Discourse Of Human Rights Research Articles

Human rights and development: the advancement of new campaign strategies

ABSTRACTContemporary scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on ‘rights-based approaches’ (RBAs) to development as being the principle way that development and human rights have merged in NGO practice. This article focuses on development-orientated campaign strategies, and in so doing challenges the ongoing RBA fixation by considering two praxis developments: (1) despite firm rejections of RBAs, alternative human rights strategies are being embedded in contemporary NGO practice, and; (2) over the past six years key changes in wider NGO campaigning contexts and environments have led to a further development in human rights approaches. Drawing on empirical findings from a ten-year in-depth research project on NGO practice, this article not only tracks developments in campaign practice, but also proposes two new models for consideration. These models – ‘rights-framed’ and ‘rights-referenced’, as practiced by influential NGOs – offer an innovative, strategic and instrumental embedding of a human rights discourse and practice.

Rethinking democracy and human rights education on the seventieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The paper outlines the usefulness and challenges of teaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to the young generation of the twenty-first century. Reflecting on the author’s experience of engaging university students the paper shares with readers some personal lessons on the subject. A brief history of the UDHR in the past seven decades will be outlined with a crucial question of why the promise of human rights has not been fulfilled as expected despite the proliferation of international legal standards since the foundation of the UDHR. In so doing I would like to shift the focus of human rights discourse away from the conventional legal-institutional one toward the conditions and contexts in which human rights could be conceptualized and realized. As a way of suggesting an alternative path to the realization of human rights through the lens of education I will discuss the structural literacy, global and ecological citizenship, and peace-rights nexus and solidarity. The conclusion will wrap up the whole argument with some pointers on the role of the UDHR-based human rights education in the seriously fragmented world of today.

Human Rights: A Cross-Cultural Conception

On examining the political theories of John Rawls and Charles Beitz, this paper is a product of the perceived disparities between the idealism of human rights theory and the socio-political failures of the real-time human rights corpus. With both theorists serving as the moral and theoretical foundations of the discourse, the loci of their arguments will be presented and dissected in light of contemporary political attitudes. This paper aims to scrutinise the human rights discourse through the lens I believe to be its most damaging: cultural pluralism and a simultaneous tendency toward (neo)-imperialist attitudes. Moreover, with the current literature failing to provide adequately constructive answers, I have endeavoured to present a compelling commentary on where I believe the necessitating changes lie culturally, attitudinally, and politically. In preserving and upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a productive and morally beneficial basis on which to ground this commentary, this paper assumes ‘human rights’ to refer to the articles enshrined in this United Nations’ document. This conception and the attitudes and actions surrounding it have nonetheless incurred significant and warranted criticism, consideration of which prompted the proposed conception that human rights be defined politically as rights to choose.

Thinking about engaging North Korea: A study on the framing of the U.S. human rights public discourse in the Washington Post and New York Times between 2001 and 2017

AbstractNorth Korea said in January 2019 that it was exploring ways to engage the human rights issue. This was a much welcomed announcement because the issue must be addressed in order for the two countries to reach a formal, comprehensive peace agreement and the lifting or easing of unilateral sanctions. This study utilizes framing as an analytical tool to examine how the North Korean human rights discourse is framed in the United States for the purpose of identifying the salient rights‐based issues covered in two traditional media outlets, namely, the Washington Post and New York Times. Next, it reframes the discourse using a coding schema based on the convergence of the human rights, human security, and non‐traditional security discourses. A reframing of the discourse highlights how the universalist–particularist debate in the traditional rights‐based literature masks the underlying issues of the rights problem. A combination of the traditional rights‐based discourse and the masking of the issues contributes to a disconnect in the way in which North Korea has been engaged in the past. Therefore, a reframing of the discourse using the convergence of the human rights, human security, and non‐traditional security discourses could open new pathways for engagement.

