Ambiguity and Vagueness in Human Rights Discourse

The modern normative discourse of human rights provides a multi-faceted global instrument for reporting the demands of justice and for pursuing the common good of the parties (individuals and states) concerned. This is evidenced in most assertions for indivisible, fundamental and universal values of rights and freedoms. Despite this, arguments arise as to the normative discursal strategies realized to express what amounts typically to semantically underdeterminate declaratory provisions encoding such rights and freedoms. These declaratory provisions seem to be the source of ambiguity and vagueness in the process of investigating and determining the degree of clarity and precision realized under broad assertions in legal/political discourse: the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (CON), and the 2000 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CHA). With this in mind, the aim of this chapter is to analyse communicative underdeterminacy deriving from the drafting and con-tent of the Charter as compared to the Convention. In particular, I shall reflect on this in terms of the information load / spread and rhetorical strategies adopted in the texts, which may lead the latter to be considered as either determinate or indeterminate in meaning. Then I shall look at the ways in which ambiguity and vagueness should be dealt with in human rights discourse. Finally, I shall reflect upon the shall modalized provisions to further highlight the impossibility of assuming that this modal auxiliary is not a word of legal precision in the discourse under investigation.