Less is more: Upendra Baxi didn’t need more than 12 pages to sketch the societal relevance of law, more than 30 years ago, in a paper on judicial discourse.[1] He wrote this piece, not coincidentally as we will see, when he was vice-chancellor of Delhi University. In 2018, Baxi was proposed by the Faculty of Law of the UAntwerp as honorary doctor and I think it can be a good occasion to revisit Baxi’s insights in 2025, to assess the way in which the UAntwerp has upheld a human rights framework as an ethical check for its international partnerships. In so doing, we combine two elements on Koen De Feyter’s academic to-do list, i.e. his concern with the war in Gaza and his work on the localization of human rights.
In Baxi’s view, we shouldn’t expect too much from the power of justice, since, when push comes to shove, it is materialized as the justice of power. Legislation is typically used as “a statement of aspiration”, he writes, an aspiration that the state can fulfil people’s expectations that their demands for justice can be met. It is this announced aspiration that lends legitimacy to the State. Yet it is an entirely different matter whether the State effectively also wants to walk the talk:
“In the last analysis, every ‘injustice’ serves the material interests of some groups in society; to attack it is to attack constellations or formations of these material interests. State power has to have recourse to political calculus; to work out the costs and gains to itself entailed in any planned attack on injustice.”
That is the essential tension between the ‘mask’ of justice and the political ‘face’ covered by the mask, a tension that is never entirely solved; The State needs the mask to cover the constellation of material interests on which it is founded, yet this is quite different from assuming a State’s legal framework is designed to achieve the good: “the good is achieved only inadvertently and occasionally”. The justice system can only do so much.
These are quite sobering observations, based on Baxi’s experience with the Indian State. To be sure, for Baxi this doesn’t mean the effort isn’t worth trying. But, together with hope, realism in the pace of progress might be a useful attitude to “localize human rights”, i.e. ground them in particular contexts where people’s demands for justice interact with public action aspiring to supply it.[2]
Baxi’s analysis quite explicitly echoes the historian E.P. Thompson’s famous conclusions in his study of the Black Act in 18th century England. After having demonstrated how the constitution and the enforcement of the rule of law is deeply reflecting the class interests of the landlords, Thompson too argues that “the essential precondition for the effectiveness of law… is that it… shall seem to be just. It cannot seem to be so without upholding its own logic and criteria of equity; indeed, on occasion, by actually being just”[3]. Yet he insists on calling the rule of law “an unqualified good. To deny or belittle this good is … in this dangerous century when the resources and pretentions of power continue to enlarge … a self-fulfilling error, which encourages us to give up the struggle against bad laws and class-bound procedures and to disarm ourselves before power”. Baxi would concur. His commitment to invest in academic training of lawyers can be seen in this light as an effort to strengthen the “own logic and criteria of equity” of the Law, strengthen the power of justice entangled with the justice of power.
Time to feed forward to 2025 and travel to Antwerp, one year into the mandate of a new rector and his team at the UAntwerp. Also on their agenda: a human rights check on its international partnerships, in the context of an unprecedented war in Gaza. Human rights occupy center stage, both as an aspiration of the Palestinian people and its supporters, and as a mask to cover the war atrocities, including war crimes and genocide committed by the State of Israel.
For its part, the Flemish Inter-university Council set up a framework for human rights assessment in 2019.[4] It was thought that such an assessment might be an important “do no harm” guardrail, also protecting universities’ reputations in a context of rising political instability and authoritarianism.
At the same time, it is clear that this guardrail would have to interfere with standard practices and routines in setting up international partnerships: Usually, these would be guided by the prospect of international funding, the most reputed type of financing, mainly in the field of research or valorization of innovations. The political economy of universities is heavily driven by international academic finance, since the ‘excellence’ of academics is directly and indirectly measured by their capacity to attract such funding: Because universities are themselves allocated public funding in function of their success in attracting international projects, they translate this criterion into evaluation and career prospects of their academic staff.
In this case, the dialectics of the ‘mask’ and the ‘face’ played out in tensions around the who and the what of the assessment.