Critical Geographies of Human Rights and the Spatial Dimensions of International Law Violations in Rakhine State, Myanmar

The term critical geographies of human rights refers to the idea that law, society, geography, and injustice are mutually constitutive. This article proposes one possible theoretical framework for analyzing critical geographies of human rights, drawing from scholarship in critical human geography, sociolegal studies, and public international law. The article uses a case study regarding the Rohingya population of Myanmar to analyze how this theoretical approach works in practice, asking how narratives about the term Rohingya are built into, and reinforced by, legal definitions of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship. It argues that the situation of the Rohingya illustrates the international legal dimensions of material injustice while showing how human rights discourse is part of ongoing geopolitical dynamics. Examining the situation of the Rohingya thus provides a way to understand how critical geographies of human rights can be used to analyze the relationship between law, geography, and injustice. Key Words: citizenship, human rights, legal geography, Myanmar, sociolegal studies.

Responsibility and Rights

AbstractA new era of responsibility seems poised to overshadow the human rights discourse in international law. On the one hand, introducing the perspective of responsibility must result in an added value when compared to the former predominant approach. In fact, some justifications are inconsistent, and the most radical interpretations jeopardize the very core of the modern theory of social and legal order—namely, the centrality of the individual. On the other hand, the incorporation of responsibility into the discourse on rights may help to overcome some of its most evident shortcomings. Nonetheless, despite some positive outcomes which the new attention on responsibility may bring about, the concept is flawed by at least two major deficits. First, the reference to responsibility tends to presuppose the possibility of taking the position of a privileged observer. This implicitly rejects the idea that the moral and legal community is essentially constituted by human individuals who freely recognize each other as equal members and rightful holders of entitlements. The second deficit is instead related to the intrinsically particularistic character of responsibility, which makes it rather difficult to apply to the field of international law and relations. An analysis shows that we are confronted with a conflict: while responsibility can, in fact, be assumed to bring an added value, the costs for this are exceedingly high, because they amount to no less than the abandonment of the core concept of modern moral and political philosophy. By recurring to the communicative paradigm of rationality and social order, a possible solution is outlined according to which responsibility is reinterpreted in the sense of a time, space, composition, and content-related expansion of mutual recognition.

SEBUAH WACANA HAM TENTANG “HAK ATAS KEPEMILIKAN”

Among vatious rights in the human rights discourse. The right of ownership is one of the rightswhich is interesting to discuss. It is because regulations of rights of ownership is not stated inthe derivation of the UDHCR (ICCPR/ICESCR) covenant. Moreover, various concepts andviews on the rights of ownership have different characteristics and uniqueness. Protection ofthe right of ownership may conflict with other rights (public interest).

Does individual and collective remembrance of past violence impede or foster reconciliation? From Argentina to Sri Lanka

AbstractWhile the dominant human rights discourse on transitional justice constitutes a mix of reinforcing aims that seek to “make peace with” a violent past, this article complicates this notion by exploring how affective memories can prevent individuals from envisioning a future for themselves in which their individual and their nation's past is safely left behind. In the context of ongoing debates over whether to remember or forget a country's traumatic past, the article will show how affective memories of violence and disappearance prevail and disrupt the reconciliation paradigm, and need to be taken into account in transitional justice processes.

Taking Ethics Seriously

Abstract. Education in ethics and professional regulation are not alternatives; education in ethics for psychologists should not be framed merely as instruction regarding current professional regulation, or “ethical training.” This would reduce ethics to essentially a legal perspective, diminish professional responsibility, debase professional ethics, and downplay its primary purpose – the continuous critical reflection of professional identity and professional role. This paper discusses the meaning and function of education in ethics for psychologists and articulates the reasons why comprehensive education in ethics for psychologists should not be substituted by instruction in professional codes. Likewise, human rights education for psychologists should not be downgraded to mere instruction in existing legal norms. Human rights discourse represents an important segment of the comprehensive education in ethics for psychologists. Education in ethics should expose and examine substantial ethical ideas that serve as the framework for the law of human rights as well as the interpretative, multifaceted, evolving, even manipulable character of the human rights narrative. The typically proclaimed duty of psychologists to protect and promote human rights requires a deepening and expounding of the human rights legal framework through elaborate scrutiny of its ethical meaning. The idea of affirming and restoring human dignity – the concept often designated as the legal and ethical basis, essence, and purpose of human rights – represents one approach to framing this duty by which the goals of psychology on the professional and ethical levels become unified.

