Construction Of Human Rights Research Articles

On the value orientations of the Russian version of human rights

The article proposes several ideas that make up the ideological, legal, and ethical prerequisites, which, in the author’s opinion, have a significant impact on the formatting and reformatting of the construction of human rights in the modern Russian version. Regulatory and law enforcement decisions are used as demonstration samples of the results of this impact, mainly from the field of family and work, including their doctrinal interpretation. Among these guidelines are the ideas of national sovereignty of approaches to human rights, their constitutional and judicial interpretation based on discretion, «weighing» public and private interests, as well as the actual development of ambiguous rights and freedoms, strengthening the role of the duty structure, subtle interaction of formal legal, ethical and religious principles.

Critical reflections about plural law, Western constructions of human rights, and occupational justice: From Indigenous and African cosmovisions

ABSTRACT Importance: This is a provocative, interactive dialogue calling for expansion and enrichment of the concept of occupational justice beyond its first publication in 2000. It is necessary to refine the concept beyond its roots in Western contexts, bringing it into dialogue with ideas of plural law to think about human rights and occupational justice from different experiences such as African and Indigenous. Objective: This study aims to discuss the applicability and representativeness of occupational justice terminology in different contexts. Theoretical and epistemic research: This theoretical and epistemic research presents a critical reflection about decolonizing everyday practices by building occupational justice comprehension based on organic and plural circular rights and justice. Findings: Human rights are not universal in their applicability; rather, they are specific to Western culture. Concepts of occupational justice based on human rights have not questioned this logic, therefore, universalizing these precepts of occupational justice is a new form of epistemic and cognitive colonization of the discipline. Reflecting on the plural construction of occupational rights and justice based on Indigenous and African cosmovisions points us to paths of the right to life in its diversity. The idea is to build everyday organic justice open to various rationalities and to multiple ways of existing, feeling, and doing. Conclusions and relevance: In order to decolonize, it is necessary to uncover existing ways of life and be open to other inventive possibilities of everyday life, seeking a break with modern rationality. This critical reflection is a pathway to decolonizing everyday practices and actions. It starts building the concept based on organic, circular, and plural rights and justices.

DOCTRINAL AND JURISPRUDENTIAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS

In the last century, human dignity became a principle recognized in the Constitution of different States and in international treaties, after the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), reinforced by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ( ICESCR) (1976). These facts gave relevance to the theme and drew attention to the emergence, implications and foundation of human rights. The problem examined in this article is the contribution of Miguel Reale's legal theory to these questions. Reale's three-dimensional philosophy of Law is juxtaposed to the recognition that the construction of human rights is a historical process initiated in ancient Rome. This process gained consistency with studies of the person during the Middle Ages. At that time, there was still a hierarchical view of dignity, which came from ancient Rome and lasted until the emergence of the liberal state. If dignity initially depended on the status or position of the individual, it gradually extended to all men. Reale's theory explains how this process took place, having as a background the characterization of values ​​as a cultural object of its own, with a historical character. In this axiology, the human person is the most important value and source of all others, just what the UN document recognizes.

Human rights mechanism: a theoretical perspective

Present article is an attempt to understand the process of individual realisation, social recognition, legal codification and political enforcement of human rights through the systems approach. The study implies that the process of social composition and political construction of human rights can be referred to as human rights mechanism. In the article, various processing units of the human rights mechanism, its operating structures and their functions are defined and explicated. Along with this, the article also explains the energy setting the mechanism in motion, besides interpreting the objectives of the mechanism and the capacity as well as conflicts of the mechanism to achieve the objective.

Economic Analysis of Law and Protection of Economic and Social Rights

The article reveals the mechanism of ensuring human rights through the prism ofeconomic analysis of law and weighing of constitutional values. The relationship between the economicanalysis of law and the principle of proportionality as criteria for the protection of economic andsocial rights is to ensure a balance of private and public interests. The principle of proportionalityis important in defining the non-discrimination and guaranteeing equal access to social assistance.The first part reveals the role of constitutional justice in protecting economic and social rights.The Constitutional Court of Ukraine protects economic and social rights in accordance with theconstitutionally conforming interpretation of laws pursuant to doctrines of direct action and thehorizontal effect of human rights. The second part of the paper focuses on the role of administrativejustice in the protection of social rights, in particular in the light of the legal construction of humanrights. Finally, differentia specifica protection of the social rights on the example of the right tofreedom of choice of occupation and profession and the right to medical care are highlighted. Thedoctrine of the duty to protect orients the government first of all to provide the infrastructure forthe realization of human rights while respecting human dignity and to take negative and positiveactions to ensure human rights.

