The Human Rights Fulcrum: Using Environmental Rights as Leverage for Change

“Give me a lever long enough and a firm place on which to stand and I will move the earth." That is how Archimedes famously described the power of levers and the possibility they create for moving something that otherwise seems immovable. His point was that with the use of distance, a fulcrum, and a lever, nothing is really immovable. This same characterization has been applied to human rights law, and its attempts to disrupt patterns of structural dispossession, discrimination and oppression that bedevil human society. Indeed, the metaphor that human rights are a lever for change is relatively common in human rights discourse.

It is worth looking more closely at this metaphor. Rather than creating a lever, this article instead suggests that human rights laws provide a new fulcrum—a new inflection point or center of gravity that can allow us to leverage all kinds of law to better protect people, places, and groups. This characterization of human rights law is more accurate than describing human rights law as a lever. Levers depend on their fulcrum to create mechanical advantage.

In fact, it is the effective deployment of a fulcrum that turns an ordinary pole into a lever.