Human Rights Law and Practice

Abstract

The book, Human Rights Law and Practice, critically examines the evolution of contemporary human rights law and practice with special reference to India. It evaluates the ongoing discourse on various issues relating to life, liberty, equality and human dignity and their reflections in international human rights law referring the state practice through Constitutional guarantees, judicial decisions as well as through enacting appropriate legislations. The book is divided into nine Chapters. The Chapter 1 is preliminary which discusses theoretical foundations of human rights law. The Chapter 2, namely, “international bill of human rights” demonstrates various facets of civil and political rights as well as economic, social and cultural rights. While the Chapter 3 is devoted to discuss the importance of human rights law in protection against inhuman wrongs, the Chapter 4 demonstrates a large number of debates oncerning human right to development and protection of environment. The Chapter 5 explores various issues relating to human rights in Indian Constitutional law, while the Chapter 6 discusses role of human rights law in protecting women and children. The scope and ambit of the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities have been debated during last few decades. Therefore, the Chapter 7 discusses the function of human rights law for protection of indigenous peoples, whereas the Chapter 8 is devoted to discuss the contour of the human rights law that deals with minority protection. The persons with disabilities have not only been discriminated against in almost all societies throughout history but they are even excluded from the societal mainstream and denied their basic human rights. Therefore, the Chapter 9 examines the utility and justifications of human rights law in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities. Thus, the division of Chapters of the book is excellent as the initial Chapters have discussed mostly individual rights and rest of the Chapters have thrown light on the collective rights of women, children, minorities, indigenous “peoples” as well as the right to have good environment and balanced development.