Sites of Sickness, Sites of Rights? HIV/AIDS and the limits of human rights in British prisons

ABSTRACTThis article considers one specific strand of discussion around HIV/AIDS, in order to think about the uses and limitations of human rights discourse in late twentieth century Britain. HIV/AIDS presented particular problems for prisons, which were initially presented as breeding grounds of infection. This shifted with the rise of human rights language and laws in the 1990s, but talk of rights for prisoners was not as comfortable a fit as talk of equivalence of care. This story is situated in the broader context of attitudes towards crime, HIV/AIDS, and rights in late twentieth century Britain.

Confessions of an ambivalent country expert: Queer refugeeism in the UK and the political economy of (im)mobility in and out of Trinidad and Tobago

This paper considers queer refugeeism from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK in relation to the political economy of (im)mobility in and out of the Caribbean. Gay rights have been embraced by liberal democracies as the newest form of human rights, what has been called “homonationalism.” Mirroring other double-binds of liberal inclusion, I show how queer asylum-seekers get caught betwixt and between two globally-stratified homonationalisms while confronting the realpolitik of European asylum law not only as queer refugees but also in terms of transnational social mobility otherwise unavailable to them. The British asylum system therefore materializes as a bordering operation that more often than not denies lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum-seekers their rights under the sign of their humanitarian protection. I consider whether homonationalisms everywhere—as assemblages of human rights discourse—should be thought of as “post-political” projects, a concept critical to growing bodies of political theory and cultural critique. This is because humanitarianism touts “rights” as universal and moral, therefore transcending the political. However, as a result of their practical effects, I show how the institutional practices deemed post-political in the case at hand should be understood as attempts to deflect and defuse the underlying politics of socioeconomic status and mobility at stake, and that the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of queer asylum-seeking represent the return of the repressed political within legal-technical spaces of disagreement. I also scrutinize the ambivalent entanglements of “expertise” when anthropologists are solicited as country experts in legal asylum cases.

A proteção dos Direitos Humanos como discurso de legitimação: a limitação do Direito Internacional no caso da Síria

Diante da imobilidade do sistema das Nações Unidas, foram formuladas diversas justificativas para as atuais intervenções militares, sendo o discurso dos Direitos Humanos uma das principais fontes de legitimação. Propugna-se no presente trabalho discutir tais justificativas teóricas, tendo em vista determinar se existe a visada legitimação diante da Comunidade Internacional. Igualmente problematiza-se o papel da Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas e a possibilidade de sua atuação no conflito com base na teoria dos poderes implícitos. Diante da paralisia do Conselho de Segurança, aduz-se que a Assembleia Geral possui a prerrogativa implícita de agir. Faz-se um levantamento bibliográfico sobre a questão, sob a utilização do método hipotético dedutivo, resultando em um estudo sobre os discursos de legitimação no caso da Síria.

Housing as a Basic Human Right: A Reflection on South Africa

This paper reflects on human rights in the post-apartheid South Africa housing context from a social development lens. The Constitution guarantees access to adequate housing as a basic human right, a prerequisite for the optimum development of individuals, families and communities. Without the other related socio-economic rights, the provision of access to housing is limited in its service delivery. We argue that housing rights are inseparable from the broader human rights discourse and social development endeavours underway in the country. While government has made much progress through the Reconstruction and Development Programme, the reality of informal settlements and backyard shacks continues to undermine the human rights prospects of the urban poor. Forced evictions undermine some poor citizens’ human rights leading courts to play an active role in enforcing housing and human rights through establishing a jurisprudence that invariably advances a social development agenda. The authors argue that the post-1994 government needs to galvanise the citizenship of the urban poor through development-oriented housing delivery.

The Papal Human Rights Discourse: The Difference Pope Francis Makes

Religious actors and their political concepts are commonly assumed as conservative, static, and aligned with the private contemplative world. Popes, however, regularly stood out of this narrative. Analysing the papal human rights discourse, this article illustrates that religious ideas and configuration change in relation to macro-political developments. The article contextualizes the papal human rights discourse and contributes a hitherto neglected aspect to the debate on human rights and religion in the international realm. The research points out three key findings: (1) John Paul II dominates this discourse, which has gained traction since the end of the Second World War. (2) Although Francis takes an outsider role in the papal discourse, he does not differ in principle from the mainstream papal human rights discourse. (3) From the first evocation of human rights by a pope, there is a persistent trend stressing both individual and collective human rights. The results offer fertile ground to anticipate future papal political conduct on the grounds of the trajectory of the human rights discourse.

