Human Rights As Battlefields

This book examines human rights as political battlefields, spaces that are undergoing constant changes in which political conflicts are expressed by a translation process within networks of interactions. This translation, in turn, contributes to modifying the scope and understanding of human rights. Ultimately, these battlefields express the legitimacy encounter of different versions of human rights in contemporary political practices. The volume thus challenges both the tendency to minimize the changing nature of human rights as well as the struggles emerging from the use of human rights discourses as a legitimization tool. By shifting the focus on what stakeholders do instead of solely on the origin, nature or foundations of human rights, the authors reveal that human rights are not static objects: they are constantly transformed and, as such, affect the horizon of universal rights.

Examining the complex relationship between international human rights and humanitarian law, this volume explores the potential for fusing the two regimes into a new legal paradigm.

Police forces across the United States have been transformed into extensions of the military. Our towns and cities have become battlefields, and we the American people are now the enemy combatants to be spied on, tracked, frisked, and searched. For those who resist, the consequences can be a one-way trip to jail, or even death. Battlefield America: The War on the American People is constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead’s terrifying portrait of a nation at war with itself. In exchange for safe schools and lower crime rates, we have opened the doors to militarized police, zero tolerance policies in schools, and SWAT team raids. The insidious shift was so subtle that most of us had no idea it was happening. This follow-up to Whitehead’s award-winning A Government of Wolves, is a brutal critique of an America on the verge of destroying the very freedoms that define it. Hands up!—the police state has arrived.

Contents: Arend Soeteman: Introduction - Edmund Abegg: Justice and the Intrinsic Value of Humans - Caridad Velarde: Universalism in Contemporary Human Rights Theory - Marijan Pavcnik: Gleichheit als rechtlicher Kern der Gerechtigkeit, Gerechtigkeitsma�st�be und Recht - Jos� Rubio-Carracedo: Differentiated Universalization of Human Rights - Ashok Gaur: Human Rights: Dimensions and Challenges - Martin Borowski: Religious Freedom as a Fundamental Legal Right, A Rawlsian Perspective - J�rg Paul Mueller: Is freedom of conscience still a topic? - Burton M. Leiser: The Right to Immigrate and the Right to Exclude Immigrants - J.W. Harris: Rights and Resources - Libertarians and the Right to Life - Hans-Rudolf Horn: The Scope of Human and Social Rights in the Global Economic System - Isabel Trujillo P�rez: Partiality and Distributive Justice - Haig Khatchadourian: Merit as a Canon of Distributive Justice - Francesco Biondo: Conception of the person and currency of distributive justice in Van Parijs and Sen - Carlos Kohn Wacher: Hannah Arendt's Concept of Solidarity as a Criticism to Liberalism - Mikko Wennberg: Contract Law as a Response to Contract Failures: When Contracting Fails? - Hendrik Kaptein: Just Criminal Lawyers? Professional ethics and problems of punitive justice: restorative perspectives - Joan McGregor: The Law's Treatment of Rape as Expressing the Inequality of Women - David A. Reidy: The Justification of Hate Crimes Laws: The Argument from Group-Based Oppression - Alexandra George: The Problem of Property in Human Body Parts - Laura Palazzani: Person and Human Being in Bioethics and Biolaw - Jan Swanepoel: The Equality Jurisprudence Developed by South Africa's Constitutional Court since 1994 - Nikolas Roos: Fundamental Rights, European Identity and Law as a Way to Survive.

From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice. We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook. In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.

"Author paints a portrait of an evolving American police state as police authority expands into extensions of the military, and government's intrusions undermine basic freedoms guaranteed to American citizens under the Constitution, turning Americans into enemy combatants who are spied upon, raided, manhandled, silenced, locked up, shot at, and denied due process of the law"--

An internationally-recognized authority on constitutional law, national security law, and counterterrorism, William C. Banks believes changing patterns of global conflict are forcing a reexamination of the traditional laws of war. The Hague Rules, the customary laws of war, and the post-1949 law of armed conflict no longer account for nonstate groups waging prolonged campaigns of terrorism—or even more conventional insurgent attacks. Recognizing that many of today's conflicts are low-intensity, asymmetrical wars fought between disparate military forces, Banks's collection analyzes nonstate armed groups and irregular forces (such as terrorist and insurgent groups, paramilitaries, child soldiers, civilians participating in hostilities, and private military firms) and their challenge to international humanitarian law. Both he and his contributors believe gaps in the laws of war leave modern battlefields largely unregulated, and they fear state parties suffer without guidelines for responding to terrorists and their asymmetrical tactics, such as the targeting of civilians. These gaps also embolden weaker, nonstate combatants to exploit forbidden strategies and violate the laws of war. Attuned to the contested nature of post-9/11 security and policy, this collection juxtaposes diverse perspectives on existing laws and their application in contemporary conflict. It sets forth a legal definition of new wars, describes the status of new actors, charts the evolution of the twenty-first-century battlefield, and balances humanitarian priorities with military necessity. While the contributors contest each other, they ultimately reestablish the legitimacy of a long-standing legal corpus, and they rehumanize an environment in which the most vulnerable targets, civilian populations, are themselves becoming weapons against conventional power.

What are the limits of human rights, and what do these limits mean? This volume engages critically and constructively with this question to provide a distinct contribution to the contemporary discussion on human rights. Fassbender and Traisbach, along with a group of leading experts in the field, examine the issue from multiple disciplinary perspectives, analysing the limits of our current discourse of human rights. It does so in an original way, and without attempting to deconstruct, or deny, human rights. Each contribution is supplemented by an engaging comment which furthers this important discussion. This combination of perspectives paves the way for further thought for scholars, practitioners, students, and the wider public. Ultimately, this volume provides an exceptionally rich spectrum of viewpoints and arguments across disciplines to offer fresh insights into human rights and its limitations.