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Thomas Pogge has famously argued that the present
arrangement
of international institutions that allows for human
rights violations
to occur on an ongoing basis is unjust, and further,
that powerful
states that create and maintain these institutions
are responsible for
the resulting human rights violations. Pogge
concludes that this
implication of responsibility creates a moral
requirement for
powerful nations to take immediate steps to reform
the global
institutional order in such a way as to minimize the
number of
foreseeable human rights violations that occur within it.
I believe that Pogge is only partly correct in his
analysis. In this
book, I outline my argument that the global
institutional order is not
"unjust" as Pogge suggests. However, even if the
maintenance of
these institutions does not constitute an injustice,
I conclude that
that there remains an important sense in which
powerful states that
support the present arrangement of international
institutions are
responsible for ongoing subsistence rights
violations, and thus have
a strong moral responsibility to support
institutional remedies for
systematic human rights violations.

Global Institutions and Human Rights: A Critical Essay on Thomas Pogge, and the Attribution of Remedial Responsibility in Cases of Human Rights Violations