The international doctrine of human rights is one of the most ambitious parts of the settlement of World War II. Since then, the language of human rights has become the common language of social ...criticism in global political life. This book is a theoretical examination of the central idea of that language, the idea of a human right. In contrast to more conventional philosophical studies, the book takes a practical approach, looking at the history and political practice of human rights for guidance in understanding the central idea. It presents a model of human rights as matters of international concern whose violation by governments can justify international protective and restorative action ranging from intervention to assistance. The book proposes a schema for justifying human rights and applies it to several controversial cases — rights against poverty, rights to democracy, and the human rights of women. Throughout, the book attends to some main reasons why people are sceptical about human rights, including the fear that human rights will be used by strong powers to advance their national interests. The book concludes by observing that contemporary human rights practice is vulnerable to several pathologies and argues the need for international collaboration to avoid them.
In recent years, influential studies have shown that the activities of human rights organizations are central in convincing violating governments to improve their practices. Yet some governments ...continue to get away with human rights violations despite mobilizations against them. InHuman Rights and State Security: Indonesia and the Philippines, Anja Jetschke considers the impact of transnational human rights advocacy on the process of human rights reform and democratization in two countries that have been successful in resisting international human rights pressure. Jetschke details the effects of campaigns waged by international and domestic NGOs, foreign governments, local opposition leaders, and international organizations. She argues that the literature on transnational advocacy overlooks the ability of governments to justify and excuse human rights violations in their public dialogue with human rights organizations. Describing efforts of international and domestic human rights advocates to protect the rights of various groups, the case studies in this book suggest that governments successfully block or evade pressures if they invoke threats to state security. Jetschke finds that state security puts into play a set of powerful international norms related to sovereignty-a state's right to territorial integrity, the secular organization of the state, or a government's lack of control over the means of organized violence. If governments frame persuasive arguments around these norms, they can effectively mobilize competing domestic and international groups and trump human rights advocacy.Human Rights and State Securityshows that the content and arguments on behalf of human rights matter and provide opportunities for both governments and civil society organizations to advance their agendas.
The Asia-Pacific is known for having the least developed regional mechanisms for protecting human rights. This edited collection makes a timely and distinctive contribution to contemporary debates ...about building institutions for human rights protection in the Asia-Pacific region, in the wake of ASEAN's establishment in 2009 of a sub-regional human rights commission.
Drawing together leading scholarly voices, the book focuses on the systemic issue of institutionalising human rights protection in the Asia-Pacific. It critically examines the prospects for deepening and widening human rights institutions in the region, challenging the orthodox scepticism about whether the Asia-Pacific is "ready" for stronger human rights institutions and exploring the variety of possible forms that regional and sub-regional institutions might take. The volume also analyses the impediments to new institutions, whilst questioning the justifications for them. The collection provides a range of perspectives on the issues and many of the chapters bring interdisciplinary insights to bear. As such, the collection will be of interest to scholarly, practitioner, and student audiences in law, as well as to readers in international relations, political science, Asian studies, and human rights.
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.
National human rights institutions-state agencies charged with protecting and promoting human rights domestically-have proliferated dramatically since the 1990s; today more than a hundred countries ...have NHRIs, with dozens more seeking to join the global trend. These institutions are found in states of all sizes-from the Maldives and Barbados to South Africa, Mexico, and India; they exist in conflict zones and comparatively stable democracies alike. InChains of Justice, Sonia Cardenas offers a sweeping historical and global account of the emergence of NHRIs, linking their growing prominence to the contradictions and possibilities of the modern state.As human rights norms gained visibility at the end of the twentieth century, states began creating NHRIs based on the idea that if international human rights standards were ever to take root, they had to be firmly implanted within countries-impacting domestic laws and administrative practices and even systems of education. However, this very position within a complex state makes it particularly challenging to assess the design and influence of NHRIs: some observers are inclined to associate NHRIs with ideals of restraint and accountability, whereas others are suspicious of these institutions as "pretenders" in democratic disguise. In her theoretically and politically grounded examination, Cardenas tackles the role of NHRIs, asking how we can understand the global diffusion of these institutions, including why individual states decide to create an NHRI at a particular time while others resist the trend. She explores the influence of these institutions in states seeking mostly to appease international audiences as well as their value in places where respect for human rights is already strong.The most comprehensive account of the NHRI phenomenon to date,Chains of Justiceanalyzes many institutions never studied before and draws from new data released from the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism of the United Nations Human Rights Council. With its global scope and fresh insights into the origins and influence of NHRIs,Chains of Justicepromises to become a standard reference that will appeal to scholars immersed in the workings of these understudied institutions as well as nonspecialists curious about the role of the state in human rights.
