Rethinking Human Rights

Rethinking Human Rights brings together a team of authors from fields as diverse as political theory, peace studies, international law and media studies - concerned with a new international agenda of human rights promotion. The collection presents an original and tightly argued critique of current trends and deals with a range of questions concerning the implication of human rights approaches for humanitarian aid, state sovereignty, international law, democracy and political autonomy.

The dominant approach to economic policy has so far failed to adequately address the pressing challenges the world faces today: extreme poverty, widespread joblessness and precarious employment, burgeoning inequality, and large-scale environmental threats. This message was brought home forcibly by the 2008 global economic crisis. Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice shows how human rights have the potential to transform economic thinking and policy-making with far-reaching consequences for social justice. The authors make the case for a new normative and analytical framework, based on a broader range of objectives which have the potential to increase the substantive freedoms and choices people enjoy in the course of their lives and not on not upon narrow goals such as the growth of gross domestic product. The book covers a range of issues including inequality, fiscal and monetary policy, international development assistance, financial markets, globalization, and economic instability. This new approach allows for a complex interaction between individual rights, collective rights and collective action, as well as encompassing a legal framework which offers formal mechanisms through which unjust policy can be protested. This highly original and accessible book will be essential reading for human rights advocates, economists, policy-makers and those working on questions of social justice.

Scholars of history, law, theology and anthropology critically revisit the history of human rights.

Contributed articles in the Indian context, most previously published in late 1987 in Lokayan bulletin, bimonthly.

Written by a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2003–4), this book has been fully updated for a second edition and continues to provide a much needed, short and accessible introduction to the foundational human rights ideas of our times and shows that every government is under international obligation to respect and uphold universal human rights. Updates include: Discussion of the recent intellectual challenges to the international human rights movement Examination of the establishment and functioning of the Human Rights Council and the Universal Review Process Evaluation of the developments in the area of the Responsibility to Protect and continued efforts to implement the right to development Inclusion of issues such as the push for compensation for slavery, experiments with democracy in a number of countries and the decisions of international judicial and human rights organs on conceptual and protection issues This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Global Institutions, International Law and Human Rights.

This book brings together researchers from the fields of international human rights law, EU law and constitutional law to reflect on the tug-of-war over the positioning of the centre of gravity of human rights protection in Europe. It addresses both the position of the Convention system vis-à-vis the Contracting States, and its positioning with respect to fundamental rights protection in the European Union. The first part of the book focuses on interactions in this triangle from an institutional and constitutional point of view and reflects on how the key actors are trying to define their relationship with one another in a never-ending process. Having thus set the scene, the second part takes a critical look at the tools that have been developed at European level for navigating these complex relationships, in order to identify whether they are capable of responding effectively to the complexities of emerging realities in the triangular relationship between the EHCR, EU law and national law. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

Practices of immigration detention in Europe are largely resistant to conventional forms of legal correction. By rethinking the notion of territorial sovereignty in modern constitutionalism, this book puts forward a solution to the problem of legally permissive immigration detention.

In Prosecuting Human Rights Offences: Rethinking the Sword Function of Human Rights Law the author explores the features of the procedural obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish human rights offences, and explains how they determine the contemporary understanding of function of criminal prosecution.