Movement For Human Rights Research Articles

Rereading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Plurality and Contestation, Not Consensus

In this article, I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterize the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorization of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority, and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity.

The Testimony Project: Papua ed. by Charles E Farhadian (review)

Reviewed by: The Testimony Project: Papua ed. by Charles E Farhadian Eben Kirksey The Testimony Project: Papua, edited by Charles E Farhadian. Jayapura: Deiyai Press, 2007. isbn 978-979i96077-6-8; xvii + 179 pages, black-and-white photos. Paper, US$14.99. The straightforward prose used by Charles Farhadian stands as an example to all anthropologists who strive to make their source material available to people beyond restricted academic audiences. Transcripts of extended interviews with twelve [End Page 192] Papuan leaders contain stories about their religious faith, abuse by Indonesian security forces, and their resulting political struggles. These compelling narratives depict indigenous intellectuals who were forced to grapple with knotty moral problems while stuck in situations not of their own choosing. Testimony is a genre that is ripe for contemporary scholarly analysis in the Pacific, and this volume is a welcome reminder of the role individual experiences can play in revealing contemporary realities. Some of the accounts in this book are by many of my own Papuan mentors and interlocutors. Intimate biographic details, personal parables that were news to me, reveal intense experiences that shaped the moral life of these men and women who were struggling to live under a military occupation. Octovianus Mote describes violence he witnessed while he was a high school student in West Papua's capitol of Jayapura, from 1978 to 1981. "During those years," Mote recounts, "the military killed a lot of people in the gardens—like hunting wildlife. They would put the bodies in a large rice bag, with the feet of the victim showing" (104). After seeing these incidents as a teenager, Mote came "under conviction" in a process the anthropologist Susan Harding has described in The Book of Jerry Falwell as crossing "through a membrane into belief" (2000, 59). Mote became determined to help resolve longstanding political problems through tactical engagements with powerful institutions as an adult. "I tried to be a bridge between the government, churches, and parliament in West Papua, reminding them that we all were working together, that we all have the same commitments" (109). Benny Giay recounts how his imagination was captured by the teachings of foreign missionaries, even as he worked to understand the cosmologies of his own people. After advanced theological training in Manila, where he was transformed by encounters with liberation theology, Giay earned a doctorate in anthropology from Amsterdam. Returning to West Papua, after rejecting lucrative career opportunities elsewhere, he became swept up in the human rights movement. When a pastor was shot dead by Indonesian soldiers at the pulpit on Christmas Day, Giay began pushing the leadership of his church to take a stand. Gradually he began to leverage his position in the church to oppose human rights abuses and to advocate for a peaceful solution to broader political problems. Amidst Giay's account of political struggles, he also relates some of his personal struggles—offering intimate details about the relationship between politics and the contingencies of daily life. His first wife, Rukiah, died in August 1999—just as he was about to join an international team in investigating alleged crimes against humanity by the Indonesian government. The sudden onset of illness, an inconclusive diagnosis, and the timing of her death led many to conclude that Rukiah had been poisoned by government agents. "I was not at home when Rukiah died," Giay shares. "And that was very difficult for me" (32). After Rukiah's death, he temporarily withdrew from human rights advocacy [End Page 193] and political organizing to take care of his two daughters. Giay has since returned to this work and has stepped forward to lead the KINGMI church, a Protestant denomination with tens of thousands of indigenous Papuan members. The Testimony Project also contains colorful stories and surprising tales. Nicolaas Jouwe, Papua's self-styled president-in-exile, recounts that the deal to transfer West Papua to Indonesia was sealed during an intimate encounter between John F Kennedy and Indonesia's first president, Sukarno. Citing personal friends in the US State Department as sources, Jouwe reports: "In January 1961 Sukarno went to the US to see Kennedy, who was sick at the time. He had something wrong with his back...

Solving for X

George F. Kennan is renowned as the author of the containment doctrine and subsequently as a critic of American Cold War policy. But other elements of his thought, which have been neglected, are integral to a reconsideration of his stature. He distrusted democracy and proposed ways to limit its expression, discounted movements for human rights in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, believed Hispanics posed a threat to the United States, and often argued against the national liberation aspirations in the Third World (which he considered largely irrelevant to Great Power diplomacy). He failed to grasp the connection between the U.S. civil rights movement and foreign policy. These weaknesses limited his usefulness as a policy adviser and still cloud his legacy as America’s “conscience.”

