Top Research Papers on Human Rights

What interest me are the reasons why “human” or “human rights” could be important or possibly most important in constituting a group (hence the introduction of the complicated word “group” and “group right(s)” in the subtitle). If I had to justify the existence of the latest debates on nature, justification and universality of human rights, on their distinction from other normative standards, on the philosophy and (legal) foundation of human rights, on “Human Rights without (or with) Foundations” (Raz, Tasioulas, Besson), then I would immediately conclude that this “process of gr...

Review of Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. A new history of the parallel rise of neoliberalism and human rights.

Education is must for all human beings whether it is value education, physical education, environmental education or human rights education. As human rights are basic to humanity and human beings are entitled by virtue of their status as human beings without consideration of nationality, religion, race, sex, class, caste and creed. While civil, political and social-economic rights are dependent on an individual's status as a citizen of a particular state but his human rights are not determined by this condition. Because these rights are concerned with humanity, with all humans, therefore, the ...

Natural rights and human rights Natural rights are the ancestor of contemporary human rights; and the idea of natural rights was a doctrine of universal rights, at least of those basic moral rights that were thought to hold good in a state of nature. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) is the keystone of contemporary human rights thinking, and it proceeds from the view that the human rights enunciated there have a foundation in morality and are universal. By the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the notion of natural rights had lost or begun to lose its appeal...

In his recent work 'The Endtimes of Human Rights' Stephen Hopgood makes an important distinction between human rights and Human Rights. The distinction is between that of an almost natural human revulsion against injustice and a desire to impose a particular, and very modern Western regime of Rights which may, or may not, take into account the particular circumstances under which people are being persecuted and suffering: A disconnect is growing up between global humanism with its law, courts, fund-raising, and campaigns on the one hand, and local lived realities on the other. It is a disconne...

This essay makes three suggestions: first, that it is attractive to conceive individualistic justification as one of the hallmarks – maybe even the one hallmark – of human rights; secondly, that combining this conception of human rights with standard worries about socioeconomic rights can tempt one to take the phrase “human rights” to refer to any individualistically justified weighty normative consideration (including considerations that are not rights); and thirdly, that reflections on the individuation of rights and rights’ dynamic quality give us some reason to resist this temptation – tho...

The concept of rights, as has often been noted, became prominent at a particular time in our history. It is associated especially with seventeenth and eighteenth century political ideas about the rights of individuals versus those of governments, and with such notable events as the American Declaration of Independence. It was at this time, too, that debates about rights of property and liberty became prominent. What was the role of this concept in earlier times? Has it always existed? Does it have a permanent place in our moral thinking? According to H.L.A. Hart,

The concept of rights, as has often been noted, became prominent at a particular time in our history. It is associated especially with seventeenth and eighteenth century political ideas about the rights of individuals versus those of governments, and with such notable events as the American Declaration of Independence. It was at this time, too, that debates about rights of property and liberty became prominent. What was the role of this concept in earlier times? Has it always existed? Does it have a permanent place in our moral thinking? According to H.L.A. Hart, the concept of a right, legal ...

Right and human right are two important concepts of in the constitutions. However,in the traditional theories of constitution,the two concepts are mixed,so it is necessary to distinguish them. After analyzing the headstreams and meanings of right and human right,the author considers that the two concepts can be distinguished according to seven aspects.

Introduction: Human Rights Legalized - Defining, Interpreting, and Implementing an Ideal 1. Lost in Translation: The Human Rights Ideal and International Human Rights Law 2. The Law Cannot be Enough: Human Rights and the Limits of Legalism 3. Putting Law in its Place: An Interdisciplinary Evaluation of National Amnesty Laws 4. The Virtues of Legalization 5. Is the Legalization of Human Rights Really the Problem? Genocide in the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission 6. Revisioning the Role of Law in Women's Human Rights Struggles 7. The Bureaucratic Gaze of International Human Rights L...

This essay focuses on the nexus of vulnerability and rights. It argues that in transforming vulnerability from a stigma that alienated women from their humanity to the signature of human dignity, women bridged the gap between the liberatory promise of human rights and its exploitative patriarchal politics. It finds that the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Drucilla Cornell, and Jean-Luc Nancy were/are crucial to this transformed idea of dignity. Religious ideas have played a complex role in this transformation. Wollstonecraft appealed to theological ideas of the soul to contes...

.......................................................................................................................... i Thesis Declaration ........................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ v Introduction .....................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Landscape of Human Rights (the Contemporary Debate) .....................

