Rescuing Human Rights

Rescuing Human Rights

Author: Hurst Hannum

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-02-14

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1108417485

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Focuses on understanding human rights as they really are and their proper role in international affairs.


Human Rights Standards

Human Rights Standards

Author: Makau Mutua

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1438459394

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A bracing critique of human rights law and activism from the perspective of the Global South. How are human rights norms made, who makes them, and why? In Human Rights Standards, Makau Mutua traces the history of the human rights project and critically explores how the norms of the human rights movement have been created. Examining key texts and documents published since the inception of the human rights movement at the end of World War II, he crafts a bracing critique of these works from the hitherto underutilized perspective of the Global South. Attention is focused on the deficits of the international order and how that order, which is defined by multiple asymmetries, defines human rights in a manner that exhibits normative gaps and cultural biases. Mutua identifies areas of further norm development and concludes that norm-creating processes must be inclusive and participatory to garner legitimacy across various cleavages and divides. The result is the first truly comprehensive critical look at the making of human rights norms and standards and, as such, will be an invaluable resource for students, scholars, activists, and policymakers interested in this important topic.


Human Rights in International Relations

Human Rights in International Relations

Author: David P. Forsythe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-05-01

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1139451030

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This new edition of David Forsythe's successful textbook provides an authoritative overview of the place of human rights in international politics in an age of terrorism. The book focuses on four central themes: the resilience of human rights norms, the importance of 'soft' law, the key role of non-governmental organizations, and the changing nature of state sovereignty. Human rights standards are examined according to global, regional, and national levels of analysis with a separate chapter dedicated to transnational corporations. This second edition has been updated to reflect recent events, notably the creation of the ICC and events in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and new sections have been added on subjects such as the correlation between world conditions and the fate of universal human rights. Containing chapter-by-chapter guides to further reading and discussion questions, this book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students of human rights, and their teachers. David Forsythe received the Distinguished Scholar Award for 2007 from the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association.


Human Dignity and Human Rights

Human Dignity and Human Rights

Author: Pablo Gilabert

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-11-08

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0192562134

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Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is human dignity, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.


Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice

Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice

Author: Jack Donnelly

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780801487767

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(unseen), $12.95. Donnelly explicates and defends an account of human rights as universal rights. Considering the competing claims of the universality, particularity, and relativity of human rights, he argues that the historical contingency and particularity of human rights is completely compatible with a conception of human rights as universal moral rights, and thus does not require the acceptance of claims of cultural relativism. The book moves between theoretical argument and historical practice. Rigorous and tightly-reasoned, material and perspectives from many disciplines are incorporated. Paper edition Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Gender-Sensitive Norm Interpretation by Regional Human Rights Law Systems

Gender-Sensitive Norm Interpretation by Regional Human Rights Law Systems

Author: Maria Sjöholm

Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Published: 2017-09-25

Total Pages: 775

ISBN-13: 9004343571

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In Gender-Sensitive Norm Interpretation by Regional Human Rights Law Systems Maria Sjöholm examines the jurisprudence on gender-based harm in the European, Inter-American and African regional human rights law systems from the viewpoint of feminist legal methods and theories. By offering indicators relevant for gender-sensitive norm interpretation, Maria Sjöholm identifies inconsistencies in the current regional legal frameworks with regard to the protection of women concerning such violations as domestic violence, human trafficking, sexual violence, forced sterilization and restrictions on other reproductive rights. The book offers an in-depth account not only of the manner in which such harm has been recognized through integration in general human rights law treaties, but also the categorization of such as particular human rights norms by regional human rights courts and commissions.


Implementing Business and Human Rights Norms in Africa: Law and Policy Interventions

Implementing Business and Human Rights Norms in Africa: Law and Policy Interventions

Author: Oyeniyi Abe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-05-15

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1000588211

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This book examines the contemporary and contentious question of the critical connections between business and human rights, and the implementation of socially responsible norms in developing countries, with particular reference to Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Business enterprises and transnational corporate actors operate in a complex global environment, especially when operating in high risks sectors such as oil and gas, mining, construction, banking, and health care amongst others. Understanding human rights responsibilities, impacts, and socially responsible behaviour for companies is therefore an essential component of corporate risk management in our current world. The release of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, an instrument consisting of 31 principles on this issue, has further underscored the emergence of a rapidly developing set of international law norms on human rights responsibilities of businesses and transnational corporations. It has also shaped the discourse on corporate accountability for human rights. In addition to minimizing litigation, financial and reputational risks, understanding and demonstrating corporate respect for human rights is vital to building a culture of trust and integrity amongst local communities, investors, and shareholders. While Africa has been at the receiving end of deleterious activities of corporate actors, it has failed to address corporate impunity and human rights violations by non-state actors. Questions abound revolving around the underpinnings of a corporate responsibility to respect human rights, that is, how non-western and particularly African conceptions of respect may help develop a beyond do no net harm approach to respect; policy discourses on human rights due diligence, human rights impact assessment; mandating corporate respect for human rights in both domestic and international law. This book examines, clarifies, and unpacks the guiding principles of a rights-based approach to development and social inclusion. It offers an excellent exposition of regulatory capacity, institutional efficacy, and democratic legitimacy of governance institutions that shape development including a comprehensive analysis of how states are shaping business and human rights discourses locally to develop a critical understanding of identified issues by exploring the latest theories through comparative lenses.


Human Rights

Human Rights

Author: Makau Mutua

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-07-03

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0812204158

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In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not succeeded in creating common ground and deep agreement as to the scope, content, and philosophical bases for human rights. Makau Mutua argues that the human rights enterprise inappropriately presents itself as a guarantor of eternal truths without which human civilization is impossible. Mutua contends that in fact the human rights corpus, though well meaning, is a Eurocentric construct for the reconstitution of non-Western societies and peoples with a set of culturally biased norms and practices. Mutua maintains that if the human rights movement is to succeed, it must move away from Eurocentrism as a civilizing crusade and attack on non-European peoples. Only a genuine multicultural approach to human rights can make it truly universal. Indigenous, non-European traditions of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas must be deployed to deconstruct—and to reconstruct—a universal bundle of rights that all human societies can claim as theirs.