More honey than vinegar: peer review as a middle ground between universalism and national sovereignty

Peer-reviewed mechanisms for the implementation of human rights such as the Universal Periodic Review rely upon traditional sovereign state diplomacy for contemporary human rights implementation. This is a positive development as a) at a theoretical level, it reveals an evolving maturity of the human rights regime with a capacity to detach from exclusively legalistic approaches to human rights implementation; b) at a policy level, there is enough evidence of measured positive outcomes of peer-reviewed mechanisms to suggest a preference for more cooperative approaches to human rights as a first and complementary step to other more law-based/adversarial means of implementation; and c) peer-reviewed mechanisms offer a theoretical and pragmatic framework conciliating between universalist and relativist conceptual approaches to human rights, while accommodating views of international law and integrating respect for sovereignty

The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, Vol. 51 Edited by John Currie and René Provost, Hardcover, Release Date:28 Feb 2015, ISBN:9780774828772
[The Canadian Yearbook of International Law published by UBC Press until 2014; as of 2015 (volume 52) published by Cambridge.]