different kinds persists. A high profile example was given by the New York Times
journalist Nicholas Kristof in 2004, who purchased and liberated two women
enslaved in a Cambodian brothel. In relation to Sudan in the 1990s, Christian
groups, including Christian Solidarity International, fundraised to free Christian
Dinkas from the South enslaved in the Muslim North. But UNICEF and Human Rights
Watch became heavily critical of the practice of slave redemption. Redemption was
driving up the price of slaves, creating incentives for slavers to enslave more
people.^61 Margaret Kellow shows that these reproduce debates in nineteenth
century American abolitionism.^62
Moreover, it is perfectly possible to articulate serious humanitarian concerns
and projects that are not best served by elision with human rights. For instance, at
the heart of human rights practice is the possibility of recognising specific violations,
either negative or positive. There needs to be a high degree of specificity about
whose rights are the subject of violation, whether they be the rights of an individual
or a group, and ideally, whose responsibility is at issue. An important contemporary
example of the problem this poses, and the danger of effecting a complete elision,
is the current attempt to formalise widespread humanitarian concern with climate
change with a specific project of human rights. An increasingly popular way of
thinking about the issue is to create some kind of accountability mechanism by
assigning a “human right to a green future”.^63 This seems like a vastly more abstract
and obtuse way of conceptualising a problem that can be captured in broader
humanitarian language, relatively simply: that is, that anthropogenic climate change
represents, in the terms set out in Chapter 2, a serious humanitarian crisis in the
sense of an urgent “crisis of humanity” that radically questions the underpinnings of
61
Margaret M. R. Kellow, "Hard Struggles of Doubt: Abolitionists and the Problem of Slave
Redemption", in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy , ed. Richard
Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 118-
- 62
63 Ibid.
Richard P. Hiskes, The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and
Intergenerational Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For more recent
discussion and research, see Stephen Humphreys, ed., Human Rights and Climate Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).