National Human Rights Action Planning

Abstract

This book deals with human rights action planning, as a largely under-researched area, from theoretical, doctrinal, empirical, and practical perspectives in order to put forward a new account of such planning. As such, the present work provides one of the most comprehensive studies of human rights planning to date. At the theoretical level, by advancing a novel general theory of human rights planning, it offers an alternative to the traditional state-centric model of planning. This new theory contains four sub-theories: contextual, substantive, procedural, and analytical ones. At the doctrinal level, a textual analysis of core human rights conventions is conducted in order to reveal the scope and nature of the obligation to adopt a national human rights action plan and to consider how to ensure that states are in compliance with this obligation. At the empirical level, a cross-case analysis of national human rights action plans of fifty-three countries is conducted exploring the major problems of these plans in different phases and uncovering the underlying causes. At the practical level, both national and supra-national human rights governance systems are examined. At the supra-national level, a networked model of global human rights governance is suggested as a practical response strategy against the extant global governance system which hardly works as an integrated system. At the national level, after suggesting the establishment of a nation-wide network for implementing human rights, the essential parts of human rights action planning are probed in four phases putting forward some methodological techniques for each phase.