Insincere Commitments Heather Smith-Cannoy
Insincere commitments: human rights treaties, abusive states, and citizen activism,
05/2012
eBook
Paradoxically, many governments that persistently violate human rights have also ratified international human rights treaties that empower their citizens to file grievances against them at the United ...Nations. Therefore, citizens in rights-repressing regimes find themselves with the potentially invaluable opportunity to challenge their government's abuses. Why would rights-violating governments ratify these treaties and thus afford their citizens this right? Can the mechanisms provided in these treaties actually help promote positive changes in human rights?Insincere Commitmentsuses both quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the factors contributing to commitment and compliance among post-Soviet states such as Slovakia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Heather Smith-Cannoy argues that governments ratify these treaties insincerely in response to domestic economic pressures. Signing the treaties is a way to at least temporarily keep critics of their human rights record at bay while they secure international economic assistance or more favorable trade terms. However, she finds that through the specific protocols in the treaties that grant individuals the right to petition the UN, even the most insincere state commitments to human rights can give previously powerless individuals-and the nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations that partner with them-an important opportunity that they would otherwise not have to challenge patterns of government repression on the global stage.This insightful book will be of interest to human rights scholars, students, and practitioners, as well as anyone interested in the UN, international relations, treaties, and governance.
The Rights of the Child Adami, Rebecca; Kaldal, Anna; Aspán, Margareta
04/2023, Volume:
7
eBook, Book
Open access
How can human rights for children born outside their national jurisdiction with parents deemed as terrorists be safeguarded? In what ways do children risk being discriminated in their welfare rights ...in Sweden when treated as invisible part of a family? How can we do research on children’s rights in not just ethically sensitive ways but also with respect for children as rights subjects? And what could be a theory on social justice for children? These are questions discussed in studies from different disciplines concerning children’s international human rights, with a special focus on the realization of the CRC in Sweden.
PADRES Martinez, Richard Edward
2005, 20050101
eBook
From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a ...racial divide in all areas of the church’s ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society. This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.
Listing every right that a constitution should protect is hard. American constitution drafters often list a few famous rights such as freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and ...seizures, and free exercise of religion, plus a handful of others. However, we do not need to enumerate every liberty because there is another way to protect them: an ""etcetera clause."" It states that there are other rights beyond those specifically listed: ""The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."" Yet scholars are divided on whether the Ninth Amendment itself actually does protect unenumerated rights, and the Supreme Court has almost entirely ignored it. Regardless of what the Ninth Amendment means, two-thirds of state constitutions have equivalent provisions, or ""Baby Ninth Amendments,"" worded similarly to the Ninth Amendment. This book is the story of how the ""Baby Ninths"" came to be and what they mean. Unlike the controversy surrounding the Ninth Amendment, the meaning of the Baby Ninths is straightforward: they protect individual rights that are not otherwise enumerated. They are an ""etcetera, etcetera"" at the end of a bill of rights. This book argues that state judges should do their duty and live up to their own constitutions to protect the rights ""retained by the people"" that these ""etcetera clauses"" are designed to guarantee. The fact that Americans have adopted these provisions so many times in so many states demonstrates that unenumerated rights are not only protected by state constitutions, but that they are popular. Unenumerated rights are not a weird exception to American constitutional law. They are at the center of it. We should start treating constitutions accordingly.
An Army of Lions Alexander, Shawn Leigh; Shakes, Will
09/2011
eBook
In January 1890, journalist T. Thomas Fortune stood before a delegation of African American activists in Chicago and declared, "We know our rights and have the courage to defend them," as together ...they formed the Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights organization. Over the next two decades, Fortune and his fellow activists organized, agitated, and, in the process, created the foundation for the modern civil rights movement.An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACPtraces the history of this first generation of activists and the organizations they formed to give the most comprehensive account of black America's struggle for civil rights from the end of Reconstruction to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Here a host of leaders neglected by posterity-Bishop Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Jesse Lawson, Lewis G. Jordan, Kelly Miller, George H. White, Frederick McGhee, Archibald Grimké-worked alongside the more familiar figures of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, who are viewed through a fresh lens. As Jim Crow curtailed modes of political protest and legal redress, members of the Afro-American League and the organizations that formed in its wake-including the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the Constitution League, and the Committee of Twelve-used propaganda, moral suasion, boycotts, lobbying, electoral office, and the courts, as well as the call for self-defense, to end disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence. In the process, the League and the organizations it spawned provided the ideological and strategic blueprint of the NAACP and the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century, demonstrating that there was significant and effective agitation during "the age of accommodation."
