Human Rights Monitoring and Forced Returns. Ethical and Methodological Challenges

The paper develops a critical reflection upon the methodological and ethical challenges of researching the food practices of low-income families with children. We draw on data and fieldwork experience in Portugal, within a recently completed European research project. The study aimed to understand children’s experiences and views about the place of food in their lives, drawing on sociological approaches to childhood that conceptualize children as social agents, active participants within families and competent experts on their own social and interactional worlds. These assertions underlie the project’s mixed-method approach (in-person interviews, questionnaires and photo-elicitation). We argue that beyond well-known ethical challenges (such as gatekeeping, power asymmetries, reciprocity and active participation), food and food poverty bring forth unique dilemmas, which may affect children’s participation in research. Following the dimensions suggested by Tracy, our contribution offers a reflexive account of ethics-in-practice of how we dealt with ethical dilemmas on the field.

This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. [...]

There have been calls for researchers, especially within the qualitative paradigm, to document and discuss the challenges they experience on the field while researching sensitive topics or with vulnerable groups, as failure to do so creates a missed opportunity for researchers to learn from one another. Accordingly, in this article, we reflect on the several layers of fieldwork challenges we experienced while researching with a vulnerable group (young Nigerian girls trafficked into northern Ghana) on a sensitive topic (commercial sexual exploitation). The reflections on the methodological and ethical challenges in this paper are drawn from a wider qualitative study conducted by the authors to explore the factors predicting the trafficking of young Nigerian girls into commercial sexual exploitation in Ghana’s Tamale Metropolitan area. The sensitive nature of the topic, coupled with the “invisible” manner in which the victims operate in Tamale, naturally raises many ethical and methodological challenges for researchers. The article discusses four main challenges the authors encountered in the field: (i) Accessing Hard-to-Reach Participants, (ii) Ethical Dilemmas in Consent: Demands for Payment, (iii) Trust-Building Strategies, and (iv) Researching in Risky Environments. The paper also discusses the approaches used to surmount these challenges.

BackgroundThis article discusses our reflections on ethical and methodological challenges when conducting separate interviews with individuals in dyads in the uMkhanyakude district, South Africa. Our work is embedded in an ethnographic study exploring care relationships between adolescents and their older carers in the context of a large-donor funded HIV programme. We use these reflections to discuss some of the challenges and present possible management strategies that may be adopted in conducting dyadic health research in resource-poor settings.MethodsDrawing from the relational agency, three rounds of separate interviews and participant observation were undertaken with dyads of adolescents aged between 13 and 19 and their older carers aged 50+ from October 2017 to September 2018. A reflexive journal was kept to record the interviewer's experiences of the whole research process. We identified methodological and ethical challenges from these data during the thematic analysis.ResultsA total of 36 separate interviews were conducted with six pairs of adolescent-older carer dyads (n = 12 participants). Five themes emerged: recruitment of dyads, consenting dyads, confidentiality, conducting separate interviews with adolescents and older carers, and interviewer-dyad interaction. We also illustrated how we dealt with these challenges.ConclusionsResults from this study can guide the recruitment, consenting and collecting data for health studies that employ a similar form of enquiry in LMICs. However, ethical and methodological challenges should be recognised as features of the relationships between cross-generation dyads rather than weaknesses of the method.

The African human rights system encompasses two major instruments: the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. The enforcement and monitoring mechanisms for both the Charter and the Protocol are the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. The Court has power to give advisory opinions on an issue relevant to the African Charter or any other relevant human rights instrument. The advisory opinion may be requested by African Union States, the African Union or any of its organs or any African organisation recognised by the African Union. The effectiveness of the Commission and the Court will depend on the extent to which sufficient resources are provided for them to carry out their mandates. Keywords: African Charter; African human rights system; human rights instrument; monitoring mechanisms

Bioethics-CSR Divide

Research involving migrant youth involves navigating and negotiating complex challenges in order to uphold their rights and dignity, but also all while maintaining scientific rigour. COVID-19 has changed the global...

