Effect Of Human Rights Research Articles

Civil liberties and economic development

Abstract:Skepticism prevails among a substantial number of economists over a possible connection between civil liberties and the level of economic activity. Until now, empirical research on economic growth has found mixed evidence on the influence of civil liberties. Disaggregation of the Freedom House Civil Liberties Index allows a fresh empirical look at the effect of human rights on long-term growth or economic development. Our results show that one of the four subcategories of the index outperforms all available indicators of property rights institutions in explaining long-term economic growth. This subcategory, Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights, captures the level of second generation human rights that affect the mobility of individuals with respect to housing, employment and university education, as well as the level of protection of property rights. This result is robust with respect to reverse causation, important omitted variables such as geography and human capital, as well as to a variety of sensitivity tests. We also discuss in our conceptual framework how civil liberties work as an indicator of the prevalence of the rule of law and how the latter affects growth or development as an essential public input.

Human Rights and Economic Liberalization

Using several case studies and data from the Economic Freedom of the World annual report and from the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, we estimate the effect of human rights abuses on economic liberalization. The data suggest that human rights abuses reduce rather than accelerate the pace of economic liberalization.

The Economic Effects of Human Rights

SUMMARYThere are three positions concerning the economic effects of human rights discussed among economists. Some economists argue that only property rights matter for economic growth and basic human rights can even make the legal system less efficient. Others argue that negative rights are generally welfare increasing while positive rights tend to reduce income and growth over time. Yet a third group of economists argues that elements of all groups of human rights are a precondition for making productive use of one's resources and are thus efficiency‐enhancing. Based on a cross‐country analysis, the effects of different groups of human rights on economic growth are estimated in this paper. The transmission channels through which the different rights affect growth are identified by estimating their effects on investment and overall productivity. Basic human rights have indeed a positive effect on investment, but do not seem to contribute to productivity. Social rights, in turn, are not conducive to investment in physical capital but do contribute to productivity improvements. None of the four groups of rights covered in this analysis ever has a significant negative effect on any of the economic variables included.

The Contribution of Law and Social Work to Interdisciplinary Community Development and Peace Building in the Middle East

SUMMARY Reducing inequity and strengthening civil society are both intrinsically related to peace building. This article outlines how social work and legal theory, coupled with an interdisciplinary practice framework, advance the development of community networks for the promotion of social rights as a medium for peace building in the Middle East. The combined effect of human rights advocacy, civic engagement, and the structuring and building of community, work to reduce inequality and promote civil society. Examples of interdisciplinary practice as implemented through the initiative of the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building are presented. Finally, implications for interdisciplinary training for schools of social work are discussed.

European Aid: Human Rights Versus Bureaucratic Inertia?

Most studies on foreign aid and human rights have ignored the role of bureaucratic inertia in the allocation process. By not controlling for which developing countries have received aid in the past and how much aid they have received, continuity of aid flows remains unaccounted for. Additionally, previous studies have not allowed for a possible non-linear relationship between human rights and aid. This study investigates aid commitments from the European Commission, Germany, France, and the UK, paying attention to non-linear effects of human rights on aid commitments and the role of bureaucratic inertia. Using data from 1978 to 2003, the study investigates how past aid commitments, the level of human rights violations, and substantial changes in the respect for human rights influence the decision of European donors on whom to give aid to, how to choose a new recipient country that did not receive aid previously, and how much aid to give to countries that made it past the gatekeeping stage. Controlling for various donor interests and recipient needs, the results show that, despite donors' emphasis on human rights in official documents, the human rights situation in developing countries does not consistently shape European aid commitments. Only Germany commits less aid to more repressive countries. However, recent substantial improvements of the human rights records are rewarded by both Germany and France when deciding whom to give aid to. Bureaucratic inertia seems to be a major obstacle to the consistent implementation of human rights consideration in European aid allocation.

What Attracts Foreign Investors? An Examination of Human Rights and Foreign Direct Investment

Though the prospective relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and human rights has long been a prominent issue within the global political economy, the linkage is empirically underdeveloped. Rather, the conventional wisdom that FDI and respect for human rights are inherently contradictory has persisted. Instead, we posit that respect for human rights may encourage FDI. To examine this issue, we assess the direct effects of human rights upon FDI as well as the extent to which human rights indirectly affects FDI through its impact upon human capital. Using a system of simultaneous equations, we find respect for human rights to have a positive impact upon FDI.

The Effect of Human Rights on Criminal Evidentiary Processes: Towards Convergence, Divergence or Realignment?