Жінки у дискурсі з прав людини під час збройного конфлікту на сході України

The aim of this study is to analyze the representation of women in human rights media discourse during the armed conflict in the east of Ukraine in 2014–2019. Thus, critical discourse analysis was conducted using monitoring methods, qualitative content analysis, comparison, analysis, synthesis and generalization. For the first time, methodological innovation was introduced by combination of critical discourse analysis with agenda-setting theory through application of an integrative approach to the research. Within media texts analysis, the discourse practice of using genres, interdiscursivity and intertextuality was identified. The existing social practice in Ukraine was studied which included women’s defence of their rights to serve in various army units; at the same time, one could observe a struggle between political discourse and the ideology of paternalism as well as between human rights protection discourse and ideology of feminism. An analysis of social practice was also conducted, and for the first time, a methodological innovation was implemented by combining critical discourse analysis with agenda-setting theory using an integrative approach in the research. In particular, it was found that due to the media discourse reproduction of social inequality, members of the public competed for their agenda with politicians. It was found that in case of women’s struggle for their rights in the army during the armed conflict, there was a conflict between human rights discourse of feminism ideology and political discourse of paternalism ideology. This study shows that in the studied conflict’s discriminatory situation, women succeded in defending their rights to serve in the army during the armed conflict in the eastern Ukraine, and, accordingly, human rights discourse succeded in the media space.

From the Brazilian Senzala to the Japanese Buraku: Naturalism, Stigma, and the Rise of Human Rights Discourse in Aluísio Azevedo and Shimazaki Tōson

article proposes a comparative analysis of Brazilian and Japanese Naturalism with a focus on two seminal novels, O Mulato (1881), by Aluisio Azevedo (1857-1913), and Hakai (1907), by Shimazaki Tōson (1872-1943), which are regarded as each country’s starting points for Naturalism. These novels gave rise to conflicting critical interpretations, being charged both with reproducing the biases of social Darwinism and Eurocentric scientificism, and with voicing the condition of oppression in authoritarian societies. This article discusses both sides of the debate and reads these foundational works based on the concepts of stigma and abjection. Such a reading will suggest that what the detractors of Naturalism perceived as its prejudiced stance, identified in its crude descriptions of social pathologies, could in fact be interpreted as a portrayal of social injustice and a call for social change. This article’s reading of Naturalism that recognizes it as socially progressive gives rise to a discussion of the relation between its aesthetic innovations and the rise of human rights discourse in Brazil and Japan, approached from the standpoint of the political and intellectual implications existing between Naturalism and Abolitionism in Brazil, and between Naturalism and the Buraku Liberation Movement in Japan.

State-Centric Approach to Human Rights: Exploring Human Obligations

The conventional wisdom of rights as a limitation on the power of the State is a product of an archaic understanding that presumed the State is the only entity capable of infringing human rights. With the increased involvement of non-State entities in functions that were erstwhile reserved to the State, we need to re-examine this State-centric approach. The international community is already challenging this State-oriented liberal rights framework. Including individual obligations within the human rights discourse is an outcome of the conflict between the ‘liberal theory of rights’ that emphasizes individual autonomy, and the social democracy theory, that calls for regulating private conduct to strengthen implementation of rights. This article contextualizes the feasibility of including such individual obligations within the human rights discourse, especially in a world where private conduct equally impacts the actualization of rights.

Feminism and Natural Right in François Poulain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon.

I compare the notion of natural right in the work of François Poulain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon. Poulain defined right in terms of possession like Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, but limited the equality it established between men and women to private spaces beyond the state's gaze. Suchon gave the natural right of freedom strong impetus by grounding it in Aristotelian teleology, but this framework made it a dead letter for the Enlightenment. This analysis demonstrates the importance of early modern feminist philosophy to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy as well as to present-day discussions of human rights.

