Human trafficking: Firming up soft power
Channel: ANU TV
Date: 2013-03-28

In this video Professor Sally Engle Merry examines the implementation of human rights using human trafficking as a case study. 

The human rights legal order is famously lacking in clear sanctioning power, yet it exerts considerable soft power in a wide variety of ways.  The use of indicators- quantitative measures of performance -- tends to harden soft law in transnational contexts. 

In the human rights legal order, indicators help to define legal obligations more clearly and to specify the terms of compliance. Thus, they serve to harden human rights law.  However, the turn to indicators is contested in the human rights field.  There are objections to the way they package information in simple, commensurable forms that tend to strip it of context, history, and robustness in particular societies and cultures.  

Professor Engle Merry explores how the turn to indicators affects the way human rights are conceived and function in transnational contexts.  Using the example of the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report (TIPS Report), it shows how information is gathered and promoted in a way that supports and legitimates a set of standards.

Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology at New York University.   Her work explores human rights, global governance, transnationalism, and the role of law in colonisation.  

This lecture was hosted by the Regulatory Institutions Network in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

For more news, analysis and commentary on human rights and international law visit http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au