Human Rights as Justifications in Wildernesses: A Third World Approach to EU Law

Abstract This article makes three claims. First, that in his foundational writings, Hugo Grotius conceptualised the seas as institutional ‘wildernesses’ where public and private persons stand on equal footing. His purpose behind doing so was to advance the interests of European colonial companies. Second, while modern international law rejects Grotius’s fundamental juridical assumptions concerning the seas, it nevertheless retains the possibility of stretches of it reverting to wildernesses where juridical accountability is systematically foreclosed. Third, this foreclosure is exacerbated by, among other things, the European Union’s tendency to flit at will between an international legal person and an amorphous ‘union of values.’ This enables European Union officials to weaponise professed values of human rights and international law to advance distinctly neo-Grotian, neo-imperial agendas of resource extraction not just on the high seas, but in other ‘wildernesses’ like Non-Self-Governing Territories, whilst simultaneously avoiding juridical accountability.