This article examines the contribution which the European Court of Human Rights has made to the development of common evidentiary processes across the common law and civil law systems of criminal procedure in Europe. It is argued that the continuing use of terms such as ‘adversarial’ and ‘inquisitorial’ to describe models of criminal proof and procedure has obscured the genuinely transformative nature of the Court's jurisprudence. It is shown that over a number of years the Court has been steadily developing a new model of proof that is better characterised as ‘participatory’ than as ‘adversarial’ or ‘inquisitorial’. Instead of leading towards a convergence of existing ‘adversarial’ and ‘inquisitorial’ models of proof, this is more likely to lead towards a realignment of existing processes of proof which nonetheless allows plenty of scope for diverse application in different institutional and cultural settings.

Measuring the Effects of Human Rights Treaties

Do human rights treaties improve human rights conditions on the ground? In the end, this critical question is empirical in character. The effectiveness of any regulatory strategy turns on whether its rules and institutions actually mitigate the problems they are designed to address. Although empirical questions require empirical study, bad data is worse than no data. In a recent study, Professor Oona Hathaway purports to quantify the effect of human rights treaty ratification on human rights violations. Her findings are striking. She contends that ratification is associated with worse human rights practices (when other important variables are held constant). Of course, it is unsurprising that some states continue to commit substantial human rights abuses even after ratifying human rights treaties. It is, however, startling to suggest that treaty membership - including the labeling, monitoring, and reporting of abuses - actually increases violations. In our view, any study advancing such wildly counterintuitive claims carries a heavy burden. While we support the empirical study of these phenomena (and indeed we rely on many such studies in formulating our critique), we identify several problems with Hathaway's project. We suggest that these problems demonstrate serious deficiencies in her empirical findings, theoretical model, and policy prescriptions.

Testing Conventional Wisdom

In my recent article, ‘Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?’, I presented evidence and arguments that called into doubt two widely shared assumptions: (1) that countries generally comply with their human rights treaty commitments and (2) that countries' practices will be better if they have ratified treaties than they otherwise would be. In response, Professors Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks argue that we must stick with ‘conventional assumptions’ until we ‘know’ the ‘real effects of human rights treaties’. In this reply, I clarify my argument, which Goodman and Jinks misportray, and respond to the central themes of Goodman and Jinks' critique. First, I argue that Goodman and Jinks' scepticism toward my empirical results is misplaced and that their claims that the multiple data sources on which I draw one ‘bod’ are unsubstantiated. Their argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would counsel against any empirical analysis of the effectiveness of human rights treaties. Second, I defend my theoretical account, which argues for looking beyond existing models in analysing state behaviour. Third, I contest Goodman and Jinks' claim that it promotes human rights to continue to rely uncritically upon conventional assumptions. I argue that the international legal community should instead seek to understand better the relationship between treaties and state behaviour and then carefully consider how to make treaties achieve their goals more effectively.

Measuring the Effects of Human Rights Treaties

Do human rights treaties improve human rights conditions on the ground? In the end, this critical question is empirical in character. The effectiveness of any regulatory strategy turns on whether its rules and institutions actually mitigate the problems they are designed to address. Although empirical questions require empirical study, bad data is worse than no data. In a recent study, Professor Oona Hathaway purports to quantify the effect of human rights treaty ratification on human rights violations. Her findings are striking. She contends that ratification is associated with worse human rights practices (when other important variables are held constant). Of course, it is unsurprising that some states continue to commit substantial human rights abuses even after ratifying human rights treaties. It is, however, startling to suggest that treaty membership — including the labelling, monitoring and reporting of abuses — actually increases violations. In our view, any study advancing such wildly counterintuitive claims carries a heavy burden. While we support the empirical study of these phenomena (and indeed we rely on many such studies in formulating our critique), we identify several problems with Hathaway's project. We suggest that these problems demonstrate serious deficiencies in her empirical findings, theoretical model and policy prescriptions.

Economic Growth and Social Indicators: An Exploratory Analysis

Abstract What are the connections between social and political conditions and economic growth? This paper explores the uses and misuses of statistical analysis of cross-national data in addressing this question. It shows that social, political and economic indicators are linked by “webs of association”. Such webs of association suggest the possibility of distinct groupings of social indicators with differentiated impacts on economic growth. But such correlations also make it difficult to disentangle causal relationships, especially when theorizing is weak, data are badly behaved, and the number of observations is small. Although under such conditions statistical techniques can help preclude premature generalizations, they are easily overinterpreted. Nonetheless, data analysis can help identify countries that seem exceptions to the general patterns, where careful case studies may be especially valuable.

