Discourse Of Human Rights Research Articles

Human rights-based approach to global surgery: A scoping review.

Health is a basic human right, yet surgery remains a neglected stepchild of global health. Worldwide, five billion people lack access to safe, timely, and affordable surgical and anesthesia care when needed. This disparity results in over 18 million preventable deaths each year and is responsible for one-third of the global burden of disease. Here, we evaluate the role of surgical care in protecting human rights and attempt to make a human rights argument for universal access to safe surgical care. A scoping review was done using the PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, and Scopus databases to identify articles evaluating human rights and disparities in accessing surgical care globally. A conceptual framework is proposed to implement global surgical interventions with a human rights-based approach. Disparities in accessing surgical care remain prevalent around the world, including but not limited to gender inequality, socioeconomic differentiation, sexual stigmatization, racial and religious disparities, and cultural beliefs. Lack of access to surgery impedes lives in full health and economic prosperity, and thus violates human rights. Our normative framework proposes human rights principles to make surgical policy interventions more inclusive and effective. Acknowledging human rights in the provision of surgical care around the world is critical to attain and sustain the Sustainable Development Goals and universal health coverage. National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anesthesia Planning and wider health systems strengthening require the integration of human rights principles in developing and implementing policy interventions to ensure equal and universal access to comprehensive health care services.

The shibboleth of human rights in public health

Human rights discourse has greatly influenced advocacy for justice in public health. Yet, beyond rhetorical claims, how can we employ human rights to achieve the aspiration of health with justice? Without human rights education to support public health practice, human rights have become a shibboleth of public health—raised frequently to signal devotion to justice, but employed rarely in policy, programming, or practice. As advocates respond to the public health injustices of populist nationalism during an unprecedented pandemic, human rights education must be an essential foundation to hold governments accountable for implementing rights to safeguard public health.

On (Not) Coming to Terms with the Past: Forced Disappearance, Social Catastrophe and the Different Uses of History in Argentina

On 1 August 2017 Santiago Maldonado, a young artisan and tattoo artist, vanished in the midst of a crackdown by the national Gendarmerie on a Mapuche community in the south of Argentina. Soon after, his disappearance became a theme of national anguish and debate. While seemingly quite different from forced disappearances carried out during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) this case has been inscribed in the ongoing debate about the possibilities and implications of coming to terms with the past. In this paper I explore the different social, political and legal processes that followed in the wake of Maldonado’s disappearance. Through the case, I consider the power of human rights discourse in the country as well as the rise and institutionalization of an alternative narrative advanced by the right-leaning political elite. Ultimately, I show that the assumptions underlying transitional justice mechanisms, specifically, the possibility of handling the past to such an extent that it can be “put behind” and “overcome” are flawed.

Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law, edited by Janice R.Bellace and Beryl terHaar. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2019, 528 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐78642‐310‐7, £195.00 (US$290.00)

Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law, edited by Janice R.Bellace and Beryl terHaar. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2019, 528 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐78642‐310‐7, £195.00 (US$290.00)

Populizm a polityka praw człowieka

Artykuł zawiera rozważania na temat relacji dyskursu praw człowieka i populizmu. Autorzy najpierw przedstawiają przegląd stanowisk teoretycznych dotyczących populizmu, następnie określają pojęcie polityki praw człowieka. Prowadzi to do wniosku, że w celu zachowa-nia swojego demokratycznego charakteru populizm musi akceptować, przynajmniej retorycznie, prawa człowieka. W następnej części autorzy przyglądają się działaniom wobec praw człowieka prowadzonym za czasów władzy populistycznej, na przykładzie rządów Prawa i Sprawiedliwości w latach 2015–2020. Uwzględniają przede wszystkim wypowiedzi polityków oraz działania wobec osób LGBT, praw reprodukcyjnych, praw imigrantów, a także prowadzone polityki socjalne. Analiza prowadzi do wniosku, że populiści prowadzą własną, odmienną od liberalnej, politykę praw człowieka. Populizm narusza prawa mniejszości, a wzmacnia prawa socjalne i dystrybuuje uznanie oparte na tożsamości narodowej. Wobec czego stosunek populizmu do praw człowieka nie jest jednoznaczny i nie polega na prostym odrzuceniu.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz: the Continuity and Legacy of a Critical Africana Human Rights Consciousness

