Public Reason: Vol. 4, No. 1-2, June-December 2012
Challenges for a New Global Order: A Two–Dimensional Approach to Global Justice
Iván Teimil García

 

The solution to global problems requires and effective extension of the universal Human Rights. Apart from demanding a more important weight of the institutions that watch over the civil rights of world citizens, this paper takes seriously into account the necessity of recovering the ambitious project included in the Human Right´s Declaration as well as in the UNO Charter. This project should make progress in the two egalitarian goals of overcoming economic inequalities worldwide and reducing the extreme difference in welfare within a highly stratified society. Therefore, the solutions have to attend so much to the inequalities of an unjust economic redistribution, as to the problems derived from an insufficient recognition of the people in a disadvantaged position. To all of that we must add a general context of undeniable unjust redistribution of the sources and the lack of effectiveness of the transnational institutions to correct this status quo. This paper underlines that the questions of global justice have necessarily at least two dimensions: redistribution and recognition. Likewise, the project emphasizes that the Declaration of Human Rights contains two types of rights: civil and economic ones. For this reason, we must remark that the civil, political and individual rights cannot reach a complete development without the guaranty of the basic conditions of subsistence. This paper also considers, as Cristina Lafont has pointed out, that transnational institutions should be in charge of redistributive problems or, at least, they should restrict the unjust global redistributive measures, that prevent poor countries from reaching a stable an egalitarian economic order and, therefore, do not permit a complete development of the civil and political rights of all people in those countries.

Key words: civil rights, subsistence rights, supranational institutions, millenium goals, economic justice.

 

Citation

García, Iván Teimil. 2012. Challenges for a New Global Order: A Two–Dimensional Approach to Global Justice. Public Reason 4 (1-2): 68-77.