The Struggle For Human Rights

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.

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.

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.

This book was first published in 2003. As World War II drew to a close and the world awakened to the horror wrought by white supremacists in Nazi Germany, African American leaders, led by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), sensed the opportunity to launch an offensive against the conditions of segregation and inequality in America. The 'prize' they sought was not civil rights, but human rights. Only the human rights lexicon, shaped by the Holocaust and articulated by the United Nations, contained the language and the moral power to address not only the political and legal inequality but also the education, health care, housing, and employment needs that haunted the black community. But the onset of the Cold War and rising anti-communism allowed powerful Southerners to cast those rights as Soviet-inspired. Thus the Civil Rights Movement was launched with neither the language nor the mission it needed to truly achieve black equality.

THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS combines uniquely strong coverage of human rights in relation to gender equity, feminist perspectives, and sexual orientation with the theme of a universal perspective on human rights that is sensitive to cultural differences and diversity among and within nations. The book is also comprehensive and accessible in its discussion of human rights law and the question of whether human rights are universal. DeLaet also addresses 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.

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.

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.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted 50 years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, its principal architect, predicted that a 'curious grapevine' would carry its message behind barbed wire and stone walls. This book tells the extraordinary story of how NGOs became the 'grapevine' she anticipated - sharpening our awareness about the violations of human rights, 'shaming' its most notorious abusers and creating the international mechanisms to bring about implementation of the Declaration. Korey traces how NGO's laid the groundwork for the destruction of the Soviet empire, as well as of the apartheid system in South Africa, and established the principle of accountability for crimes against humanity. The notion of human rights has progressed from being a marginal part of international relations a half century ago to stand today as a critical element in diplomatic discourse and this book shows that it is the NGOs that have placed human rights at the centre of humankind's present and future agenda.