The human being can not survive without water, and the human right to water is therefore a basic human right. The human right to water has been well recognized in international law, the state has a duty to implement the right according to the maximum of its available resources. Although the human right to water belongs to the kind of economic, social and cultural rights, which the state shall undertakes to take steps with a view to achieving progressively its full realization, the state has certain immediate obligations. However, at national level, there is a problem to be solved, i.e., lack o...

Undoubtedly, the idea of rights and especially human rights is pervasive these days. According to some, the discourse of human rights has acquired ‘in recent times [...] the status of an ethical lingua franca’1; others hold that ‘there are few mechanisms available other than human rights to function as a global ethical foundation’2, consider it the ‘dominant morality of our time, [...] a truly global morality’3 or even call it ‘the world’s first universal ideology’4. The worldwide acceptance of the idea of human rights is also reflected by the fact that all of the almost 200 states in the worl...

The notion of human rights is intimately connected with the twentieth century, but civic rights, freedoms and liberties are much older. In fact, they can be traced to antiquity and continued with varying fortunes throughout centuries until the present. For most of Western history, they were either intimately linked with citizenship, popular sovereignty and various limits put on political power (i.e., provided rights and liberties only to the members of a given political community), or had religious or philosophic foundation that stressed human dignity, sameness of nature and brotherhood of all...

In some respects, the recent and unprecedented election to the Bolivian presidency of Evo Morales (widely hailed as the first indigenous person to be elected president of a Latin American nation) can be attributed to his command of the transnational discourse of human rights. In the last several years Bolivia has seen the emergence of powerful social movements demanding greater political inclusion and representation for indigenous peoples, and against the privatization and/or expropriation of natural resources (particularly water and gas), all expressed, in various ways, using the transnationa...

ABSTRACT In this paper I respond to the central claims presented in Samuel Moyn’s influential book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Moyn argues that human rights have the following features: they are powerless to combat growing material inequality; they share key characteristics with neoliberalism; they make only minimalist or sufficientarian demands and therefore are not enough to achieve the equality demanded by justice. He suggests, in particular, that Henry Shue’s Basic Rights exemplifies these features. My response argues that Moyn does not accurately present the core concep...

The title of this essay is rather ambitious and the space available is hardly sufficient to examine two words of almost limitless expanse—“human rights”—whether standing alone or in tandem. This requires that I begin with (and remained disciplined by) what a teacher of mine, Leo Strauss, called “low facts.” My low facts are these: We call ourselves humans because we have certain characteristics that define our nature. We are social and political animals, as Aristotle noted, and possess attributes not shared by other animals. The ancients noted this, of course, when they defined our principal b...

The Caslon Analytics profile on Australian and overseas human rights supplements guides dealing with privacy, censorship, intellectual property, governance of the global information infrastructure and other matters. It identifies major international instruments and Australian law, highlights academic literature, points to institutions and advocacy bodies, and discusses debate about rights and responsibilities

The relationship between human rights and refugee law Althoug human rights law generally applies to all individuals, regardless of nationality or citizenship, refugees have traditionally been dealt with via humanitarian law. Yet the continued separation of the two disciplines seems untenable: ‘It is no longer possible to interpret or apply the Refugee Convention without drawing on the text and jurisprudence of other human rights treaties. Conversely it is not possible to monitor the implementation of other human rights treaties, where refugees are concerned, without drawing on the text of the ...

For

This essay asks whether international human rights arguments are likely to be effective in advancing immigrants' rights in the United States. There are certainly reasons to be pessimistic. Despite its history as a nation of immigrants and the ever-increasing diversity of its populace, the United States remains a deeply parochial and nationalist culture. International human rights arguments are often seen as the advocates' last refuge. In the absence of an international forum that can hold the United States accountable, and in the face of Congressional directives that the international human ri...

This guide has resources to support diversity, including anti-racism organizations and teaching resources.

See the best resources in the Library and on the Internet for information on human rights worldwide.

Introduction To begin, let me provide an immediate opening to the chapter’s principal claims. As the anthropology of the practice of human rights demonstrates, even in terms of an explicit understanding of “progress,” it is very difficult to sustain empirically the conclusion that human rights has been a force for progress in the contemporary world. On the one hand, the postwar human rights project is intensely teleological; the movement toward a better, more advanced, more civilized future is implicit in the construction of “human rights” as the primary “symbol to all of victory over those wh...

The author considers the likely impact of the UK Human Rights act in employment tribunals and on employment law disputes generally. Article by Professor Bob Hepple QC (Master of Clare College and Professor of Law, University of Cambridge) published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.

