Description
Seán MacBride (1904-88) led an extraordinary international life, difficult to reconcile with prevailing accounts of how international lawyers chnage international relations. He was, successively, Irish delegate to the League Against Imperialism (1928-9), IRA Chief of Staff (1936-7), Irish Minister for External Affairs (1948-51), a central negotiator (1949-1950) and pioneering user (1958-1960) of the European Convention of Human Rights, Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists (1963-1970), chair of Amnesty International's International Executive Committee (1963-1974), first UN Commissioner for Namibia (1973-1976), and a winner of both the Nobel (1974) and Lenin (1975-6) Peace Prizes. This was, unsurprisingly, a thoroughly political life. MacBride was no expert within an ‘epistemic community’. Nor, moreover, was he a simple ‘norm entrepreneur’, who miraculously converted from militant nationalism to the principled cause of human rights. He can instead be more plausibly seen as a strategic investor of (national) political capital in new (international) legal fields.
Even this picture is, however, misleading. International political sociologists have rightly emphasised how international careers should not be analysed separately from prior national political struggles. But MacBride’s career illustrates how these national struggles may themselves be shaped by local internationalist traditions and principles. He did not discover fair trial rights and campaigns to release political prisoners in Strasbourg or Geneva. These were already central demands of the Irish revolutionary and anti-imperialist movement in which he had been born and raised. His efforts to translate them into international law were thoroughly continuous with his earlier criminal defence work on behalf of (republican) prisoners. His example thus highlights the general importance for international relations of the local human rights vernaculars studied by historians and anthropologists.