This article places El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’s praxis, as well as the Africana [Black] movement for freedom, into a human rights discourse. Exploring his evolution into an internationalist activist-theoretician in five rhythmic movements, if you will, the opening; the transitioning; the solidification; the influencing; and the continuities, it is the central premise of this article that in order to truly grasp the breadth and depth of the Africana [Black] struggle for freedom we must explore those involved and their contributions as a product of a critical human rights consciousness. Accordingly, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz becomes an archetype in this regard. This idea rests upon the assertion that his praxis, albeit incomplete, due to his untimely death, represents an important nexus in the Africana struggle for freedom, merging various manifestations of radical praxis into a clearer articulation of the Black radical tradition.

Health Reinsurance as a Human Right

Health reinsurance as a public policy measure aims to offload the expensive costs of those who are catastrophically ill onto the best risk-bearer, often the state. The benefits ripple out, helping not just those with the highest health costs, but also the broader public by helping to make health coverage more widely affordable and accessible. The health and human rights discourse ought to include the notion that we all enjoy a core health right to state performance of the reinsurance function First, the features of reinsurance map well onto the features of the right to health specified in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights and the associated General Comments. These texts suggest particular concern for the vulnerable, attention to co-variant risk, promotion of equitable distribution, and state action that ensures the underlying conditions for a strong health system. This book chapter explains how government-sponsored health reinsurance also addresses these same concerns and is instrumental in creating stable background conditions for the organization of broad health provision. I further argue that understanding the core right to health as including reinsurance helps soften certain tensions that afflict the concept of “the minimum core.” Reinsurance helps bridge 1] the tension between context sensitivity and universalizability, and 2) the tension between individually claimable rights and broader systemic duties. I illustrate these advantages using the experiences that various countries around the world have had with health reinsurance as a policy.

Mutilación genital femenina. Consecuencias para la salud física y mental; una violación de los derechos humanos de mujeres y niñas

La mutilación genital femenina (en adelante MGF), constituye una práctica realizada a mujeres y niñas en varios lugares del mundo, mediante la cual, se alteran los genitales o se remueven partes de estos, sin ninguna motivación médica. Al tener un componente cultural, de tradición, se plantea una eventual tensión con la universalidad de los derechos humanos (en adelante DDHH) para quienes afirman su relatividad. El objetivo general de este artículo es describir las consecuencias de la MGF, y ponerlas en contexto con el discurso de los DDHH, al afirmar su universalidad.

Beyond Claim‐Rights: Social Structure, Collectivization, and Human Rights

Beyond Claim‐Rights: Social Structure, Collectivization, and Human Rights

Sobre el sentido, contenido y configuración jurídica de la accesibilidad

En este trabajo se destaca el papel de la accesibilidad en el discurso de los derechos humanos. Para ello se expone su significado general tomando como referencia el diseño universal, en sus tres sentidos, y los ajustes razonables. El trabajo describe las diferentes construcciones jurídicas de la accesibilidad y sus límites.

Human rights teaching: snapshots from four countries

This article examines how some schools with ethnically diverse student populations are teaching about, for, and through human rights. The author conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data from a multi-site study, which included secondary schools serving students from immigrant backgrounds in four countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (England and Scotland). The author found that schools taught about the history of human rights, rights in terms of national constitutions, and violations of human rights in the Global South; she observed fewer examples of human rights discourse addressing national and local issues. Across schools, students experienced respect of their human rights, through voicing their opinions and contributing to school-level decisions primarily on school councils. Some students developed knowledge, skills, and dispositions for exercising their rights and respecting others’ rights as they deliberated issues and took civic action locally and globally.

