Making Human Rights News

Making Human Rights News: Balancing Participation and Professionalism explores the impact of new digital technology and activism on the production of human rights messages. It is the first collection of studies to combine multidisciplinary approaches, "citizen witness" challenges to journalism ethics, and expert assessments of the "liberating role" of the Internet, addressing the following questions: 1. What can scholars from a wide range of disciplines – including communication studies, journalism, sociology, political science, and international relations/studies – add to traditional legal and political human rights discussions, exploring the impact of innovative digital information technologies on the gathering and dissemination of human rights news? 2. What questions about journalism ethics and professionalism arise as growing numbers of untrained "citizen witnesses" use modern mobile technology to document claims of human rights abuses? 3. What are the limits of the "liberating role" of the Internet in challenging traditional sources of authority and credibility, such as professional journalists and human rights professionals? 4. How do greater Internet access and human rights activism interact with variations in press freedom and government censorship worldwide to promote respect for different categories of human rights, such as women's rights and rights to health? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Human Rights.

In the last six decades, one of the most striking developments in international law is the emergence of a massive body of legal norms and procedures aimed at protecting human rights. In many countries, though, there is little relationship between international law and the actual protection of human rights on the ground. Making Human Rights a Reality takes a fresh look at why it's been so hard for international law to have much impact in parts of the world where human rights are most at risk. Emilie Hafner-Burton argues that more progress is possible if human rights promoters work strategically with the group of states that have dedicated resources to human rights protection. These human rights "stewards" can focus their resources on places where the tangible benefits to human rights are greatest. Success will require setting priorities as well as engaging local stakeholders such as nongovernmental organizations and national human rights institutions. To date, promoters of international human rights law have relied too heavily on setting universal goals and procedures and not enough on assessing what actually works and setting priorities. Hafner-Burton illustrates how, with a different strategy, human rights stewards can make international law more effective and also safeguard human rights for more of the world population.

A history of the successes of the human rights movement and a case for why human rights work Evidence for Hope makes the case that yes, human rights work. Critics may counter that the movement is in serious jeopardy or even a questionable byproduct of Western imperialism. Guantánamo is still open and governments are cracking down on NGOs everywhere. But human rights expert Kathryn Sikkink draws on decades of research and fieldwork to provide a rigorous rebuttal to doubts about human rights laws and institutions. Past and current trends indicate that in the long term, human rights movements have been vastly effective. Exploring the strategies that have led to real humanitarian gains since the middle of the twentieth century, Evidence for Hope looks at how essential advances can be sustained for decades to come.

A timely look at children's rights, the young activists who fought for them, and how readers can do the same by Amnesty International, Angelina Jolie, and Geraldine Van Bueren

Provides critical evidenced based assessements and tools with which to investigate the role of rights abrogation in the health of populations.

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.

"[The report] details xenophobic incidents in the year after the government adopted the National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance."--Publisher website.