The United Nations Human Rights Office has issued a clarion call for a paradigmatic shift in the moral architecture of global markets: human rights must no longer be optional embellishments, but inviolable guardrails that structure economic activity.
This vision, encapsulated in the notion of a Human Rights Economy, seeks to subordinate the pursuit of profit to the prior and non-negotiable obligation of respecting human dignity. Such a proposition is not merely a technical reform but a profound recalibration of norms. For decades, the global economy has operated within an ethical vacuum, a realm where legal and moral constraints have been conspicuously absent.
In this barren space, systemic cruelty has not only flourished but become banal, its consequences transfigured into the mundane costs of commerce. What remains are conditions so brutal in their persistence and so avoidable in their causation that they demand to be named for what they are: structural atrocities masquerading as the price of progress.
Chronic hunger, homelessness, environmentally induced cancers and lives extinguished by climate-amplified catastrophes are not aberrations within this order. They are the logical, if macabre, outputs of a system that privileges capital over conscience. Despite their lethality, such harms rarely merit the juridical gravity accorded to wartime excesses. Yet their preventability compels us to confront them as forms of slow violence: deliberate, structural and engineered by design. While human rights law recognises all rights – civil, political, economic, social and cultural – as indivisible and coextensive, international criminal law has sequestered the lexicon of ‘atrocity’ within the narrow confines of armed conflict.
This semantic boundary has dulled our moral urgency, allowing long-burning crises precipitated by negligent or malign governance to be euphemistically reduced to ‘externalities’. Poisoned water, denuded forests, and collapsing ecosystems are not mere accidents of industrial modernity; they are symptoms of an economy that externalises suffering and internalises profit. This bifurcation perpetuates a double standard in which harm inflicted by the most powerful actors, including states and corporations, passes unremarked and is routinised into invisibility.
Judicial mechanisms have largely confined their scrutiny to spectacular acts of kinetic violence, leaving unexamined the insidious and long-term harms that corrode lives over decades. The tragedy lies in the willful orchestration of policies that prioritise financial returns over the preservation of human life. Corporations and governments often exploit legislative lacunae, weaponise regulatory loopholes, and externalise risks onto the most vulnerable, all in service of a singular deity: shareholder value.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of the social contract offers an enduring philosophical lens through which to critique this moral disorder. In Rousseau’s scheme, rights are tethered to duties; freedom exists not as an infinite resource but as a bounded space constrained by the rights of others. His most trenchant warning reverberates with undiminished relevance: liberty ends where it begins to erode the liberty of another.
These structural injustices are not static. They metastasise into combustible inequalities. When dispossessed communities are stretched to their breaking point, social upheaval becomes an inevitability rather than an anomaly. Rousseau reminds us that neither governments nor corporate entities may claim rights so expansive that they extinguish the entitlements of others.
Economic actors must be bound by the same ethical compact as political institutions. The rule of law and the protection of human rights are not optional niceties but fiduciary imperatives. Profit, if it is to be defensible, must be earned only after legal and moral obligations are fulfilled.
Human rights, therefore, cannot be treated as ornamental flourishes appended to glossy corporate reports after the quarterly dividend is declared. They must constitute the very precondition for any legitimate economic endeavour. Yet the fiction of separate ledgers, one for profit and another for principle, persists even as climate change and industrial pollution record their monthly harvest of human lives. This dangerous dualism necessitates a fundamental reimagining of our economic priorities.
At the heart of this ethical malaise lies the neoclassical orthodoxy of ‘profit maximisation’. The pathology is not profit-seeking per se, but the pernicious modality through which profits are extracted by displacing costs and harms onto the public. Disease, poverty and curtailed freedoms are too often rationalised as regrettable but acceptable trade-offs in an economy designed to enrich a privileged few. Meanwhile, the burdens, including soaring healthcare expenditures, environmental remediation and collective suffering, are socialised onto ordinary citizens, while those who engineered the devastation retreat unscathed and profits remain intact.
The language of atrocity must expand beyond the theatre of war to encompass the slow violence perpetuated by economic systems that convert human lives into expendable variables. Restoring moral equilibrium requires that human rights be woven into the very fabric of law, governance and commerce – not as peripheral ideals but as preconditions for legitimacy. Profit extracted through the deliberate infliction of preventable harm is neither progress nor prosperity; it is the quiet architecture of human ruin masquerading as economic success.
If we continue to avert our gaze from this reality, one must ask: does the relentless pursuit of profit still stand apart from the silent perpetration of violence?
The writer is a law student.