OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 10: The Need for Fewer Legal Tools

This is the tenth in a series of posts on last week’s OSCE “Supplementary Human Dimension” meeting in Vienna. More will be coming in the next few days. See the list of links at the bottom of this post for previous articles.

The following intervention was made at Thursday’s OSCE meeting in Vienna by Henrik Ræder Clausen on International Civil Liberties Alliance (ICLA). He warns against the trend towards more law and more international regulation in the name of defending ”human rights”. Instead, he proposes that what we really need are fewer but more principled laws, similar to the Bill of Rights, as well as solid understanding and enforcement of such laws. He also argues that upholding these laws is performed best by national institutions with established democratic legitimacy, rather than by international bodies perceived as quite remote from the average citizen.

Many thanks to Henrik Ræder Clausen for recording this video, and to Vlad Tepes for processing and uploading it:

OSCE Vienna 2013:

2013   Jul   11   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 1: Introduction
        11   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 2: The American Response Concerning the SPLC
        11   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 3: Do British Police Enforce Sharia?
        12   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 4: A Double Standard in Germany
        12   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 5: Do British Police Enforce Sharia? (2)
        12   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 6: The Official US Government Use of SPLC Blacklists
        12   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 7: Repudiate the Cairo Declaration
        12   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 8: The Right to Peaceful Assembly in Germany
        13   OSCE Vienna 2013, Part 9: The Role of Religion in Public Affairs
 

For links to earlier articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.