Confronting the evils of World War II and building on the legacy of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a group of world ...citizens including Eleanor Roosevelt drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the Universal Declaration has been translated into 300 languages and has become the basis for most other international human rights texts and norms. In spite of the global success of this document, however, a philosophical disconnect exists between what major theorists have said a human right is and the foundational text of the very movement they advocate. InInherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration, philosopher and political theorist Johannes Morsink offers an alternative to contemporary assumptions. A major historian of the Universal Declaration, Morsink traces the philosophical roots of the Declaration back to the Enlightenment and to a shared revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust. He defends the Declaration's perspective that all people have human rights simply by virtue of being born into the human family and that human beings have these rights regardless of any government or court action (or inaction). Like mathematical principles, human rights are truly universal, not the products of a particular culture, economic scheme, or political system. Our understanding of their existence can be blocked only by madness and false ideologies. Morsink argues that the drafters of the Declaration shared this metaphysical view of human rights. By denying the inherence of human rights and their metaphysical nature, and removing the concepts of the Declaration from their historical and philosophical context, contemporary constructivist scholars and pragmatic activists create an unnecessary and potentially dangerous political fog. The book carefully dissects various human rights models and ends with a defense of the Declaration's cosmopolitan vision against charges of unrealistic utopianism and Western ethnocentrism.Inherent Human Rightstakes exception to the reigning view that the Golden Rule is the best defense of human rights. Instead, it calls for us to "follow the lead of the Declaration's drafters and liberate the idea of human rights from the realm of the political and the juridical, which is where contemporary theorists have imprisoned it."
Over the past decade, abolitionist feminist and evangelical Christian activists have directed increasing attention toward the “traffic in women” as a dangerous manifestation of global gender ...inequalities. Despite renowned disagreements around the politics of sex and gender, these groups have come together to advocate for harsher penalties against traffickers, prostitutes’ customers, and nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem the flow of trafficked women. In this essay, I argue that what has served to unite this coalition of “strange bedfellows” is not simply an underlying commitment to conservative ideals of sexuality, as previous commentators have offered, but an equally significant commitment to carceral paradigms of justice and to militarized humanitarianism as the preeminent mode of engagement by the state. I draw upon my ongoing ethnographic research with feminist and evangelical antitrafficking movement leaders to argue that the alliance that has been so efficacious in framing contemporary antitrafficking politics is the product of two historically unique and intersecting trends: a rightward shift on the part of many mainstream feminists and other secular liberals away from a redistributive model of justice and toward a politics of incarceration, coincident with a leftward sweep on the part of many younger evangelicals toward a globally oriented social justice theology. In the final section of this essay, I consider the resilience of these trends given a newly installed and more progressive Obama administration, positing that they are likely to continue even as the terrain of militarized humanitarian action shifts in accordance with new sets of geopolitical interests.
This book examines the engagement of African states with the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism. This human rights mechanism is known for its pacific and ...non-confrontational approach to monitoring state human rights implementation. Coming at the end of the first three cycles of the UPR, the work offers a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of African states’ engagement and its potential impact. It develops a framework which comprehensively evaluates aspects of states’ UPR engagement, such as the pre-review national consultation process and implementation of UPR recommendations, which, until recently, have received little attention. The book considers the potential for acculturation in engagement with the UPR and unpacks the impact of politics, regionalism, cultural relativism, rights ritualism and civil society.
The work provides a useful guide for policymakers and international human rights law practitioners, as well as a valuable resource for international legal and international relations academics and researchers.
Human rights activists frequently claim that human rights are indivisible, and the United Nations has declared the indivisibility, interdependency, and interrelatedness of these rights to be beyond ...dispute. Yet in practice a significant divide remains between the two grand categories of human rights: civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. To date, few scholars have critically examined how the notion of indivisibility has shaped the complex relationship between these two sets of rights. InIndivisible Human Rights, Daniel J. Whelan offers a carefully crafted account of the rhetoric of indivisibility. Whelan traces the political and historical development of the concept, which originated in the contentious debates surrounding the translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into binding treaty law as two separate Covenants on Human Rights. In the 1960s and 1970s, Whelan demonstrates, postcolonial states employed a revisionist rhetoric of indivisibility to elevate economic and social rights over civil and political rights, eventually resulting in the declaration of a right to development. By the 1990s, the rhetoric of indivisibility had shifted to emphasize restoration of the fundamental unity of human rights and reaffirm the obligation of states to uphold both major human rights categories-thus opening the door to charges of violations resulting from underdevelopment and poverty. AsIndivisible Human Rightsillustrates, the rhetoric of indivisibility has frequently been used to further political ends that have little to do with promoting the rights of the individual. Drawing on scores of original documents, many of them long forgotten, Whelan lets the players in this drama speak for themselves, revealing the conflicts and compromises behind a half century of human rights discourse.Indivisible Human Rightswill be welcomed by scholars and practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding the realization of human rights.
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.
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