Character Of Rights Research Articles

Human rights and divine holiness

Abstract Theists commonly hold that God endows humans with rights. Standard explanations draw on natural law theory or divine command theory. However, the natural law account does not give God a central role in explaining our rights, and the divine command account does not assign human nature a significant explanatory role. A successful theistic explanation of human rights must meet three conditions: (1) God must directly explain human rights; (2) human nature must also directly explain human rights; (3) this dual contribution must explain why morality forbids rights violations by grounding the deontic reasons associated with rights. I propose a holiness account of rights. On this view, God endows human nature with rights by making human nature holy, and God does so by fashioning humans with one of God's essential properties: the capacity to love. This theory satisfies all three conditions and explains the deontological character of rights.

THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN THE PROTECTION OF BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS

Abstract. The article addresses the question of the role of the state in the protection of human rights and freedoms. Like states, rights and freedoms are also created on the basis of social conventions, and any reference to the universal nature or natural character of rights and freedoms is only an ideological moment in the pursuit of political goals. The basic prerequisite for the protection of rights and freedoms is the establishment of organised coercion in the form of state power which brings under its authority the multitude of different interests and diverse ways of implementing justice. The conclusive findings show that for its successful introduction into the lives of individuals, the moral discourse of universal human rights and freedoms needs effective state authority that embeds these rights and freedoms into the foundations of the legitimacy of its own existence. Keywords: Constitutionalism, the state, human rights and freedoms, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

Theorizing the social foundations of exceptional security politics: Rights, emotions and community

This article theorizes the social processes through which purportedly liberal democratic states compromise fundamental rights in times of perceived security crises. It has become increasingly common to suggest that a general culture of fear serves both as the motor and the outcome of exceptional security politics. This article suggests instead that the transgression of fundamental rights in the name of security is intimately connected to collective feelings of humiliation and the reassertion of self-worth through efforts to re-establish the integrity of imagined communities. To demonstrate this, the article highlights the dual character of rights, having both a formal and a symbolic function, associated with collective emotions. By theorizing the connections between rights, emotions and belonging the article offers the building blocks for a more nuanced and possibly more accurate understanding of why exceptional security politics tend to elicit such broad public support in spite of its often-glaring contradictions to fundamental principles of liberal democracy.

Human Rights, Legal Pluralism, and the Freedom of Religion in Malaysia

AbstractThe so-called crisis of human rights requires a precise diagnosis. Through a theoretical discussion of human rights and legal pluralism in the context of the freedom of religion in Malaysia, this paper suggests that the crisis ought to be understood as something vital to the character of rights. Crisis is not tangential to the human rights project: rights are political objects engendering political responses. Beginning with an excursion into legal positivism and liberalism, the paper argues that analyses of rights based on abstraction and presumptions of homogeneity are confounded in contexts of contested plurality. Secondly, legal pluralism is raised as a more suitable framework for rights. Finally, Augustine and Schmitt offer some clues as to how the political status of human rights might be properly acknowledged. The prominent Malaysian case ofLina Joyprovides an ongoing commentary on the dangers of divorcing human rights from this essential political character.

Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition. By Lewis Perry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. xv + 407. $35.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition . By Lewis Perry . New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 2013. xv + 407. $35.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis impressively comprehensive survey traces the practice and theory of disobedience the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Violating the law in the name of higher morality is, according to Perry, a distinctive American that flourished every age and achieved special prominence the decades before the Civil War and the 1960s (1). Perry moves deftly from abolition to Occupy, from campaigns against Indian removal to Operation Rescue, touching en route on women's rights, temperance, pacifism, labor organizing, and other impulses for social transformation.Several thematic arguments give shape to Perry's chronological narrative. The first is encapsulated the subtitle: gently resisting the transnational tendencies of other American studies scholars, Perry insists on the American provenance of disobedience. This approach to social change appeals to democracy-loving Americans because it is civil as well as disobedient. It allows the activist to affirm the general validity of democratic institutions even while violating specific unjust laws. Perry's stress on the Americanness of disobedience helps him underscore its character as tradition that is continuous over time. Too much emphasis on the Gandhian character of rights, for example, would obscure its homegrown reliance on abolitionist precedents. On the other hand, Perry's approach obscures the profoundly cosmopolitan sensibilities of most disobedients. In the abolitionist era, Henry David Thoreau read the sacred texts of India, William Lloyd Garrison declared that our country is the world, and William Wells Brown began resisting Jim Crow segregation after experiencing integration England. Their twentieth-century successors filled their homes with icons of Mohandas Gandhi, Oscar Romero, and Nelson Mandela. Few imagined that the United States was the only arena for their activism.A second guiding theme is the religious origin of disobedience. Though many activists claim the Boston Tea Party as inspiration, Perry suggests that it was less influential than the refusal of eighteenth-century Baptists to pay church taxes. Shortly before abolitionists began using disobedience on large scale, group of protestant missionaries to the Cherokee accepted imprisonment rather than comply with the Jacksonian policy of Indian removal. I found these stories to be the most exciting part of the book, but they raise questions. If eighteenth-century Baptists New England are part of the story, why not sixteenth-century Anabaptists Switzerland? And if the Baptist campaign against state religion launched the tradition, why were Baptists proportionately under-represented subsequent disobedience campaigns, while establishmentarian Congregationalists and Unitarians were over-represented? (The even more over-represented Quakers might offer clue, since they had both an anti-establishmentarian theology and heritage of quasi-establishment Pennsylvania.)Perry's training as an intellectual historian informs third theme. He is fascinated with the theory underlying disobedience, and repeatedly skewers activists for seeking to circumscribe it within narrow definition. Civil disobedience, he insists, has never been restricted to pacifists. …

Rights Transmission by Mimesis: the Biomedicine Convention in Central Europe

All new postcommunist members of the European Union signed the Council of Europe's Biomedicine Convention, and all but one subsequently ratified it. Although some studies have shown strong mimetic tendencies in human rights transmission, the controversial nature of the Convention suggested that in this instance the process of rights transfer would entail serious substantive consideration of the multifarious issues raised. Left-wing parties would constitute the main opposition to the Convention. However, examination of the parliamentary process in the nine ratifying countries shows that this was not the case. The process was mimetic, with no indication of engagement by parliamentary deputies, specialist committees, professional bodies, or the wider public. The pull of “Europe” and the legitimizing effects of international treaty ratification, the lack of challenge to state sovereignty, the pressures for regional conformity, and the phenomenon of legislative overload in Central and Eastern Europe can partly explain the imitative character of rights’ transmission in these cases. The implications of mimetic rights transmission also suggest a continuing research agenda in this arena.

Afterword to: 'Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key': The Social Life of Rights

In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early 20th-century “legal realists” and look closely at the underlying assumptions and hidden practices of political and legal processes. Studying the “social life of human rights” would involve focusing on, inter alia, the performative dimensions of human rights, the dynamics of social mobilization, and the attitudinal changes of elite and nonelite social actors toward formulations of “rights” and “justice,” both inside and outside the legal process. I conclude with a review of recent anthropological research on human rights epistemology and evaluate its implications for human rights policy.

Afterword to “Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key”: The Social Life of Human Rights

In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early‐20th‐century “legal realists” and look closely at the underlying assumptions and hidden practices of political and legal processes. Studying the “social life of human rights” would involve focusing on, inter alia, the performative dimensions of human rights, the dynamics of social mobilization, and the attitudinal changes of elite and nonelite social actors towards formulations of “rights” and “justice,” both inside and outside the legal process. I conclude with a review of recent anthropological research on human rights epistemology and evaluate its implications for human rights policy.

Foucault, Critique and Rights

This paper outlines Foucault's genealogical conception of critique and argues that it is not inconsistent with his appeals to concepts of right so long as these are under stood in terms of his historical and naturalistic approach to rights. This approach is explained by reference to Nietzsche's account of the origins of rights and duties and the example of Aboriginal rights is used to exemplify the historical character of rights understood as internal to power relations. Drawing upon the contemporary ‘externalist’ approach to rights, it is argued that the normative force of rights can only come from within historically available moral and political discourses. Reading Foucault's 1978-1979 lectures on liberal governmentality in this manner suggests that his call for new forms of right in order to criticise disciplinary power should be answered by reference to concepts drawn from the liberal tradition of governmental reason.