Introduction - PART 1 MORALITY - Rules, Principles and Conduct - Morality and Society - Moral Universality and Moral Diversity - Moral Diversity Continued: Religion and Ideology - Morality and the 'Categorical Imperative' - PART 2 RIGHTS - The Idea of Rights - The Idea of Rights Continued - The Idea of Rights Continued: Human Rights - Human Rights and Politics - Notes - Index

T his chapter is about the relationship between needs and rights, and what that means for social work practice. Social workers can be regarded as professional need definers. They are constantly in the process of identifying, and then trying to meet, human needs, as described back in 1945 by Charlotte Towle (Towle 1965). Scarcely a day would pass in any social worker's life when the word ‘need’ is not used on dozens of occasions. Social workers do ‘needs assessments’, talk about the needs of individuals, of families, of client groups (e.g. the aged), of communities, of agencies, of service deli...

A. J. Milne regarded the book Human Rights and Human Diversity as a work of the philosophy of human rights, and mentioned in its preface that philosophical inquiry into human rights, as an effort to understand the world and human being, should not be limited to any tradition of particular culture and civilization. In essence, philosophical inquiry into human rights is a kind of research by human, that is, each man can make his contribution to the inquiry. Milne’s theory of universal minimum human rights is reexamined, and some concomitant questions with Milne inquiry are posed in this review.

This book describes the author's process of self-doubt, which led to her decision to give up on her career as a teacher and become a full-time writer.

Since 1948 the world community has continuously debated varying interpretations of human rights in response to global developments. Little of this discussion however has addressed questions of gender and only recently have significant challenges been made to a vision of human rights which excludes much of womens experiences. The concept of human rights like all vibrant visions is not static or the property of any one group; rather its meaning expands as people reconceive of their needs and hopes in relation to it. In this spirit feminists redefine human rights abuses to include the degradation...

In the 21st century, torture survives in Brazil in a wide and systematic manner. It is not a mere residue of the military ★ Mestre em Direito pela Universidade de Utrecht, Países Baixos e doutoranda no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Bioética da Universidade de Brasília, Brasília, DF, Brasil. ★★ Doutora em Antropologia pela Universidade de Brasília, Brasil. Professora da Universidade Católica de Brasília no Programa de PósGraduação em Psicologia, Brasília, DF, Brasil. Gontijo, Daniela Cabral & Pereira, Ondina Pena. (2012). Direito à vida sem tortura: direitos humanos para humanos direitos? Psicol...

Аннотация. This article aims to analyze a new phenomenon, taking place in the sphere of human rights protection. Companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, which means to act with due diligence to avoid infringing on the rights of others. This is the message the UN Human Rights Council sent to all actors in 2008 as part of adopting unanimously the Protect, Respect and Remedy policy framework for business and human rights put forward by John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative for Business and Human Rights. The protection of human rights, including where it relates to business, ...

Why do we have human rights? What ought to be the function of such rights in the global order, and to what extent does this help define what they are? Who needs to do what to realize these rights? In response to such questions this paper develops a conception of human rights that thinks of them as membership rights in the global order. Human rights are derived from contingent but relatively abiding political and economic arrangements. This conception has some intuitive disadvantages, but makes clear how human rights can be of genuinely global relevance; can explain why the language of rights (...

It has been 15 years since the historic world conference on women in Beijing, which marked the major progress in the struggle to end multiple types of discrimination against women throughout the world and defined a clear mission to promote women’s right. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Actions serve as an important action plan for women’s right, gender equality and female empowerment all over the globe.

In the UK at the moment there is much talk of Human Rights as the Conservative Party (the main party of the coalition government) publishes its proposed reforms to correct perceived adverse consequences of rulings in the European Court of Human Rights.

Perhaps the most significant goal in the world today is to make everyone fully aware of their rights. To end the abuse of rights the first and necessary step is to create rights awareness. By mobilizing the media to spread human rights awareness a positive transformation can take place that would not only empower individuals, groups and marginalized communities to stand up but speak out and protect themselves. There seems to be a systematic effort underway to eliminate the voices of dissent. Hundreds of such incidents are taking place which reveal the direct involvement of law enforcing or the...

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the African American struggle for equality and the international arena.1 Racial violence in America and de jure segregation and disfranchisement in the South, discriminatory treatment of nonwhite diplomats from newly independent countries, and the need to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism as the two superpowers competed during the Cold War for the allegiance of emerging nations exerted pressure on American presidents to address domestic civil rights. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the National Negro Congress (NNC...