Illuminating the trauma of the LGBTQ closet: A cinematic-phenomenological study and film about existential rights

ABSTRACT This phenomenological research study investigated the lived experience of the LGBTQ closet and presents the research findings in two ways: a written hermeneutic interpretation, and a short film called illuminate which expresses the phenomenology of the closet through poetic cinematography. I developed a method called “cinematic-phenomenological research,’ for which I collected and interpreted phenomenological descriptions from five participants about their experience of being closeted about their non-hetero sexual orientations. Then, I collaborated with artists in a process of phenomenological filmmaking to transform the thematic research findings into the film illuminate. Hermeneutic research findings suggest that the LGBTQ closet is lived as a traumatic loss of existential rights – the right to truth, freedom, love, hope, and power. Each scene in illuminate expresses these existential rights cinematically to evoke the sociopolitical trauma of being in the closet, and the healing and liberation of coming out (viewable at www.illuminatethecloset.com). The study introduces an existential rights paradigm for human rights discourse, based on the premise that truth, freedom, love, hope, and power are basic human rights and mental health imperatives. The study also confirms that the closet can induce PTSD symptomology among queer people, and offers insight about how psychotherapists can foster empowerment in the face of sociopolitical trauma among marginalized clients.

Novel Violence

ABSTRACT The novel coronavirus pandemic is throwing into relief traditional notions and rhetorics of witness, visibility, recognition, and violence in human rights discourse. This essay articulates the ways in which the current pandemic is being framed rhetorically as a spectacular war, using rhetoric that obfuscates the structural violations that leads to the virus disproportionately impacting the precarious. It argues for a reframing of traditional paradigms of representation, recognition, and resistance toward a notion of everyday violence that accounts for the accumulation of structural and material conditions of precarity as a human rights violation.

Stolen lives: What the dead teach us

This paper questions the utility the social category of “refugee” as defined by international human rights discourse. The notion of “racializing assemblages” supplies an analytic tool for situating the deportation machine and mass incarceration of refugees/asylum seekers as “death spaces” within modern Western humanity. Building on discussions related to “political death,” “social death” and “muertas en vida” (living dead), this paper explores an alternative framing of “the refugee” that relies less on human rights and more on other forms of emancipation. The history of “African American fugitivity” offers one possibility for reclaiming another articulation of freedom from persecution and enslavement.

Rights for Some, Not for Others: On the Move and Margins of Human Rights

Rights are meant to make meanings and to have positive impacts on people’s lives. By having space ordained by the interests of dominant powers and people confined within a space that is delineated, controlled, and divided into class, racial, and gender hierarchies, the right to space and freedom of movement, mostly for those in the Global South, is rendered meaningless. Drawing on my lived experience, I explore the connection between space and power on two different levels: national institutions, and across international borders over six-years period between 2011 and 2016. Reflecting on the policies and politics of space, I examine the implications of control over space on people’s lives and identities. I argue that the dominant discourse of human rights, as it appears, not only violates the basic right to free choice but also serves as instrumental to the maintenance of the current world order and hierarchies. The fact that rights, today, very much rest on spatial, capital, gender, and racial divisions suggests that the UN human rights political project is insufficient and requires us to seriously consider its devastating effects, even when these are unintentional. Thus, we must rethink rights beyond nation-state and its ideological institutions and open up its scope for constructive alternative mechanisms and strategies that center the marginalized rather than maintain a hierarchal system in which some people are unfairly privileged over others. Until we rethink and rewrite international human rights discourse in a way that stands for justice for all and that fosters creative alternatives, it will continue to be hollow, dysfunctional, and even instrumental to existing racial, class, and gender hierarchies.

A new Convention on the human right to development: Putting the cart before the horse?

