The Most Human Right
The Most Human Right

Author: Eric Heinze

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0262547244

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A bold, groundbreaking argument by a world-renowned expert that unless we treat free speech as the fundamental human right, there can be no others. What are human rights? Are they laid out definitively in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the US Bill of Rights? Are they items on a checklist—dignity, justice, progress, standard of living, health care, housing? In The Most Human Right, Eric Heinze explains why global human rights systems have failed. International organizations constantly report on how governments manage human goods, such as fair trials, humane conditions of detention, healthcare, or housing. But to appease autocratic regimes, experts have ignored the primacy of free speech. Heinze argues that goods become rights only when citizens can claim them publicly and fearlessly: free speech is the fundamental right, without which the very concept of a “right” makes no sense. Heinze argues that throughout history countless systems of justice have promised human goods. What, then, makes human rights different? What must human rights have that other systems have lacked? Heinze revisits the origins of the concept, exploring what it means for a nation to protect human rights, and what a citizen needs in order to pursue them. He explains how free speech distinguishes human rights from other ideas about justice, past and present.

The Human Right
The Human Right

Author: Rice Broocks

Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM

Published: 2018-02-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0718093666

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Many Christians believe we need to choose between fighting injustice and communicating the good news of Jesus Christ. But what if failing to speak the truth is ultimately the greatest injustice of all? If we truly believe the human heart is the source of injustice and the gospel is the only real solution, shouldn’t sharing the gospel’s transforming truth be our highest priority? With his thoughtful, accessible style, Rice Broocks explores why knowing the gospel is, in fact, every person’s greatest right—and therefore the greatest justice issue of our time.Drawing on contemporary stories and rich historical sources, The Human Right answers the question, What is truth? frames evangelism as a human rights issue, explains why secularism lacks the foundation to ground human rights, gives evidence for the existence of the human soul, and describes how the Bible has shaped the modern world. The Human Right urges us persuasively toward a renewed conviction that our ultimate calling is to proclaim the gospel—the only truth that has the power to change our world, to change us, from the inside out.

The Idea of Human Rights
The Idea of Human Rights

Author: Charles R. Beitz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-07-28

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0199604371

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Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

Not Enough
Not Enough

Author: Samuel Moyn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 067498482X

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“No one has written with more penetrating skepticism about the history of human rights.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “Moyn breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.” —George Soros The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. While state violations of political rights have garnered unprecedented attention in recent decades, a commitment to material equality has quietly disappeared. In its place, economic liberalization has emerged as the dominant force. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn considers how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of broader social and economic justice. Moyn places the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift and explores why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside exploding inequality. “Moyn asks whether human-rights theorists and advocates, in the quest to make the world better for all, have actually helped to make things worse... Sure to provoke a wider discussion.” —Adam Kirsch, Wall Street Journal “A sharpening interrogation of the liberal order and the institutions of global governance created by, and arguably for, Pax Americana... Consistently bracing.” —Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books “Moyn suggests that our current vocabularies of global justice—above all our belief in the emancipatory potential of human rights—need to be discarded if we are work to make our vastly unequal world more equal... [A] tour de force.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

The Human Right to Dominate
The Human Right to Dominate

Author: Nicola Perugini

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-05-27

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0199365032

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At the turn of the millennium, a new phenomenon emerged: conservatives, who just decades before had rejected the expanding human rights culture, began to embrace human rights in order to advance their political goals. In this book, Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon account for how human rights--generally conceived as a counter-hegemonic instrument for righting historical injustices--are being deployed to further subjugate the weak and legitimize domination. Using Israel/Palestine as its main case study, The Human Right to Dominate describes the establishment of settler NGOs that appropriate human rights to dispossess indigenous Palestinians and military think-tanks that rationalize lethal violence by invoking human rights. The book underscores the increasing convergences between human rights NGOs, security agencies, settler organizations, and extreme right nationalists, showing how political actors of different stripes champion the dissemination of human rights and mirror each other's political strategies. Indeed, Perugini and Gordon demonstrate the multifaceted role that this discourse is currently playing in the international arena: on the one hand, human rights have become the lingua franca of global moral speak, while on the other, they have become reconstrued as a tool for enhancing domination.