[Extract] Well the double standard is alive and well on social media today. Outrage - outrage - at women staging a 'nurse in' outside the Sunrise studios. The tenor of this outrage on Twitter seems to be somehow that David Koch, in calling for women to be discreet and classy in their breastfeeding habits, is simply expressing opinion and that this is not deserving of protest. Let's be clear here: breastfeeding anywhere is protected by law in Australia. Calls for women to breastfeed in a 'low traffic area', or to 'be discreet' are nothing more than calls for women to leave public places to b...

In 1973, Hilary Rodham Clinton argued that, ‘The phrase children’s rights is a slogan in search of a definition’. This oft repeated claim was challenged by Hodgson (an Australian legal scholar) who argued that decades of attention to the rights of children led by the United Nations (UN) have rendered Clinton’s phrase obsolete (Hodgson 2009). Yet he also lamented the failure of many governments to create mechanisms that allow for enactment of the duties enshrined within the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (UN 1989) such that there exists in policy and practice a superficial ‘li...

Human Rights and the American Right Robi Chakravorti Civil rights issues which dominate the attention of the US media today deal with episodes of unequal treatment of people called "behavioural minorities' or gender discrimination related to 'pursuit of happiness' in certain areas of social life The increasing difficulties of the class and ethnic minorities resulting from the widening gap between the rich and the poor do not cause as much media attention or political excitement.

This comment on the contribution by Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin focuses on three apparent antinomies of women’s rights: margin–mainstream, specialist–generalist, and family–individual. Adding a Chinese perspective to these discussions, the comment highlights the importance of choice of terminology in a particular cultural setting. It also questions the positioning of actors in terms of centre–periphery and shows how various actors can work across limits and perceived locations. Going beyond the discussions in UN bodies, the comment emphasizes the local social contexts and persist...

ABSTRACT Recent discussions of a ‘welfare rights’ approach in social work have suggested that the European Convention on Human Rights might provide a useful framework, a list of service objectives against which present provision might be assessed. In the present paper the author argues that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is to be preferred, because of its inclusion of social and economic rights. However, there are philosophical and political objections to such a wide-ranging list of human rights. The author attempts to answer these objections in order to release the U...

This essay maps how human rights have helped advance abortion rights, and it explores the relationship between human rights discourses and abortion access in jurisdictions with under-resourced health systems. The first part describes the incorporation of abortion rights in international human rights documents and in the opinions and reports of human rights bodies. The second part discusses why courts increasingly cite human rights texts in national opinions, noting courts’ invocation of universal values, consensus on limited abortion permission, and state duties to protect women’s rights. The ...

Arguments to support transgender rights often rely on "born that way" arguments, which assert that gender identity is innate, immutable, and unassociated with choice.

The article opens with the analysis of a 2013 legal memorandum of the U.S. Department of Justice that sanctions state ordered killings of citizens on foreign soil, as well as the violation of foreign sovereignty that may have to accompany such killings. This document, together with arguments of contemporary juridical pragmatist like M. Ignatieff, functions in the article as a prototype of the kind of juridical thinking that has been explicitly countered in classical philosophies of (international) right. Section I outlines Kant's theory of the common ethical ground of morals and politics, his ...

Are labour rights human rights? This question has attracted much interest in recent years among lawyers, academic scholars, trade unionists and other activists, and has given rise to heated debates. In human rights law and labour law scholarship, some endorse the character of labour rights as human rights without hesitation, while others view it with scepticism and suspicion. This article finds that there are in fact three different approaches in the literature that examines labour rights as human rights, which are not always distinguished with sufficient clarity. First, there is a positivisti...

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this symposium, convened to examine Professor Wenona Singel's article, Indian Tribes and Human Rights Accountability. 1 Amongst her many professional accomplishments, Professor Singel is well known as a scholar in American Indian law, 2 the Chief Justice of an active tribal appellate court, and a Reporter on the American Law Institute's Restatement of American Indian Law. Her

Given the burgeoning literature on the devaluation of national citizenship and the effects of globalization, the sources and beneficiaries of individual legal rights assume increased importance. This Article seeks to distinguish those legal rights that states should confine to their own citizens from those that flow from residence, immigration status, territorial presence, or simply personhood. Section I examines the very reasons for states to distribute citizenship in the first place. These reasons relate to participatory democracy, immigration privileges, other rights and disabilities, perso...

There remains an enormous need to examine, at a macro level, the interrelated research, practice, and policy issues that are important for societies that seek to achieve social justice for all and health as a human right.