The Extension of Legal Personhood in Artificial Intelligence.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the main ethical, legal and social implications (ELSIs) concerning social humanoid robots that have their base in artificial intelligence (AI). The main dilemma highlighted touches upon the expansion of the concept of legal personhood, and the attribution of appropriate legal responses to govern the future proliferation of AI systems vis-a-vis social humanoid robots. The paper cautions on the need to carefully reflect on notions of personhood and human dignity for AI systems, balanced against the underlying representation of values and behaviors that may threaten to erode the human rights discourse. Additionally, it questions the wisdom of the broad expanse of the European legal response to the development and use of AI systems.

Abortion and Human Rights for Women in Argentina

Abortion and Human Rights for Women in Argentina Barbara Sutton (bio) and Elizabeth Borland (bio) introduction Legal abortion is one among several dimensions of a reproductive justice agenda, and yet it continues to be at the center of controversy in many places around the world. While in countries such as the United States abortion is legal but contested,1 in places such as Argentina, abortion is largely illegal, with few exceptions.2 Despite its criminalization, it is estimated that up to 522,000 abortions take place annually in Argentina.3 Abortion is also a leading cause of maternal mortality, and the clandestinity of the practice especially hurts the most destitute women.4 In this context, women's movement and feminist activists in Argentina have long advocated for the legalization of abortion. Their cause gained momentum in the last decade. Unlike the more narrow emphasis on "choice" that has been prevalent in the United States and other contexts,5 and critiqued by scholars and activists advocating for "reproductive justice,"6 abortion rights activists in Argentina have included expansive frames in their discursive repertoire, even as they concentrate on legalizing abortion. One of these expansive frames pertains to the notion of human rights. The proliferation of human rights discourse as a recognized and shared language across national borders and cultures—for example, as evidenced by international human rights treaties—suggests the need to examine how this frame works in practice and whether it has local resonance in different national contexts. According to Elizabeth Jay Friedman, from a feminist perspective, part of the power of the human rights frame derives from its ability to "provide legitimacy to political demands, given both its political acceptance and its 'machinery,' or instruments for its realization."7 Furthermore, the notion that "women's rights are human rights" was increasingly deployed in the global arena during the 1990s and is still being invoked in prominent activist spaces in different locales, including the 2017 Women's March on Washington.8 Still, [End Page 27] as we shall see, this frame is not without critics, including among feminists who have taken issue with its usefulness both philosophically and in terms of its concrete application in specific national contexts.9 Thus the question emerges: Is the human rights frame useful or viable when it comes to articulating long-standing feminist demands such as abortion rights? If so, in which circumstances? In the case of Argentina, why have abortion rights activists chosen to incorporate the language of human rights as an important component of their discursive repertoire? Within Argentina, the movement for abortion rights needs to be situated in the context of broader struggles for social justice, democracy, and gender and sexuality rights. In the last two decades several progressive laws were passed in Argentina, including legislation on sexual and reproductive health (2002), comprehensive sex education (2006), ending violence against women (2009), marriage equality (2010), and self-determination of gender identity (2012). These changes followed a historic turning point marked by a severe economic and political crisis in 2001, when a variety of social movements were agitating for new and old demands.10 However, despite legislative progress on matters of sexual and reproductive rights, legalizing abortion has proven more difficult to achieve. This article examines activist efforts to decriminalize and legalize abortion, paying special attention to the strategic use of a human rights frame. The prominent coalition to demand the legalization and decriminalization of abortion in Argentina is the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion, launched in 2005.11 By its tenth anniversary the Campaign had the support of more than three hundred organizations as well as countless individuals from all walks of life. Groups in the coalition include political parties, labor organizations, academic institutions, human rights groups, and many more. Activists characterize the Campaign as plural (comprising a diversity of individuals, social sectors, and political ideologies), federal (reaching the various regions of the country), self-organized (not directed by any external entity), and democratic (with the main direction of the Campaign determined through plenary meetings and collective discussion). The Campaign's key slogan, which has unified it when tensions and disagreement have arisen, is: "Sex education...