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Garton Ash is well aware that the same logic of exception applies to economic relations. In Cancún last year, the US insisted on keeping subsidies for its cotton producers, thus violating its own advice to Third World countries to abandon state subsidies and open up to the [[market]]. With [[torture]] it's much the same story. The exemplary economic strategy of today's capitalism is [[outsourcing]] - contracting out the 'dirty' [[process]] of [[material]] production (but also publicity, [[design]], accountancy) to other companies. In this way, it is easy to circumvent environmental and health legislation: the production takes [[place]] in Indonesia, say, where regulations are much less stringent than in the West, and the Western company which owns the logo can claim that it is not [[responsible]] for any violations by the sub-contractor. Torture is nowadays 'outsourced' to Third World allies of the US, which can practise it without worrying about [[legal]] liability or [[public]] protest. Garton Ash's analysis does not allow him to see how the things he condemns (ruthless disregard for the [[environment]], the hypocritical [[double]] standards imposed by the superpowers etc) are products of the social dynamics which sustain the [[role]] of the exporters of democracy and guardians of [[universal]] [[human rights]].
Then there is the question of depoliticised '[[Human Rights|human rights]]' and '[[humanitarian intervention]]'. When Sarajevo was under siege for more than three years in the early 1990s, there was no attempt by UN forces, [[NATO|Nato ]] " or the US to create a corridor - the most modest of options - through which people and provisions could move freely. It would have cost little and a bit of serious pressure on the Serb forces would have ended the prolonged [[spectacle]] of the encircled Sarajevo, exposed to ridiculous levels of [[terror]]. So why was [[nothing]] done? There is only one answer to this: the one proposed by Rony Brauman, a former president of Médecins sans Frontières, who co-ordinated the relief effort for Sarajevo. The presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as 'humanitarian', the recasting of the politico-military conflict in humanitarian terms, was in Brauman's view sustained by an eminently <i>political</i> [[choice]] - that of siding with the Serbs.
More generally, how is it that human rights are so often the 'rights' only of those excluded from the political [[community]] and reduced to '[[bare life]]'? Jacques Rancière has proposed in an essay in the <i>South Atlantic Quarterly</i> that when such rights are of no use,