‘Moral and material resources’ and the social construction of India’s Right to Food Act

ABSTRACT The case study presented in this article analyses the social construction of India’s Right to Food Act of 2013 in light of the extant literature on the social construction of human rights. It argues that Lockwood’s novel hypothesis – that human rights are created by elite actors using the enhanced ‘moral and material resources’ that they have at their disposal, not in their own self-interests, but in the interests of the less advantaged – is borne up by the present case study, (although less advantaged social actors were involved in the campaign for the Act). The article also seeks to extend Lockwood’s theory by examining which moral and material resources contributed the most to the creation of the Act and why. Finally, drawing on Waters, the article proposes that political elites’ need to consolidate political support was an important factor in securing the Act. In conclusion, this paper argues that further research on the perceived needs of the less advantaged in respect of the Right to Food Act’s content must be undertaken if we are to be sure it genuinely reflects their interests. The article is based on in depth socio-historical research including a review of hundreds of documents and 37 interviews.

Human rights politic in postmodern world

Human Rights are a complex meta-legal phenomenon that serves to justify and legitimize the existing law and order. Human Rights are not rules of law or legal relations. They are similar with law principles. The subject of the article is a theoretical understanding of human rights in the post-modern world. The aim of the study is to conceptualize human rights in the context of post-modernity. The research methodology is determined by the post-classical research program developed by the author over the past twenty years. In relation to the topic of the article, it involves the study of the construction of human rights and their practical reproduction. Human rights from the point of view of the sociology of law is the actual legal status of a person in the relevant legal system. Human rights define and limit legal policy. At the same time, the content of human rights is determined by the legal policy. Human rights can only be justified from the standpoint of the prevailing values. However, in the modern world, values are contextual and relatable. Therefore, only pragmatism as an abstract value can be the basis of human rights in the post-modern world. The main problem of modern philosophy and theory of law is the impossibility of meaningfully and universally define the measure of human rights. Only an abstract Declaration of human rights can be universal and meaningful. Their specific content is always contextual. It is determined by the policy in the field of human rights. Human rights policy is, on the one hand, the construction of social ideas about the content of human rights. Further, it is the concretization of these representations in the appropriate forms of law. On the other hand, human rights policy is a reproduction of these ideas in discursive practices. In these types of practices, human rights are implemented in a de facto legal order.

Los derechos humanos para las personas LGBT y sus limitantes frente al modelo de la ciudadanía normativa

Los derechos humanos se implementan en el marco de los Estados democráticos, como un dispositivo potente que fortalece la calidad de las democracias, se posicionan como un discurso de verdad que resuelve las deficiencias de los Estados-nación. No obstante, a estos últimos, se eximen muchas veces de sus responsabilidades cotidianas; así como de una autoreflexión sobre el modelo normativo de ciudadanía generado por la democracia liberal que propicia, por su propia lógica, exclusiones que a su vez subsanan los derechos humanos, por lo que se cae en una tramposa legitimación de las democracias. El Estado, aunque democrático, tiene sexo y eso le hace generar cierto tipo de exclusiones relacionadas con la población LGBT; por consiguiente, el objetivo de este trabajo es analizar los caminos que se han tomado en la construcción de los derechos humanos para las personas LGBT, dentro de los contextos democráticos, y si estos son los más idóneos para romper con el orden heteronormativo, patriarcal y binario que apuntala la discriminación hacia estas poblaciones en el día a día, así como discutir las respectivas limitantes.

