Author Archives: Frédéric Mégret

About Frédéric Mégret

Frédéric Mégret is a Professor of Law and a William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. From 2006 to 2015, he held the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. He was promoted to full professor in 2019 and was named co-director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in 2021. His interests lie at the intersection of human rights law, critical theory, and the history of international law. He is currently working on a book on diasporas and international law.

Human Rights Populism

Abstract: Human rights are typically thought of as the anti-thesis of populism, a precarious bulwark against majoritarian political passions and their sometimes toxic brand of anti-elitist demagoguery. This tends to neglect the extent to which certain Western populist movements have themselves increasingly instrumentalized human rights to better feed into racist and xenophobic discourses. This raises uncomfortable questions for the human rights movement and has a tendency to radicalize unresolved tensions that go to its very intellectual foundation. The article suggests that the human rights response Continue reading → Continue reading →