Why, despite massive public concern, is child trafficking on the rise? Why are unaccompanied migrant children living on the streets and routinely threatened with deportation to their countries of ...origin? Why do so many young refugees of war-ravaged and failed states end up warehoused in camps, victimized by the sex trade, or enlisted as child soldiers? This book provides the first comprehensive account of the widespread but neglected global phenomenon of child migration, exploring the complex challenges facing children and adolescents who move to join their families, those who are moved to be exploited, and those who move simply to survive.
Spanning several continents and drawing on the actual stories of young migrants, the book shows how difficult it is for children to reunite with parents who left them behind to seek work abroad. It looks at the often-insurmountable obstacles we place in the paths of adolescents fleeing war, exploitation, or destitution; the contradictory elements in our approach to international adoption; and the limited support we give to young people brutalized as child soldiers. Part history, part in-depth legal and political analysis, this powerful book challenges the prevailing wisdom that widespread protection failures are caused by our lack of awareness of the problems these children face, arguing instead that our societies have a deep-seated ambivalence to migrant children-one we need to address head-on.
Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Ageoffers a road map for doing just that, and makes a compelling and courageous case for an international ethics of children's human rights.
Preferential trade agreements have become common ways to protect or restrict access to national markets in products and services. The United States has signed trade agreements with almost two dozen ...countries as close as Mexico and Canada and as distant as Morocco and Australia. The European Union has done the same. In addition to addressing economic issues, these agreements also regulate the protection of human rights. InForced to Be Good, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton tells the story of the politics of such agreements and of the ways in which governments pursue market integration policies that advance their own political interests, including human rights.
How and why do global norms for social justice become international regulations linked to seemingly unrelated issues, such as trade? Hafner-Burton finds that the process has been unconventional. Efforts by human rights advocates and labor unions to spread human rights ideals, for example, do not explain why American and European governments employ preferential trade agreements to protect human rights. Instead, most of the regulations protecting human rights are codified in global moral principles and laws only because they serve policymakers' interests in accumulating power or resources or solving other problems. Otherwise, demands by moral advocates are tossed aside. And, as Hafner-Burton shows, even the inclusion of human rights protections in trade agreements is no guarantee of real change, because many of the governments that sign on to fair trade regulations oppose such protections and do not intend to force their implementation.
Ultimately, Hafner-Burton finds that, despite the difficulty of enforcing good regulations and the less-than-noble motives for including them, trade agreements that include human rights provisions have made a positive difference in the lives of some of the people they are intended-on paper, at least-to protect.
John Locke's political theory has been the subject of many detailed treatments by philosophers and political scientists. But The Lockean Theory of Rights is the first systematic, full-length study of ...Locke's theory of rights and of its potential for making genuine contributions to contemporary debates about rights and their place in political philosophy. Given that the rights of persons are the central moral concept at work in Locke's and Lockean political philosophy, such a study is long overdue.
Global Society and Human Rights tries to grasp and reconstruct the processes of global unification and the shaping of a common feeling of humanity: the conviction, in different cultural contexts, of ...the unity of mankind and the existence of inalienable human rights.
There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced
persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to
alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and
...displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced
returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many
cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence.
Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction?
What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults,
families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a
fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not
viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From
Bureaucracy to Bullets answers these questions and more by
focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the
intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked
human rights issue.