Os direitos da mulher à luz do sistema universal de proteção e o potencial integrador dos tratados internacionais de direitos humanos: diálogos entre o global e o local

Os principais documentos internacionais de tutela dos direitos humanos estabelecem a igualdade como um direito a ser efetivado, tendo este sido proclamado em diversas declarações. Não obstante, tal igualdade tem permanecido meramente formal, sendo árdua a tarefa de transformá-la em igualdade real entre mulheres e homens, principalmente quando se constata que a construção histórica dos direitos humanos sempre ocorreu com a exclusão da mulher e o reforço de ideologias patriarcais. O resultado desse desigual é a vulnerabilidade da mulher, advinda de um modelo de sociedade patriarcal, que afeta diretamente o cumprimento dos direitos humanos. Com base neste cenário, o presente estudo tem por objetivo apresentar os principais tratados internacionais relacionados com a proteção aos direitos das mulheres, em especial a Convenção sobre Eliminação de Todas as Formas de Discriminação contra a Mulher, adotando como técnica de pesquisa a revisão bibliográfica, manejada a partir do método dedutivo. Isso, com vistas a analisar como estes tratados são recepcionados e como essas normas internacionais influem ou podem influir na conformação do ordenamento jurídico brasileiro. O presente estudo parte da hipótese de que o devido enfrentamento das circunstâncias que propiciam a situação de vulnerabilidade de mulheres, atrelado ao combate à desigualdade de gênero é essencial para o combate da discriminação contra a mulher, e consequente proteção dos direitos humanos, razão pela qual é temática objeto de preocupação de várias instâncias internacionais.

Retreating rights: Human rights, pre-theoretical praxes and student activism in South African universities

This paper is a recognition-theoretical reading of a research-study on pre-theoretical understandings of human rights amongst university students as ways to logically anchor agential options for student social activism. The study shows that the expected legal and political constructions of human rights are discursively dominant. However, from the overall results of the study, it appears students have more complex pre-theoretical understandings of human rights from which they derive justice-orientations as sources for activism. We conclude this has deliberative implications for human rights praxes.

Corporate respect for human rights: meaning, scope, and the shifting order of discourse

Purpose– Drawing on Fairclough (1989, 2005), the purpose of this paper is to explore how respect for human rights is emerging and being operationalized in the discourse of 30 Fortune 500 companies in the mining, pharmaceutical and chemical industries at two key points in the recent evolution of the UN’s business and human rights agenda. Specifically the paper explores the scope of rights for which corporations are accountable and, more specifically, the degree of responsibility a company assumes for enacting these rights.Design/methodology/approach– The authors draw on Fairclough (1992) and Mashaw (2007) in a critical discourse analysis of corporate human rights disclosures of ten companies in each of the chemical, mining and pharmaceutical industries at two points in time coinciding with: first, the publication in 2008 of the Protect, Respect, Remedy policy framework; and second, the endorsement by the UN in 2011, of a set of Guiding Principles designed to implement this framework.Findings– The study finds four grammars of respect and three different scopes of rights within specific corporate accountably disclosures on their responsibility to respect rights. Corporate constructions of human rights are broad: from labour rights, through social and political rights, to the right to health and a clean environment. The corporate discourse is one of promoting, realizing and upholding rights that construct the corporation as an autonomous source of power beyond the state.Practical implications– The paper contends that the structuring of this emerging discourse is important, not only because the meaning and scope of corporate respect for rights affects the lived experience of some of the most vulnerable in society, but also because it reflects a shifting the relationship between the state, business and society (Muchlinski 2012).Originality/value– The authors develop a way of conceptualizing business human rights responsibilities and contend that the corporate human rights discourse of respect reflects a significant reconfiguration of political power.

Human Rights and Social Work: Beyond Conservative Law

We can think about social work and human rights in two ways: social workers joining broader human rights campaigns, and achieving human rights through social work practice. This paper concentrates on the latter approach, identifying the limitations of conventional legal-based human rights narratives for social work. By extending the idea of human rights to concentrate on the ‘human’, and by recognising the limitations of individualist liberal constructions of human rights, this paper argues for human rights based social work grounded in the humanities. It also identifies some important future challenges for human rights based social work within a less anthropocentric world view.

