International human rights law was originally focused on universal individual rights. This book examines the developments which have seen it change to a multi-cultural approach, one more sensitive to the cultures of the people directly affected by them. It argues that this can provide benefits, but that aspects of universalism must be retained.
Drawing from a comprehensive review of legal instruments, practice, jurisprudence and literature, and using a multidisciplinary approach, this unique book brings forth the full spectrum of cultural rights, as individual and collective human rights, and offers a compelling vision for public policy.
Collective cultural rights are commonly perceived as the most neglected or least developed category of human rights. Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective endeavours to challenge this view and offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of recent developments in distinct areas of international law and jurisprudence, from every region of the world, in relation to the scope, legal content, and enforceability of such rights. Leading international scholars explore the conceptualisation and operationalisation of collective cultural rights as human rights, encompassing community rights, and discuss the ways in which such rights may collide with other, mostly individual, human rights. As such, Cultural Rights as Collective Rights – An International Law Perspective offers a cross-cutting and original overview on how the protection, recognition and enforcement of collective cultural rights affect the development, changes and formation of general international law norms.
This new book examines the relationship between culture and respect for human rights. It departs from the oft-made assumption that culture is closely linked to ideas about community. Instead, it reveals culture as a quality possessed by the individual with a serious impact on her ability to enjoy the rights and freedoms as recognised in international human rights law in meaningful and effective ways. This understanding redirects attention towards a range of issues that have long been marginalised, but which warrant a central place in human rights research and on the international human rights agenda. Special attention is given to the circumstances induced by cultural differences between people and the laws by which they are expected to live. The circumstances are created by differing tools, know-how and skills (cultural equipment), diverse settlements on matters that are ultimately indifferent from the standpoint of cosmopolitan moral law (adiaphora), and conflicts having their source in conflicting doctrinesethical, religious and philosophicaladdressing deep questions about the ultimate purpose of human life (comprehensive doctrines). Each of the circumstances shifts the focus with the aim of securing effective and adequate protection of individual freedom, as societies become increasingly diversified in cultural terms and issues arise of access to laws and public institutions, exemption from legal obligations for reasons of conscience, fair resolution of conflicts having their source in differing ethical, religious and philosophical outlooks, and, excuse for breach of law in case of involuntary ignorance.
Drawing on social-legal, cultural and media theory, this book is one of the first to examine the media politics of human rights. It examines how the media construct the story of human rights, investigating what lies behind the apparent media hostility to human rights and what has become of the original ambition to establish a human rights culture. The human rights regime has been high on the political agenda ever since the Human Rights Act 1998 was enacted. Often maligned in sections of the press, the legislation has entered popular folklore as shorthand for an overbearing government, an overzealous judiciary and exploitative claimants. This book examines a range of significant factors in the mediation of human rights, including: Euroscepticism, the war on terror, the digital reordering of the media landscape, , press concerns about an emerging privacy law and civil liberties. Mediating Human Rights is a timely exploration of the relationship between law, politics and media. It will be of immense interest to those studying and researching across Law, Media Studies, Human Rights, and Politics.
New and unremitting violence linked to state, inter-state, and private actors has precipitated a renewal of social movements, many of which act in concert with human rights ethos and legal conceptions. Yet, cultural studies has so far had little engagement or institutional connection with these movements. How can cultural studies as a progressive discipline think with, and make space for, rights-inflected legal and humanitarian practices? This book considers the ways in which cultural humanism and the critical approach to rights, and more broadly between culture and law, can be brought together to open a new intellectual space to allow cultural studies to better engage with the current challenges presented by social and political struggles worldwide. It lays out the central theses essential for constructing a critical view of human rights, and then advances a distinctive critical model of analysis that incorporates insights of postcolonial legal theorists and jurists from the Global South and important cultural theorists from the North, while rethinking law, rights, and social movements as something constituted by multiple legal modernities. Through case studies covering questions relating to sovereignty, citizenship, refugee displacement, human rights defenders, and gender and sexual rights, Law and Cultural Studies develops a means by which the practice of cultural studies can be reinvigorated around the legal spaces, institutions, and movements tied to human rights struggles. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural and media studies, critical legal studies, political theory, postcolonial studies, and human rights.
The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law provides an authoritative and original overview of one of the key branches of international law. Forty contributors comprehensively analyse the role of human rights in international law from a global perspective, examining its origins and principles, and measuring its impact on the world.
Human rights law and the legal protection of women from violence are still fairly new concepts. As a result, substantial discrepancies exist between what is decided in the halls of the United Nations and what women experience on a daily basis in their communities. Human Rights and Gender Violence is an ambitious study that investigates the tensions between global law and local justice. As an observer of UN diplomatic negotiations as well as the workings of grassroots feminist organizations in several countries, Sally Engle Merry offers an insider's perspective on how human rights law holds authorities accountable for the protection of citizens even while reinforcing and expanding state power. Providing legal and anthropological perspectives, Merry contends that human rights law must be framed in local terms to be accepted and effective in altering existing social hierarchies. Gender violence in particular, she argues, is rooted in deep cultural and religious beliefs, so change is often vehemently resisted by the communities perpetrating the acts of aggression. A much-needed exploration of how local cultures appropriate and enact international human rights law, this book will be of enormous value to students of gender studies and anthropology alike.
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.
Challenging questions arise in the effort to adequately protect the cultural rights of individuals and communities worldwide, not the least of which are questions concerning the very understanding of ‘culture’. In Cultural Rights in International Law and Discourse: Contemporary Challenges and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Pok Yin S. Chow offers an account of the present-day challenges to the articulation and implementation of cultural rights in international law. Through examining how ‘culture’ is conceptualised in different stages of contemporary anthropology, the book explores how these understandings of ‘culture’ enable us to more accurately put issues of cultural rights into perspective. The book attempts to provide analytical exits to existing conundrums and dilemmas concerning the protections of culture, cultural heritage and cultural identity.