As oral historians, we devote a great deal of time to painstakingly designing our projects, cognizant of the fact that our research requires us to interact with human beings in often intimate ways. For this same reason, though, our careful methodology and meticulously designed projects are constantly being tested. This article is a reflection on some of the ethical and methodological challenges that the authors faced during their life story interviews with Holocaust survivors in Montreal, Canada. In particular, it explores three major themes: the elaborate process of learning to “share authority” and build trust with interviewees; the limitations of “deep listening” and their implications; and the struggle to deal with contentious politics, such as perceived racism, that emerged out of some interviews. Reflection on these methodological and ethical challenges not only opens up a wider and important discussion among researchers about how practice relates to theory but also teaches us about our interviewees. For example, what does an interviewee's refusal to engage deeply about his or her past tell us about how they formed their identity in the aftermath of mass violence? Challenges, such as this one, are part of the story. They shed light on questions of narrative formation, the identity politics that result from survival, and how individual memory interacts with dominant narratives about atrocity. They force us to recognize that both our interviewees—and ourselves—are human beings, and not just collections of stories.

This study addresses the practical, methodological and ethical challenges that were found in three studies that used focus groups with people with severe mental illness, in the context of community mental health services in Brazil. Focus groups are a powerful tool in health research that need to be better discussed in research with people with severe mental illness, in the context of community mental health facilities. This study is based on the authors' experience of conducting and analyzing focus groups in three different cities - Campinas, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador - between 2006-2010. The implementation of focus groups with people with severe mental illness is discussed in the following categories; planning, group design, sampling, recruitment, group interview guides, and conduction. The importance of connecting mental healthcare providers as part of the research context is emphasized. Ethical issues and challenges are highlighted, as well as the establishment of a sensitive and empathic group atmosphere, wherein mutual respect can facilitate interpersonal relations and enable people diagnosed with severe mental illness to make sense of the experience. We emphasize the relevance of the interaction between clinical and research teams in order to create collaborative work, achieve inquiry aims, and elicit narratives of mental health users and professionals.

This paper will look at the potential of artificial intelligence in the field of social work as a helping profession focused on social justice, social development, democracy, equality and the protection of human rights. Artificial intelligence represents a complex area that is still not advanced enough, especially in the field of social work. In this sense, AI is seen as a discipline and science that should make everyday life easier, while on the other hand there are still numerous moral and ethical issues, especially in the field of human rights protection. At first glance, AI and social work may seem like an unlikely combination, or even as conflicting disciplines; however, the paper will show the strengths, and the common tendencies of the aforementioned disciplines. Additionally, the paper will present what the main ethical dilemmas and challenges in the implementation of artificial intelligence in the field of social work are, as well as what various state-of-the-art mechanisms are provided at the moment. Finally, the paper leaves room for discussion about the digitalisation of social work, the practicality of applying AI in social work, as well as the possibilities of more proactive protection of human rights and the establishment of new policies and practices.

The article examines the main international legal and ethical aspects of the regulation of artificial intelligence. Key issues related to legal uncertainty, ethical dilemmas and the need to protect human rights in the context of the rapid development of AI technologies are considered. The role of international organizations and countries, in particular the USA and Ukraine, in the formation of global standards and norms regarding AI is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the need to unify approaches to regulating AI and ensuring security at the international level. The development of artificial intelligence has led to the emergence of new legal and ethical challenges that require the attention of the international community. The lack of generally accepted standards and regulatory mechanisms in AI creates risks for law enforcement, increases the likelihood of confrontations among states and may violate human rights. It has been established that ethical aspects, such as the transparency of algorithms, responsibility for decisions made by AI, and inequality in legal regulation, are critically important for ensuring the safety and ethics of the use of artificial intelligence systems; therefore, a promising task is the improvement of international legal norms that would regulate research questions. The author’s generalizations regarding the creation of universal ethical principles, a global coordination centre, standards of responsibility, mechanisms for monitoring the observance of human rights, and ensuring transparency and accountability, can significantly contribute to forming an efficient legal framework for using AI. The joint efforts of the international community can ensure a balance between innovation and the protection of human rights, which will create an ethical and safe environment for the development of artificial intelligence technologies. Coordination of efforts will avoid legal disputes and contribute to the coherence of approaches to AI globally.