The Role of Colonialism in the Construction of Human Rights

The Role of Colonialism in the Construction of Human Rights

The construction of human rights: accounting for systematic bias in common human rights measures

Empirical human rights researchers frequently rely on indexes of physical integrity rights created by the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) or the Political Terror Scale (PTS) data projects. Any systematic bias contained within a component used to create CIRI and PTS carries over to the final index. We investigate potential bias in these indexes by comparing differences between PTS scores constructed from different sources, the United States State Department (SD) and Amnesty International (AI). In order to establish best practices, we offer two solutions for addressing bias. First, we recommend excluding data before 1980. The data prior to 1980 are truncated because the SD only created reports for current and potential foreign aid recipients. Including these data with the more systematically included post-1980 data is a key source of bias. Our second solution employs a two-stage instrumented variable technique to estimate and then correct for SD bias. We demonstrate how following these best practices can affect results and inferences drawn from quantitative work by replicating a study of interstate conflict and repression.

The International Human Rights Movement: A History by Aryeh Neier (review)

Reviewed by: The International Human Rights Movement: A History by Aryeh Neier Wendy H. Wong (bio) Aryeh Neier , The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton University Press 2012), 379 pages, ISBN No. 978-0-6911-3515-1. A number of important books in the field of human rights have attempted to trace the long history of the phenomenon (and importance) of rights in the political and social history of human civilizations.1 Aryeh Neier's The International Human Rights Movement: A History fundamentally shifts the focus of such discussions, electing instead to focus mostly on post-World War II developments and the global shift towards a human rights oriented world. The book takes its place in the burgeoning bibliography of books that offers a history of human rights, which speaks in itself to the rising importance of the topic across a variety of academic fields. It makes two contributions. First, it adds to the understanding that human rights as we know them today have unfurled most dramatically and most relevantly since the end of World War II.2 Second, Neier's emphasis on non-state actors and, in particular, the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that helped reify the human rights project from aspirational international law to practical policies places it among the few sweeping histories of the work, highlighting the role of an international movement in disseminating the human rights regime.3 In these two senses, Neier's version of how we should understand where human rights come from and where they are going should be a primer for anyone starting the study of human rights. Given the growing interest of recent publications in the role that non-state actors play in the construction of human rights, Neier's book is a classic statement of a growing theme in both public and scholarly imaginations.4 Neier's basic thesis is that the international human rights movement has been the most important catalyst in securing human rights throughout the world in the past thirty-five years. He proceeds in the book to provide ample [End Page 804] evidence for why NGOs have affected human rights outcomes. Neier's credible analysis stems from a place of personal investment in the subject matter; after all, he served as Human Rights Watch's founding Executive Director and shaped the politics of human rights in the United States during some of the key moments of inconsistency in the Reagan administration. Neier's book brings to life the contributions of not only the organization dear to his heart, but also traces the history of Amnesty International and other lesser known human rights NGOs working in the US, including: Human Rights First, Physicians for Human Rights, The Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Rights, and others. Neier also discusses non-US-based NGOs. These stories serve to demonstrate the diversity of views and strategies within the worldwide human rights movement, and in turn, Neier gives smaller groups a platform. This is an important achievement of the book, as to date most scholarly examinations have focused on larger, politically salient groups, thereby giving a rather skewed view of international human rights work. As much as this book notes the importance of NGOs, it is also quite clear that Neier did not simply wish to tell a story of NGOs in international human rights politics; instead, he sought to draw a more complete picture by bringing in a broader discussion of human rights beyond non-state actors. In a later chapter, for instance, Neier tackles what he sees as a major goal of the international human rights movement in more recent years: how to hold states accountable for their most grave of abuses. It is in this discussion of the International Criminal Court and other such institutions of accountability that Neier's account of the role of NGOs gets a bit muddled. What exactly is the role of NGOs once tribunals like the ICC get established? Is the work of global activism pertaining to the realization of accountability for human rights abuses, at least the most atrocious of abuses, somewhat resolved now that states have decided to create their own international institutions? The desire to "go beyond" non-state actors...

