Although critics have noted Bedjaoui’s universalism, they tend to depict him, and the NIEO agenda, as ‘generally unsympathetic’ to the rhetoric of human rights. Bedjaoui’s strident defence of the sovereignty of newly independent states did put him firmly at odds with the new human rights movement of the time, and the NIEO has been depicted as a programme of ‘state rights against private capital’, for which the freedom and rights of individual citizens was an ‘ancillary product’ of national independence. In reality, however, Bedjaoui was not indifferent to individual rights, and nor did he subordinate the individual to the state. The Algerian lawyer celebrated the fact that the ‘State, that Moloch or Kronos that devours its own people, or rather, devours itself, is in process of being de-hallowed’, and stressed that the equitable sharing of the world’s resources required attending to the problem of ‘human rights’. ‘What would be the use of exploiting for man’s benefit the immense riches of the sea-bed, within the framework of the new ‘law of mankind’, he asked, ‘if man’s dignity or integrity is threatened’? While Bedjaoui mobilised the language of human dignity and rights, his horizon, and his universalism, extended far beyond the liberal individualism of the major human rights NGOs of his time.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 419