In this column I discuss the background, evolution, legal status and functions of the human right to development, with special reference to the proposed draft Convention on this subject, published by the Human Rights Council in January 2020. It notes the widely diverse views on the added value of the right to development. In my view, taking the discussion on the formulation, consolidation and implementation of the right to development seriously, is important to create a balance in the international human rights discourse by showing a genuine interest in matters raised for long by developing countries. This could serve the cause of the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of the global human rights architecture. However, it is questionable whether the adoption of a new Convention on the Right to Development would serve the cause of the right to development. The right to development is already well rooted in the existing core human rights treaties and has the potential to play a key role as a cluster right, an integrative right and a bridging right. Therefore, I suggest some alternative avenues for realising and operationalising the right to development.

Legislated Rights in the real world

This essay, written for a symposium in the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies on Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights Through Legislation (Cambridge University Press 2018, pb 2019), engages with the careful and challenging contributions by Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov, Lech Garlicki, Vicki Jackson, James Kelly, and Yaniv Roznai. Organised around the theme of the relevance of Legislated Rights in the real world of fallible legislatures, the essay explores seven themes: (1) the neglect of the legislature from court-centred modes of human rights discourse; (2) the central case method; (3) the relevance of real world legislatures to the central case method; (4) populism and non-central cases; (5) the good legislator; (6) the specification of rights and the general welfare; and (7) constitutional rights and judicial review.

Chomsky and Genocide

Noam Chomsky may justly be considered the most important public intellectual alive, and the most significant of the post-World War Two era. Despite his scholarly contributions to linguistics, at least three generations know him primarily for his political writings and activism, voicing a left-radical, humanist critique of US foreign policy and other subjects. Given that a human-rights discourse is prominent in Chomsky’s political writing, and given that genocide-related controversies have sometimes swirled around him, it is worthwhile to consider the overall place and framing of genocide in his published output. The present paper undertakes such an inquiry. It employs a broad and systematic sampling of Chomsky's published work (including online sources and interviews) to explore: - How Chomsky understands the concept "genocide," and how this has evolved over the years; - His skepticism towards the term and and criticisms of its political manipulation; - Past genocide-related controversies involving Chomsky (the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia/Kosovo, Rwanda); - Cases of mass violence that Chomsky considers genocides, "near" or "virtual" genocides, and propagandistic non-genocides; - The place of the Holocaust and Israel in Chomsky's analysis; and - Structural forms of genocide, especially those linked to contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism. The attempt is to provide a critical and wide-ranging evaluation of a leading public intellectual's writing and commentary on genocide over the past half-century.

‘What ought we do?’ and other questions

Kant formulates the question “What ought I do?” as an agent’s question. This is not the only way in which practical reasoning can be approached. A great deal of contemporary work in ethics and political philosophy addresses different, often narrower, questions. Much of it focuses primarily on recipients rather than agents, and so on entitlements or rights rather than on requirements or duties to act, including most obviously discussions of human rights. I will consider some of the consequences and the advantages of starting from each of these questions, and some of the ways in which each shapes practical reasoning.

Dennis Brutus and the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee in Exile, 1966–1970

ABSTRACT In July 1966, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) re-emerged in exile in London. The arrival of Dennis Brutus, the coloured Rhodesian-born activist, poet, and educator, into the British capital provided the stimulus to renew calls for the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from international sport. In the years 1966–1970 that marked Brutus’s exile in Britain, SANROC elevated apartheid sport to the world’s attention. As this paper contends, SANROC’s success in discouraging foreign contact and competition with racialist sporting organisations, teams, or individuals from South Africa rested largely on Brutus’s ability to position himself at the nexus of an emergent human rights discourse that dominated the agendas of state institutions and international organisations throughout the 1960s. Brutus skilfully tethered the issue of racism in South African sport to broader discussions of human rights. SANROC’s anti-apartheid activism, however broad its transnational horizons, must also be read in its national context. As this paper will further contend, a deeper comprehension of the political and racial climate of 1960s Britain is central to understanding Brutus and SANROC’s experiences in exile in the years 1966–1970.