Regulating the Many Powerful: What Human Rights Can Learn From Other Legal Fields in Holding Plural, Diverse, Intertwined Actors Accountable

Human Rights, in positive, “Westphalian” international law, have been conceived of as norms that protect the individual (or - originally - the (male, bourgeois, etc) citizen) against the state. This vertical relationship that underlies human rights has helped it to develop into a very state-centric legal regime, which only grudgingly and lethargically acknowledged on-the-ground realities of rights of individuals and communities being violated by actors other than the (central) state, as well as the agency of non-state actors in rights protection an realisation. However, a socio-legal approach to today’s globalised, pluralist world (which arguably was always so) reveals that actors occupy positions of varying degrees of power and influence in relation to many other actors, both “right-holding” and “duty-bearing”, which does not fit into the singular vertical line between state and citizen that human rights law was designed to rely on. Instead, actors collaborate, cooperate, become accomplice; share decision-making, regulatory, service-providing, extractivist, and exploitative power over humans and non-humans; creating complex ecosystems and networks in which “rights”, “duties” and “responsibilities”, become blurred and unidentifiable, or if nothing else - unpursuable. This paper attempts to (1) conceptualise this empirical relationality between multiple, diverse, intertwined (arguable) human rights duty-bearers, and (2) draw insights from other legal fields, which have mechanisms that regulate multiple, interrelated, emerging powerful actors and systems, in order to (3) alleviate the accountability gap created by the verticality, singularity and state-centricity of human rights law.