Human Rights in the United States: Legal Aid Alleges that Denying Access to Migrant Labor Camps is a Violation of the Human Right to Access Justice

It is estimated that there are more than 86 million migrant workers worldwide, the vast majority of whom suffer poor living and working conditions. In the United States, more than 3 million migrant farmworkers, including at least 100,000 children, are estimated to labor in fields every year, many of whom lack access to justice, earn sub-living wages, and exist in dehumanizing circumstances. Farmworkers are among the most exploited and vulnerable populations in the United States; yet, distressingly, they are also the least protected by U.S. law and law enforcement. Legal aid advocates in the United States attempt to raise awareness and educate this starkly poor, mobile, and isolated population about the legal protections and remedies available to them, only to have employers either outright deny access or prevent meaningful communication with farmworkers in the migrant labor camps where migrants and their families often reside during the course of their employment. One nonprofit law firm that provides such services, Maryland Legal Aid Bureau, spearheaded the submission of a joint legal aid complaint on the issue to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. The advocates, who reach out to and represent migrant farmworkers, argue that the lack of federal law mandating access to migrant labor camps, combined with discriminatory treatment of migrant farmworkers under U.S. labor laws and lackluster enforcement of those laws that would apply, violates a panoply of farmworkers’ human rights, including their right to access justice.The complaint, which is the basis for this Article, is notable because it is the first-ever joint effort among U.S. legal aid organizations to utilize the Special Procedures provided through the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights to shine an international spotlight on an entrenched local issue. It comes on the heels of a new partnership between Maryland Legal Aid, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, and the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Washington College of Law (the “Center”) at American University. One of the the Center’s programs, the Local Human Rights Lawyering Project, aims to normalize human rights at the state and local level and help legal aid lawyers integrate human rights into their daily work. Such partnerships are part of a larger push among social justice advocates in the United States to galvanize a domestic human rights movement so as to bring human rights home, rather than only applying them oversees, as has thus far been more common. As described more fully below, the joint legal aid complaint submitted to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights argues that the denial of access to migrant labor camps ostensibly equals an inability for the farmworkers to access justice, as well as other human rights, especially the right to health and the right to family and community. The complaint argues that the United States, as a State Party to various human rights treaties, is required to protect, respect, and fulfill the human rights of all people, including migrants. By refusing to uphold the right to access to justice for farmworkers in the United States, the U.S. government, as well as state and local governments, violate human rights law, thereby allowing millions of farmworkers to continuously suffer inhumane conditions and assaults on human dignity.

The 1963 Good Friday Parade in Birmingham, Alabama: Walker v. City of Birmingham (1967) and Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham (1969)

The 1963 Good Friday Parade in Birmingham, Alabama Walker v. City ofBirmingham (1967) and Shuttlesworth v. City ofBirmingham (1969) DEBORAH ANN ROY On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, the actions of a group of African-American ministers and their supporters in Birmingham, Alabama would impact the struggle for civil rights in America and lead to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Two United States Supreme Court decisions would arise from the Good Friday events, one that upheld the actions ofthe ministers and one that held that their actions had violated the law. In deciding the two cases, the Supreme Court balanced the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and to peaceably assemble against the right of a state to maintain public order and to require that citizens respect state court orders. The two cases are Walker v. City ofBirmingham1 and Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham? The named petitioners, Wyatt Tee Walker and Fred Lee Shuttlesworth, were African-Amer­ ican ministers who were active in the movement protesting segregation in the City of Birmingham. In Walker, the Supreme Court considered the ministers’ violation of a state court injunction that prohibited them from violating a city ordinance requiring a permit for parading or demonstrating. In Shuttlesworth, the Court considered the constitutionality of the parade ordinance itself. In April 1963, Reverend Walker was the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (“SCLC”). The SCLC was a civil rights organization formed by African American ministers in 1957. Martin Luther King, Jr. served as the SCLC’s President.3 Prior to joining the SCLC, Rever­ end Walker was pastor ofthe Gillfield Baptist Church in Petersburg, Virginia. King de­ scribed Walker as a “youthful, lean and bespectacled man” who “brought his energet­ ic and untiring spirit” to the SCLC’s meet­ ings.4 Walker was detailed by the SCLC to begin work on a direct action campaign to end segregation in public facilities in 414 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Birmingham. He visited the city periodically to lay the groundwork for the campaign that would begin in the spring of 1963. Walker scheduled workshops on nonviolent confron­ tation and he conferred with lawyers about the city code on picketing and demonstrating.5 Reverend Shuttlesworth grew up in a rural area outside ofBirmingham.6 As a young man, he worked as a mechanic and truck driver before joining the ministry. At the age of thirty, Shuttlesworth was named the pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham.7 He began a voter registration campaign among his new congregation and agreed to act as membership chair for the Birmingham branch of the National Association for the Advance­ ment of Colored People (“NAACP”).8 He organized a campaign to desegregate Birming­ ham’s buses, wasjailed several times, and had his home damaged by a bomb, although he escaped injury.9 Due to his active participation in the effort to end segregation in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth became the named petitioner in a number of U.S. Supreme Court cases.10 Following actions taken in Alabama against the NAACP, Reverend Shuttlesworth helped to found a new civil rights organization in Birmingham. In 1956, Alabama’s attorney general John Patterson had sought to force the NAACP to register as an out-of-state corpo­ ration and furnish lists ofits officers, employ­ ees, and members to the State of Alabama.11 On June 1, 1956, Patterson obtained a temporary restraining order against the NAACP, barring its operations in Alabama for failing to register as a foreign corporation with the state.12 The NAACP did not want to register with Alabama because it meant identifying its members and supporters, which might place them in harm’s way. From the date of the Alabama court’s order until the Supreme Court overturned it in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Flowers,13 the NAACP had almost no presence in Ala­ bama.14 Reverend Shuttlesworth joined with other members of the banned NAACP to form a new group named the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (“ACMHR”),15 and he was elected its first president by acclamation.16 The ACMHR became an affiliate of Dr. King’s SCLC and began work to relax Birmingham...