The International Human Rights Movement
The International Human Rights Movement

Author: Aryeh Neier

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0691200998

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A fascinating history of the international human rights movement as seen by one of its founders During the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in struggles against totalitarian regimes and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement, Aryeh Neier—a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement—offers a comprehensive, authoritative account of this global force, from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its essential place in world affairs today. Neier combines analysis with personal experience, and gives an insider’s perspective on the movement’s goals, the disputes about its mission, its rise to international importance, and the challenges to come. This updated edition includes a new preface by the author.

Seeing Human Rights
Seeing Human Rights

Author: Sandra Ristovska

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0262542536

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As video becomes an important tool to expose injustice, an examination of how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism. Visual imagery is at the heart of humanitarian and human rights activism, and video has become a key tool in these efforts. The Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, the Green Movement in Iran, and Black Lives Matter in the United States have all used video to expose injustice. In Seeing Human Rights, Sandra Ristovska examines how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism through video production, verification standards, and training. The result, she argues, is a proxy profession that uses human rights videos to tap into journalism, the law, and political advocacy. Ristovska explains that this proxy profession retains some tactical flexibility in its use of video while giving up on the more radical potential and imaginative scope of video activism as a cultural practice. Drawing on detailed analysis of legal cases and videos as well as extensive interviews with staff members of such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Court (ICC), Ristovska considers the unique affordances of video and examines the unfolding relationships among journalists, human rights organizations, activists, and citizens in global crisis reporting. She offers a case study of the visual turn in the law; describes advocacy and marketing strategies; and argues that the transformation of video activism into a proxy profession privileges institutional and legal spaces over broader constituencies for public good.

On Human Rights
On Human Rights

Author: James Griffin

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-08-27

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0191623415

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What is a human right? How can we tell whether a proposed human right really is one? How do we establish the content of particular human rights, and how do we resolve conflicts between them? These are pressing questions for philosophers, political theorists, jurisprudents, international lawyers, and activists. James Griffin offers answers in his compelling new investigation of the foundations of human rights. First, On Human Rights traces the idea of a natural right from its origin in the late Middle Ages, when the rights were seen as deriving from natural laws, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the original theological background was progressively dropped and 'natural law' emptied of most of its original meaning. By the end of the Enlightenment, the term 'human rights' (droits de l'homme) appeared, marking the purge of the theological background. But the Enlightenment, in putting nothing in its place, left us with an unsatisfactory, incomplete idea of a human right. Griffin shows how the language of human rights has become debased. There are scarcely any accepted criteria, either in the academic or the public sphere, for correct use of the term. He takes on the task of showing the way towards a determinate concept of human rights, based on their relation to the human status that we all share. He works from certain paradigm cases, such as freedom of expression and freedom of worship, to more disputed cases such as welfare rights - for instance the idea of a human right to health. His goal is a substantive account of human rights - an account with enough content to tell us whether proposed rights really are rights. Griffin emphasizes the practical as well as theoretical urgency of this goal: as the United Nations recognized in 1948 with its Universal Declaration, the idea of human rights has considerable power to improve the lot of humanity around the world. We can't do without the idea of human rights, and we need to get clear about it. It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

Health as a Human Right
Health as a Human Right

Author: Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-17

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1108594301

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Does human rights law work? This book engages in this heated debate through a detailed analysis of thirty years of the right to health - perhaps the most complex human right - in Brazil. Are Brazilians better off three decades after the enactment of the right to health in the 1988 Constitution? Has the flurry of litigation experienced in Brazil helped or harmed the majority of the population? This book offers an in-depth analysis of these complex and controversial questions grounded on a wealth of empirical data. The book covers the history of the recognition of health as a human right in the 1988 Constitution through the Sanitary Movement's campaign and the subsequent three decades of what Ferraz calls the politics and judicialization of health. It challenges positions of both optimists and sceptics of human rights law and will be of interest to those looking for a more nuanced analysis.