Shortly after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the USA, multiple authors on openGlobalRights were already debating what role, if any, international human rights could play in the struggle against the spread, normalisation and institutionalisation of the misogyny, racism and latent fascism of the Trump campaign. In the European context, memories of fascism and the Nazi Holocaust were important factors in the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in 1950. The drafters may have been driven by a broader agenda to contain democracy and socialist ideas, but the hope that a supra-national legal system of human rights protection would stabilise and safeguard liberal democratic institutions runs quite deep in the foundations of the ECHR.
Human rights law alone is unlikely to protect liberal democratic institutions from a fascist take-over.
Now that liberal democracies have delivered far-right regimes in Europe (and beyond) and contributed to the legitimation of xenophobic discourse and practices, there is indeed cause to ask whether international human rights law will actually deliver on its “promise”. The legal perspective from the European regime, however, suggests that human rights law alone is unlikely to protect liberal democratic institutions from a fascist take-over and that we are far from immune from the atrocities of the early twentieth century.
