Narrating Law

This chapter presents a re-narration of international law within an international human rights law regime. Section B begins by providing a brief overview of the frameworks and primary sources of international law as well as the various interpretive approaches. Scholarly comparisons of the different rights regimes across cultures, which include attempts to either wed or contrast international law and other rights schemes (e.g., Islamic, Asian, Customary), enter contested terrain. Underpinning the debates, which are often ignited in this space, are questions related to how rights are conceived and applied, and the lens through which we approach the answers to these questions plays out in how we read the law. Section C turns to these broader debates about the development and language of international law, looking specifically at the question of universality. Section D looks at how the 'technique of articulating political claims' has played out specifically within the international human rights field by mapping out the relationship of law to states of exception; that 'point of imbalance between public law and political fact'. This section focuses on the performance of law in the 'no man's land' of exception to distil the normative developments and arguments that have played out in this space. Finally, Section E situates these broader debates within a review of how these approaches affect Muslim state engagement with the international human rights machinery at the UN level.