Regarding the ‘who’, it was quickly decided that the assessment would materialize not at the Flemish level, but at the university level, closer to the face of the interests involved. In the case of the Uantwerp, the self-regulation was even devolved further down to the Department of Research and Valorization, the department most closely interested, in the literal sense of the word. As it happens, the Department of Research and Valorization also organised the secretary of the Human Rights Committee. Further, while the Human Rights Committee hosts some human rights experts, these are also a minority in the committee, which is also (wo)manned by representatives of the different faculties. Third, in two cases the Executive Board of the university also simply took over: It declared being unsatisfied by the advice of the Human Rights Committee and judged that the university should go ahead with an international cooperation with an Israeli university, explicitly against a negative advice of the Committee.
There are obviously also tensions regarding the ‘what’, the contents of the assessment: one important tension is around whether or not one can carry out projects with partner institutes who are themselves contributing to serious human rights abuses committed by governments, e.g. in military operations. Such projects inevitably also finance the institute itself and they strengthen the international reputation of an institute complicit in such abuses, whatever the type of research they would finance.
Yet at least in one case, the Executive Board decided to take over the role of its own Human Rights Committee. It built its argument around the type of research, making abstraction of the connection of the academic partner with the Israeli government – even through the same research. To be sure, another strategy to match the interests and the standards of justice it to bend the knowledge of the case, so as to make it fit with the announced policy: while the Executive Board had declared a moratorium on all new international cooperations with Israeli universities in May 2024, the university allowed a new project to start up in early 2025, arguing that a project already proposed for financing before May 2024 would already count as ‘ongoing’.
So, yes, the insights of Baxi regarding the rule of law in 20th century India -,or, for that matter, the insights of Thompson on the Black Act in 18th century England – can be helpful to understand the dynamics of the ‘mask’ of a check on the risk of contributing to serious breaches in human rights and the ‘face’ of the political economy of a Flemish university.
But the reference to Baxi would not just have to imply we have to lower our ambitions in the pursuit of justice. Following Baxi, the production of judicial discourse – and in casu support for a human rights discourse at our university – remains an important project, even if the gap between the “talk” and the “walk” would standardly remain yawning: Dismissing the “talk” as mere hypocrisy would mean the dismissal of the legal profession and the judges who are “under an obligation to produce discourse … theirs is not the will to power; but the will to reason”[5], writes Baxi. It is precisely this reasonableness that would legitimize rulers’ exercise of power.
But this reason ultimately also finds its raw material, Baxi once more, “in the dynamics of power relations, whether among citizens and state or among citizens themselves…”. Dismissing the “talk” as just talk would mean dismissing one of the few resources ordinary people might have to secure their interests: So a strengthening of the autonomy of this reason “not merely marks the limits of the power of the state but also the maintenance of civil and political space within which they can continue to articulate their struggle against the dominating groups”.
One could add to this that, in the case of an ethical check on international academic partnerships, the autonomy of reason could be strengthened not just by trusting the judgment of human rights experts in the procedure, but also by increasing the autonomy of the Human Rights Committee, particularly vis-à-vis the research department.
But indeed, a human rights discourse is, indeed merely discourse, patient words, awaiting the willingness of the ‘powers that be’ to materialize, and always risking to be reinterpreted and instrumentalized before reaching that point. Yet, who are we to give up on such an important good? Who are we not to do everything needed both to strengthen the talk and increase the number of occasions the walk is following suit?
[1] U. Baxi, ‘Judicial Discourse: Dialectics of the Face and the Mask’ (1993) 35(1-2), pp. 1-12.
[2] K De Feyter, Localizing Human Rights (IOB Discussion Paper 2006-02, Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp 2006) https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/ab5f01/a7de0e20.pdf accessed 30 September 2025.
[3] E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The origin of the Black Act, London, Penguin Books, 1977, p. 263.
[4] Flemish Interuniversity Council, Recommendations for Implementing a Human Rights Assessment at the Flemish Universities (VLIR.doc 01, Ad Hoc VLIR Working Group on Human Rights, October 2019) https://medialibrary.uantwerpen.be/files/1518562/e6c7e60a-9df7-4d76-91bd-8c8f4a62cbb9.pdf accessed 30 September 2025.
[5] At this point, I must say, I find Baxi’s wording of the contrast less convincing: the legal profession undoubtedly isn’t just driven by “reason”, it would inevitably also in part be shaped by its own power relationships.