Doctors and human rights

This article describes the roles of Amnesty International's Medical Groups and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in campaigning for and treating those suffering the physical and psychological effects of human rights abuse in peace and war.

The Ignoble Savage: Amerind Images in the Mainstream Mind

The Ignoble Savage:Amerind Images in the Mainstream Mind Opal Moore and Donnarae MacCann The 1987 celebration of the U.S. Constitution is in fact a celebration of a struggle for recognition and acceptance by various minorities within the United States. The rhetorical phrase, "We The People . . .," raises the question: Who were "the people?" They were not Black until a war had been fought. They were not female for more than 130 years. They were not the people indigenous to North America. Our study of the Amerind in literature points to the ongoing nature of the struggle, and to the wide applicability of Thurgood Marshall's words about unpleasant truths. In the following statement, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice refers specifically to the maintenance of slavery by the Founding Fathers, but his remarks apply equally to genocidal policies aimed against Native Americans in their own country: No doubt it will be said, when the unpleasant truth of the history of slavery in America is mentioned during this bicentennial year, that the Constitution was a product of its times . . . . But the effects of the Framers' compromise have remained for generations . . . . Some may . . . observe the [Constitution's] anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled. (5,6,9) Clearly the long-range effects of human rights compromises are still in evidence. For example, Native Americans still seek to reclaim confiscated lands and to dismantle a super-structure of false images and debasing concepts. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, when the New World became the New Frontier, the image of the Amerind as uncivilized became standard literary fare. Biased tales of the actual or imagined internments of whites by American Indians were disseminated as a propagandistic addendum to a national policy of Indian eradication. Unfortunately, a number of modern books are equally misleading. Mary Gloyne Byler, who is a Cherokee and who helped critique six hundred children's books for the Association of American Indian Affairs, comments on these works. She writes: American Indians . . . contend with a mass of materials about themselves . . . . There are too many books featuring painted, whooping, befeathered Indians closing in on too many forts, maliciously attacking "peaceful" settlers . . . ; too many books in which white benevolence is the only thing that saves the day for the incompetent, childlike Indians; too many stories setting forth what is "best" for American Indians. (5) Not much has changed in the portrayal of the Indian since the seventeenth century publication of Mary Rowlandson's Captivity, a popular narrative detailing the hardships of a captive white woman. In 1975 the "captivity" sub-genre was resurrected and re-tooled in Evelyn Sibley Lampman's White Captives, a novel based on Reverend R.B. Stratton's Captivity of the Oatman Girls: Being an Interesting Narrative of Life Among the Apache and Mohave Indians (1857). In an author's note, Lampman claims that now, over a hundred years later, it is possible to look at the white captivity experience "more dispassionately" (177). But for whom is this done? And what is gained by her mode of "dispassion"? The book does achieve an evenness of tone, a stylistic improvement upon the overbearing prose of the Reverend Stratton's document. But style of writing does not diminish the fact that Lampman's White Captives projects all the images and assumptions described in Mary Gloyne Byler's critique. It offers us a natural point of departure for a look at the portrayals of Indians in works that span genre categories. Included in our coverage are the fantasy works of Lynne Reid Banks, The Indian in the Cupboard (1980) and The Return of the Indian (1986), and three environmentalist novels by Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves (1972), The Talking Earth (1983), and Water Sky (1987). Lampman's White Captives keeps strictly to the formula established in its source narrative; it idealizes whites at the expense of the Indians, who are characterized as savage, unfeeling, undisciplined. Every aspect of the three societies—Euro-American, Mojave, Apache—is presented in a comparative mode, the Indian falling short to the Euro-American in nearly every category. For example, Olive, the older of the two Oatman girls, hates the people...

The European Human Rights Convention and Relations between Private Parties

The duty or obligation not to infringe constitutionally protected fundamental human rights which have hitherto been owed by state organs towards individuals may now have been extended, in certain countries, to encompass relationships between individuals. This particular development – also referred to as an issue relating to “third parties (Drittwirkung)” or alternatively as one concerning the “horizontal” or “intersubjective” application of fundamental human rights – appears to have its origins in the German doctrine of the so-called “absolute effect of human rights”, whereby fundamental human rights which are defined in constitutions are considered to be enforceable by individuals against other private persons as well as by public authorities.