensive way, and instead focuses on protecting the rights of “persons belonging to” groups. Compared to the interwar precedents that protected the group as such, the language of rights has been turned on its head. That is, groups today are mostly protected through the rights of individuals.
Therefore, national, religious and linguistic groups are unable to make collective legal claims to fight against prejudices held against them in society. To counter this, groups have coalesced politically, as the American civil rights movement illustrates. But members of groups that do not reach this level of organisation have the ungrateful task of fighting group-based prejudice at the individual level. When claims for group-based recognition and identities are frustrated, we almost always witness a deterioration of the social tissue.
What are your plans for the future?
Since I intend to pursue a career in academia, the present crossroads between student life and new horizons offers very exciting prospects. My current research project focuses on the genealogy of international rights by addressing the early relationships between public and private international law. To this end, the Graduate Institute has recently awarded me a Junior Visiting Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, and the experience has been very enriching thus far. Exposure to the vibrant, stimulating and interdisciplinary community of the IWM is a welcome change after the necessary rigors of my doctoral trajectory.
I will continue this line of research next year at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law of the University of Cambridge, and in Florence as Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow of the European University Institute. To fund these splendid opportunities, I have received a generous postdoctoral grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. I look forward to translating the knowledge and skills that I developed at the Institute into useful and accessible scholarship in these professional environments.
What major challenges did you confront during your doctoral experience?
To be intellectually honest with myself is perhaps the most important lesson I will retain from this rewarding period. My first attempt at formulating a doctoral project backfired because my skills were incompatible with the chosen topic. When I realised my research interests also lied elsewhere, I decided to change my subject midway. Thanks to the excellent guidance I received from my thesis supervisor and other professors, I was able to confidently pull forward, and eventually gained a strong sense of purpose as a scholar.
Full citation of the thesis: Castellanos-Jankiewicz, León. “Minority Protection and the Foundations of Human Rights”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2016.
Illustration: Koloman Moser, 1905 design, reproduced with permission of the Leopold Museum, Vienna.