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the relationship between history, memory, archiving and trans experiences. This body of work has shown how questioning the praxis of archiving from the vantage point of trans experiences has the potential to problematise cis-heteronormative assumptions around the body, time and space and to queer the epistemological premises around what constitutes archives and archival practices. In this article, we present the experience of the project ArchiviST* – Archivi Storia Trans (Trans History Archives) which aims to create the first archive exclusively dedicated to the history of trans lives and activism in contemporary Italy. The project has been promoted by Trans Identity Movement, the most influential and long-lived trans association in Italy. Since its birth in 1979, Trans Identity Movement informally collected a substantial documentary heritage concerning trans and LGBTQIA+ history as a political practice to preserve the counter-memories of its people and movements. The ArchiviST* project carries out the inventorying and digitising of the materials, together with the collection of original video-recorded interviews with pioneering activists of the trans movement. By presenting a reflection on the process of ‘reconstructing’ an archive in this context, we unpack and explore some of the key issues surrounding trans archiving and collective memories in the Italian context: what counts as collective memory? What types of relationships are established between trans memories and the documents present in the archive? What memories have (not) been told, and what voices and subjects have (not) emerged as protagonists? We encourage a reflexive attitude towards the practice of trans archiving to problematise established historiographical categories, such as time, private/public, political engagement, life history and memory and to recognise the ethical and methodological challenges that such a path poses to historiography and archive research in general.

Call to action for equitable access to human milk for vulnerable infants

Over the last 2 decades, several international indices have been developed to describe the status of older persons. None, however, have examined their human rights. The International Older Persons' Human Rights Index (IOPHRI) fills in this gap by analyzing the formal legislative foundation of human rights for older people. The objective of this exploratory study is to examine the IOPHRI while comparing the legislation in 6 countries. A comparative international exploratory study comparing the human rights legislation of 6 countries: United States, Chile, Ireland, South Africa, India, and Australia in 5 different human rights domains: constitutional, protection, familial and informal support, planning, and empowerment. The findings suggest that the actual relationship between formal human rights of older persons and the real world is complex: for example, while the IOPHRI index places South Africa in first place, it is far behind compared with all other participants in the Global AgeWatch Index (which measures objective elements such as life expectancy at 60, or poverty rates in old age). Measuring and indexing human rights of older persons reveal significant methodological issues. Beyond these methodological challenges, comparing the ranking of the IOPHRI to nonlegalistic indices raises significant questions about the relationship between formal human rights and the actual living experiences of older persons.

Sexual violence against children is an extraordinary crime that demands firm legal enforcement to ensure both deterrence and protection for victims. To address this issue, the Indonesian government introduced chemical castration through Government Regulation in Lieu of Lieu of Law (Perppu) Number 1 of 2016 as an additional sanction for perpetrators of sexual violence against children. This study critically examines the implementation of chemical castration in Indonesia by highlighting the legal framework and the tension between deterrence and the protection of human rights. The analysis draws on relevant legislation, criminal law concepts, and selected court decisions to evaluate the policy’s practical and ethical challenges. The findings reveal that chemical castration has not been an effective deterrent due to the absence of technical implementation guidelines and objections from medical professionals, particularly the Indonesian Medical Association (IDI), based on professional ethics. These obstacles have weakened both deterrence and rehabilitation efforts, creating ethical and legal dilemmas in their enforcement. Therefore, a policy reformulation is necessary by positioning chemical castration within a double-track system that integrates punishment and rehabilitation to achieve a balanced approach between deterrence, offender recovery, and human rights protection. Future implementation should be supported by clear procedural standards, inter-agency coordination, and ethical oversight to ensure that the policy aligns with the principles of justice and human dignity.