Der Optionscharakter von Bezugsrechten

The analysis of stock purchase rights, or shortly rights, has a long tradition in Germany. In most cases the call option character of rights is neglected. This paper considers the valuation of rights based on option pricing theory. A formula is derived which can be implemented in conventional financial software packages. A further part of the paper deals with the empirical analysis of rights pricing as observed in real markets and identifies factors with an influence on this pricing.

The Structural Context of Novel Rights Claims: Southern Civil Rights Organizing, 1961-1966

Theorists of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) have argued that the abstract, individualistic, and state-dependent character of rights makes them of dubious value for groups fighting for social change. Southern civil rights organizers in the early 1960s engaged in the kind of power-oriented strategy that CLS writers advocate in lieu of a rights-oriented one. However, the rights claims they made inside and outside courtrooms were essential to their political organizing efforts. Far from narrowing collective aspirations to the limits of the law, activists' extension of rights claims to the “unqualified” legitimated assaults on economic inequality, governmental decisionmaking in poverty programs, and the Vietnam War. What made possible this novel formulation was not only the multivalent character of rights but also key features of the social, political, and organizational contexts within which rights were advanced.

Civil Law and the Transformation of State Property in Post-Socialist Economies: Alternatives to Privatization

CIVIL LAW AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF STATE PROPERTY IN POST- SOCIALIST ECONOMIES: ALTERNATIVES TO PRIVATIZATION Andrei A. Baevt TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION II. DECENTRALIZATION AND ITS ROLE IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF A PLANNED ECONOMY INTO A MARKET ORIENTED SYSTEM III. TRANSFORMATION OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY WITHOUT PRIVATIZATION ...... A. The American and Western approach: Do as w e do . B. Discrepant facta cum dictis IV. THE ECONOMIC AND LEGAL DEFINITION OF PRIVATIZATION IN LIGHT OF THE POST- SOCIALIST METAMORPHOSIS A. Distinguishing features of post-socialist privatization B. Definition of privatization: Economic and legal approaches V. ALTERNATIVES TO PRIVATIZATION: LEGAL ISSUES A. The variety of legal forms of ownership ........ B. The legal term private ownership and its recognition by law VI. THE LEGAL CHARACTER OF RIGHTS OF STATE ENTERPRISES ON ASSETS ASSIGNED TO TH EM t Assistant Professor of Law, Sverdlovsk Law Institute, Yekaterinburg, Rus- sia. J.D. 1989, Sverdlovsk Law Institute. Master of the Science of Law, 1992, The Urals Academy of Law, Russia. LL.M student at UCLA Law School, 1993.

Toward an Employee Responsibilities and Rights Paradigm

Current changes in the nature of the workforce, organizational structures, and institutions of society underlie the considerable, and growing, worldwide orientation toward a workplace responsibilities and rights paradigm. Analysis of the moral, legal, bureaucratic, and social construction of reality literature provides a broad definition of rights and responsibilities based on (a) the basic injunction to do no harm, (b) the obligatory character of rights, and (c) the reciprocal nature of workplace interrelationships. Further, the article analyzes in detail the development of rights-responsibilities concerns in modern workplaces. It identifies some major characteristics of employee! employer responsibilities and rights, and also provides a scheme for studying, understanding, and organizing knowledge in the emerging field underscored by the notions of responsibilities and rights. The underlying paradigm suggested by the article can be understood in terms of two dimensions: Focus are (e.g., organizational entry, job incumbency, continued emmployment, and postemployment issues) and approaches, perspectives, or strategies (e.g., philosophical, legal, collective activity, human resource rights, and management education strategies).

The Legal Character of Rights under "Governmental Licenses"

The Legal Character of Rights under "Governmental Licenses"