The International Struggle For New Human Rights

In recent years, aggrieved groups around the world have routinely portrayed themselves as victims of human rights abuses. Physically and mentally disabled people, indigenous peoples, AIDS patients, and many others have chosen to protect and promote their interests by advancing new human rights norms before the United Nations and other international bodies. Often, these claims have met strong resistance from governments and corporations. More surprisingly, even apparent allies, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other nongovernmental organizations, have voiced misgivings, arguing that rights "proliferation" will weaken efforts to protect their traditional concerns: civil and political rights. Why are certain global problems recognized as human rights issues while others are not? How do local activists transform long-standing problems into universal rights claims? When and why do human rights groups, governments, and international organizations endorse new rights? The International Struggle for New Human Rights is the first book to address these issues. Focusing on activists who advance new rights, the book introduces a framework for understanding critical strategies and conflicts involved in the struggle to persuade the human rights movement to move beyond traditional problems and embrace pressing new ones. Essays in the volume consider rights activism by such groups as the South Asian Dalits, sexual minorities, and children of wartime rape victims, while others explore new issues such as health rights, economic rights, and the right to water. Examining both the successes and failures of such campaigns, The International Struggle for New Human Rights will be a key resource not only for scholars but also for those on the front lines of human rights work.

The Struggle for Human Rights evaluates the themes of law, politics, and practice which together define international human rights practice and scholarship. Taking as it's inspiration the 40 year career of international human rights advocate Philip Alston, this book of essays examines foundational debates central to the evolution of the human rights project. It critiques the reform of human rights institutions and reflects on the place of human rights practice in contemporary society. Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and critics of human rights from a variety of disciplines, The Struggle for Human Rights addresses the most urgent questions posed within the field of human rights today - its practice and its theory. Rethinking assumptions and re-evaluating strategies in the law, politics, and practice of international human rights, this book is essential reading for academics and human rights professionals around the world.

A global history of human rights in a world of nations that grant rights to some while denying them to others Once dominated by vast empires, the world is now divided into some 200 independent countries that proclaim human rights—a transformation that suggests that nations and human rights inevitably develop together. But the reality is far more problematic, as Eric Weitz shows in this compelling global history of the fate of human rights in a world of nation-states. Through vivid histories from virtually every continent, A World Divided describes how, since the eighteenth century, nationalists have established states that grant human rights to some people while excluding others, setting the stage for many of today’s problems, from the refugee crisis to right-wing nationalism. Only the advance of international human rights will move us beyond a world divided between those who have rights and those who don't.

Deals with the history of the human rights movement, and slavery in many parts of the world. Includes biographies of human rights activists and abusers, as well as the text of the Draft Bill of Rights of the African National Congress, the Draft Charter of Fundamental Rights (issued by the South African Government in February 1993), Fundamental Rights proposed in the Constitution of the State of Kwazulu/Natal, the Organization of African Unity's African Charter on Human and People's Rights, and the Bill of Rights for the Transitional Period in the Republic of South Africa.

Explore the tension between state sovereignty and human rights, genocide, economic rights, and various concepts of justice as they relate to the promotion of fundamental human rights with THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS: UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES IN WORLD POLITICS. This textbook covers human rights in relation to gender equity, feminist perspectives, and sexual orientation and suggests a universal perspective on human rights sensitive to cultural differences and diversity among and within nations. The text also explores human rights law and the question of whether human rights are universal. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

How today's unjust global order is shaped by uncertain expert knowledge—and how to fix it A World of Struggle reveals the role of expert knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born. In this provocative book, David Kennedy draws on his experience working with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists to provide a unique insider's perspective on the complexities of global governance. He describes the conflicts, unexamined assumptions, and assertions of power and entitlement that lie at the center of expert rule. Kennedy explores the history of intellectual innovation by which experts developed a sophisticated legal vocabulary for global management strangely detached from its distributive consequences. At the center of expert rule is struggle: myriad everyday disputes in which expertise drifts free of its moorings in analytic rigor and observable fact. He proposes tools to model and contest expert work and concludes with an in-depth examination of modern law in warfare as an example of sophisticated expertise in action. Charting a major new direction in global governance at a moment when the international order is ready for change, this critically important book explains how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.

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.

Human Rights, Power and Civic Action examines the interrelationship between struggles for human rights and the dynamics of power, focusing on situations of poverty and oppression in developing countries. It is argued that the concept of power is a relatively neglected one in the study of rights-based approaches to development, especially the ways in which structures and relations of power can limit human rights advocacy. Therefore this book focuses on how local and national struggles for rights have been constrained by power relations and structural inequalities, as well as the extent to which civic action has been able to challenge, alter or transform such power structures, and simultaneously to enhance protection of people’s basic human rights. Contributors examine and compare struggles to advance human rights by non-governmental actors in Cambodia, China, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The country case-studies analyse structures of power responsible for the negation and denial of human rights, as well as how rights-promoting organisations challenge such structures. Utilising a comparative approach, the book provides empirically grounded studies leading to new theoretical understanding of the interrelationships between human rights struggles, power and poverty reduction. Human Rights, Power and Civic Action will be of interest to students and scholars of human rights politics, power, development, and governance.