Human rights : confronting governments? : Michel Foucault and the right to intervene

In 1981, Michel Foucault delivered a speech entitled 'Confronting Governments: Human Rights' at the UN in Geneva to coincide with the creation of an International Committee Against Piracy. Addressing 'all members of the community of the governed', he argued that the 'suffering of men', too often ignored by governments, 'grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power'. The specific suffering that had sparked Foucault's intervention was that of the Vietnamese asylum-seekers who had left their country after the Jail of Saigon. Under the leadership of Bernard Kouchner of Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), the committee sought to protect the asylum-seekers from pirates who were viciously attacking boats in the South China Sea. Foucault's short speech, in which he evoked an 'international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power; whoever its author; whoever its victims' is both powerful and passionate. Nonetheless, it leaves us with many questions, not least about the nature of this new right advocated by the thinker whose prior view of rights had been most starkly encapsulated in a phrase from a l976 lecture: 'Right in the West is the King's right. In that, now justly famous, lecture, Foucault suggests that the function of the theory of right, since medieval times, has been to erase the problem of domination by framing power as a question of legitimacy - to secure both the legitimate power of the sovereign and the legal obligation to obey. In contrast, he describes his own 'general project over the past few years' - that is, in the period in which he was writing Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction - as an attempt to reverse the mode of analysis of the discourse of right in order to show that right is itself an instrument of domination. In language that is both stark and seemingly unambiguous, he writes: 'The system of right, the domain of the law, are permanent agents of these relations of domination, these polymorphous techniques of subjugation'.