About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


28 L. & Critique 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq28 and id is 1 raw text is: Law Critique (2017) 28:1-22 CrssMark DOI 10.1007/s10978-016-9191-2 [Disability] Justice Dictated by the Surfeit of Love: Simone Weil in Nigeria Oche Onazi'2 Published online: 26 July 2016 © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract How is Nigeria's failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criti- cism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil's 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil's insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil's criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil's work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations. Keywords Attention - Disability justice - Disability simulation - Human obligations - Human rights - Simone Weil H Oche Onazi o.onazi@dundee.ac.uk University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK 2 Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), London, UK I Springer