Alasdair MacIntyre on morality, community and natural law

This article explores Alasdair MacIntyre’s social philosophy, which is regarded as both a sweeping criticism of the moral incoherence of modern society and a wide-ranging challenge to value-neutral and descriptive sociology. MacIntyre argues that any moral philosophy presupposes sociology, and hence the following discussion outlines his sociology as the underpinning of his criticisms of emotivism – the proposition that what is pleasurable to me and aesthetically satisfying is the good – in modern philosophy. MacIntyre is criticized on two grounds: firstly his work creates a nostalgic picture of the coherence of past communities; and secondly it neglects the growth of human rights and international law as instances of a shared moral system that is not based on emotivism. Indeed his Dependent Rational Animals can offer a notion of the ontology of human rights based on human vulnerability. The article concludes with a comparison of MacIntyre and Jacques Maritain, who, from the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, contributed to the construction of human rights as the modern version of natural rights. The growth of international law and human rights suggests that MacIntyre’s pessimistic view of the collapse of a common moral vocabulary is unfounded.

‘Putting Cruelty First’: Interpreting War Crimes as Human Rights Atrocities in US Policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article contributes to an understanding of the role of agency in a sociology of human rights by examining how a small group of individuals interpreted, defined, and instantiated ‘hard’ human rights, or those atrocities associated with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Using political theorist Judith Shklar’s perpetrator-focused framework of ‘putting the prevention of cruelty first’, we explore the role of agency in the construction of human rights through the empirical lens of US war crimes policies around the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia-Herzegovina. We draw on US State Department documents, and on interviews with key participants in the Accords, to argue that a richer sociology of human rights – seen as socially situated and embedded – requires a fuller appreciation of the experiences of key social actors in those social locations in which human rights are articulated, interpreted, and actualized.

The Political Construction of Human Rights in the United States

American constitutional scholarship was inspired but seriously sidetracked by the Warren Court, which was viewed as a lonely warrior battling intolerant majorities on behalf of the powerless. History and empirical evidence have defeated this romantic view. In fact, the modern Court is less likely to support human rights in the face of public opposition and as compared to Congress and, in any case, its effectiveness in doing so is limited. Recent scholarly developments - the popular constitutionalism and regime politics movements - properly recognize that human rights are politically constructed and dependent on popular and elite support. Empirical evidence, such as that offered here, more specifically reveals that the Supreme Court’s propensity to favor rights claims is strongly influenced by the partisan identity of both its members and the president making recent appointments. Thus, when it comes to rights, elections matter immensely. Courts nonetheless contribute importantly and uniquely to the ongoing and multi-party American dialogue over its constitutional values.

How Do Texts Matter? The Impact of Texts in Human Rights Reasoning in Europe

This paper analyzes the significance of texts for the legal construction of human rights. First, it argues that a written and legally enforceable Bill of Rights is no precondition to the legal existence of human rights. But, secondly, such texts, be they binding or non-binding, of a constitutional nature or simple Acts of Parliament, serve to rationalize legal discourse by channeling legal reasoning. To prove this, human rights concepts and modes of legal reasoning will be analyzed both in EU member states representative of diverse human rights models - Germany, France, and Great Britain-and at the level of European Union law.In fact, human rights interpretation underlies cultural patterns that shape the scope and interpretation of rights rather than mere texts. Their existence and wording as a source of law is neither essential nor does it determine the scope of human rights. But texts do interfere at various levels with human rights adjudication and thereby shape the very idea we have of particular rights in society. Therefore, this paper analyzes strongly diverging approaches to legal reasoning in the field of human rights in EU member states. It further establishes how these interact and converge at EU level in the case law of the European Court of Justice. The paper focuses on the EC as this can be seen as a unique human rights laboratory in which a new culture of legal reasoning emerges out of a multitude of established human rights cultures.

The Exclusionary Construction of Human Rights in International Law and Political Theory

Textbooks tend to depict human rights as safeguards protecting the individual from the excessive use of state authority. Such accounts presuppose, amongst others, a neat opposition of law and politics, and a pre-political character of the law. Drawing both on positive international law and the evolving theoretical inquiry into human rights, this article claims that the fictions of universality and inalienability of human rights collude their exclusionary function. Human rights take part in the formation of a polis by excluding the bare life of the human being from that community, to then re-include it and subject it to regulation. Where re- inclusion does not take place, for one reason or another, the exclusionary function of human rights creates outcasts which have no more, are no more than bare life (refugees being a prominent example). Seen thus, human rights constantly remind us how devoid of protection we are outside the polis. Once re-inclusion has taken place, human rights may work reasonably well as protective devices. Yet, as there is no access right to the polis, there is no right for any human in any situation to have human rights.