The Oas And The Promotion And Protection Of Human Rights

This book is a product of my long-standing interest in international action on human rights, an interest which I developed as a graduate student and which I have maintained as a teacher and researcher. I am indebted to Professor Vernon Van Dyke of the University of Iowa for stimulating my interest in the subject and for guiding the preparation of my Ph. D. thesis, of which this book is a greatly revised and expanded version. I should also like to express my ap preciation to Professor A. Glenn Mower, Jr. , of Hanover College, and to my colleague Glenn N. Schram, both of whom read the thesis and made many helpful suggestions when I began to revise it for publication. The book is im proved as a result of their efforts, though I alone remain responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation. Most of the research on the book was done at the Columbus Memorial Library of the OAS in Washington, D. C. , and I am grateful to the librarians there for kind and efficient assistance. The Marquette University Committee on Research provided me with a research grant for the summer of 1974 and supplementary grants in 1975 and 1976 which facilitated the completion of the manuscript: I am grateful for this assistance. I have endeavored to include all material available to me as of the end of March, 1976.

This book, which can be used as a text for teaching purposes, gives a fascinating, and authoritative treatment both the rights protected by the Inter-American system and of the way in which its institutions work. An important part of the book is a thorough, article by article account of the guarantee in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and in the American Convention on Human Rights of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in the light of the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and of the Commission's many country reports on the human rights situation in particular states. There are also chapters on the rights of indigenous peoples, amnesty laws and states of emergencies. The evolution and current methods of work of the Commission and the Court are set out at length and their achievements are critically assessed. The role of non-governmental organisations is also examined in this context. The book will be invaluable to all those interested in the protection of human rights in the Americas and international human rights law generally.

How you get in contact with the UN and UN-bodies in order to file complaints of violations of human rights.

Preface.

The book provides in-depth insight to scholars, practitioners, and activists dealing with human rights, their expansion, and the emergence of 'new' human rights. Whereas legal theory tends to neglect the development of concrete individual rights, monographs on 'new' rights often deal with structural matters only in passing and the issue of 'new' human rights has received only cursory attention in literature. By bringing together a large number of emergent human rights, analysed by renowned human rights experts from around the world, and combining the analyses with theoretical approaches, this book fills this lacuna. The comprehensive and dialectic approach, which enables insights from individual rights to overarching theory and vice versa, will ensure knowledge growth for generalists and specialists alike. The volume goes beyond a purely legal analysis by observing the contestation, rhetorics, the struggle for recognition of 'new' human rights, thus speaking to human rights professionals beyond the legal sphere.