Achieving Human Rights


Book Description

This book addresses similar questions as Falk's earlier Human Rights Horizons, extending the exploration of human rights discourse and practice to focus on matters of post-9/11 security issues, developments in international criminal law, the role of citizenship and democracy, and approaches from the humanities.







Human Rights from Below


Book Description

In Human Rights from Below, Jim Ife shows how human rights and community development are problematic terms but powerful ideals, and that each is essential for understanding and practising the other. Ife contests that practitioners - advocates, activists, workers and volunteers - can better empower and protect communities when human rights are treated as more than just a specialist branch of law or international relations, and that human rights can be better realised when community development principles are applied. The book offers a long overdue assessment of how human rights and community development are invariably interconnected. It highlights how critical it is to understand the two as a basis for thinking about and taking action to address the serious challenges facing the world in the twenty-first century. Written both for students and for community development and human rights workers, Human Rights from Below brings together the important fields of human rights and community development, to enrich our thinking of both.




Realizing the Right to Development


Book Description

This book is devoted to the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development. It contains a collection of analytical studies of various aspects of the right to development, which include the rule of law and good governance, aid, trade, debt, technology transfer, intellectual property, access to medicines and climate change in the context of an enabling environment at the local, regional and international levels. It also explores the issues of poverty, women and indigenous peoples within the theme of social justice and equity. The book considers the strides that have been made over the years in measuring progress in implementing the right to development and possible ways forward to make the right to development a reality for all in an increasingly fragile, interdependent and ever-changing world.




The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century


Book Description

The Global Citizenship Commission was convened, under the leadership of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the auspices of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study, to re-examine the spirit and stirring words of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The result – this volume – offers a 21st-century commentary on the original document, furthering the work of human rights and illuminating the ideal of global citizenship. What does it mean for each of us to be members of a global community? Since 1948, the Declaration has stood as a beacon and a standard for a better world. Yet the work of making its ideals real is far from over. Hideous and systemic human rights abuses continue to be perpetrated at an alarming rate around the world. Too many people, particularly those in power, are hostile to human rights or indifferent to their claims. Meanwhile, our global interdependence deepens. Bringing together world leaders and thinkers in the fields of politics, ethics, and philosophy, the Commission set out to develop a common understanding of the meaning of global citizenship – one that arises from basic human rights and empowers every individual in the world. This landmark report affirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeks to renew the 1948 enterprise, and the very ideal of the human family, for our day and generation.




On Human Rights


Book Description

What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term 'human rights' (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.




Compasito


Book Description

Living among other people, in their families and communities, children become aware from a very early age of questions related to justice, and they search for the meaning of the world. By fostering an understanding of human rights, shaping opinion and developing attitudes, human rights education strongly supports this natural interest and learning process. This is what human rights education is about and this is what ’Compasito manual on human rights education for children' is for.’Compasito' is a starting point for educators, teachers and trainers who are ready to deal with human rights education with children of 7-13 years. The book covers the key concepts of human rights and children's rights, and provides substantial theoretical background to 13 key human rights issues, such as democracy, citizenship, gender equality, environment, media, poverty, and violence.The 42 practical activities serve to engage and motivate children to recognise human rights issues in their own environment. They help children to develop critical thinking, responsibility and a sense of justice, and help them learn how to take action to contribute to the betterment of their school or community. The manual also gives practical tips on how it can be used in various formal and non-formal educational settings.




Not Enough


Book Description

“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.” —George Soros The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice. Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality. “Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse... Sure to provoke a wider discussion.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana... Consistently bracing.” —Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books “Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal... [A] tour de force.” —Los Angeles Review of Books




The Reach of Human Rights in a Globalising World


Book Description

In the globalizing world of today, the conduct of states often affects the human rights of persons situated outside of those states' territories. The problem of applying human rights to such state conduct has become increasingly topical as a result of phenomena such as the 'war on terror, ' foreign military interventions, and economic globalization. The controversies, as regards the applicability of human rights treaty law in such cases, stem mainly from the wording of the relevant treaty provisions. The principal treaties on civil and political rights require states to guarantee certain human rights to persons 'within their jurisdiction, ' while treaties on economic, social, and cultural rights specifically envisage international cooperation of states' parties for the purposes of achieving these rights. The meaning of 'jurisdiction, ' and the precise nature and content of the obligation of international cooperation, are subject to debate. This study explores the question of extraterritorial application of principal, universal, and regional human rights treaties. It covers treaties on civil and political rights, as well as those on economic, social, and cultural rights. The study determines to what extent and under which circumstances human rights treaties are applicable to state conduct which affects the human rights of persons situated outside the borders of the state party in question. The problem is analyzed by reference to the rules of treaty interpretation and in the conceptual framework of public international law. It contains a thorough analysis of preparatory works of the relevant treaties, the case law of the International Court of Justice and of human rights courts, as well as other output of human rights treaty bodies. State practice, including the case law of national courts, is also explored. The study argues for a flexible approach to extraterritorial application of human rights treaties which would make it possible for the human right systems to respond to the challenges posed by the evermore notorious extraterritorial state conduct. In 2010, Michal Gondek has won the first prize in the Max van der Stoel Human Rights award for this book. He also has won Manfred Lachs Prize for the Best Book Debut in International Law by a Polish Author 20




The Last Utopia


Book Description

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.