Saveable Lives and Emotions. The Potential for Establishing an International Legal Duty to Aid Foreigners Abroad

International law provisions often proclaim the inviolability of basic human rights of all human beings. Nevertheless, millions of people die every year, even if their lives could be saved through affordable economic efforts by high-income countries to fight world poverty. In order to oppose this collective ‘failure to rescue,’ the article urges for a ground-breaking change in the current conception of the States’ duties corresponding to basic human rights. A change that might be reached, if not globally, at least at a domestic or regional level, with the support of a humanitarian media strategy and a concept of global activism which would both draw partly on findings emerging from the study of the history of emotions. In this process, emotional stories could, and should, play a fundamental role in building and enlarging specific emotional communities (whose members could be a small number of activists or large sectors of national public opinion) that engage in promoting, within a certain country or even globally, the recognition of a legal duty to aid foreigners abroad.