Writing Human Rights History—And Social Science Encounters

This review essay on Aryeh Neier'sThe International Human Rights Movement:A History(Princeton University Press, 2012) discusses Neier's central themes: the origins and maturation of the movement and its effects, including the expansion of human rights and humanitarian law, enhanced criminal accountability for human rights crimes, and the appearance of criminal tribunals, culminating in the International Criminal Court. An overview is interspersed by imaginary conversations between Neier and scholars who speak to his themes, especially legal scholar Jenny Martinez, political scientists Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, historians Devin Pendas and Tomaz Jardim, and sociologists John Hagan, Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider, Joachim Savelsberg, and Ryan D. King. Linking a practitioner's account with scholarly analyses yields some benefits of “Pasteur's Quadrant.”

Negotiating Religious and Women's Identities: Catholic Women at the UN World Conferences, 1975-1995

At the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, the delegation from the Holy See succeeded in ensuring that religious views of women were placed prominently on the UN agenda. Yet the situation was not without conflict in the Catholic ranks. The Vatican's recent involvement in this field challenged the authority and influence of long-time Catholic women's organizations, such as the World Union of Catholic Women's Organizations, who had, since the birth of the UN, often single-handedly represented the Catholic perspective on women. This article explores how the participation of this NGO in the World Conferences on Women encouraged Catholic women to take an active part in the global women's movement and to promote a more secular-influenced understanding of women's rights. It also describes how the growth of discussion on reproductive rights in the 1990s engendered a reconsideration of their "moderate" feminism under the pressure of John Paul II's "new feminism" and the emerging women's human rights movement.

The international human rights movement: a history

Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1: The Movement 1 Chapter 2: Putting Natural Law Principles into Practice 26 Chapter 3: What Are Rights? 57 Chapter 4: International Human Rights Law 93 Chapter 5: International Humanitarian Law 117 Chapter 6: Defying Communism 138 Chapter 7: Rights on the Other Side of the Cold War Divide 161 Chapter 8: Amnesty International 186 Chapter 9: Human Rights Watch 204 Chapter 10: The Worldwide Movement 233 Chapter 11: Accountability 258 Chapter 12: Rights after 9/11 285 Chapter 13: Going Forward 318 Notes 335 Index 359

Fighting Wars for Human Rights

A new book recounts the history of the international human rights movement, a movement that of late has become in part an instrument of war.

Cooperation Between Secular and Religious Rights Organizations in Turkey

This paper elucidates patterns of cooperation over the past three decades between some Islamic and secular organizations in Turkey's human rights movement. This paper argues the human rights master frame provided the building blocks for activists to build bridges among ideologically disparate organizations. As a result, a process of reconciliation blossomed in the mid-1990s during a tumultuous period of unprecedented opportunities and severe repression. In addition to the human rights master frame, which formed an ideational bridge across distinct agendas, organizational leaders served as brokers, battling a culture of mistrust and intolerance through confidence-building measures. Although movement activists have made great strides in reconciling differences, two issues—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual rights and external funding—pose new challenges to cross-cleavage partnerships.

Projecting Liberalism Into a Realist World: David P. Forsythe and the Political Science of Human Rights

Using a claim from David Fosythe in his Human Rights and International Relations, this paper discusses the ways in which the empirical political science of human rights has explored how human rights have projected liberalism into a realist world. It extends Forsythe's notion of realism to the domestic level and shows how scholarship in the field since the 1980s has sought to examine the ways that power and self-interest can be constrained through institutions and norms of the kind articulated through an appeal to human rights. The discussion shows that findings in the literature largely confirms Forsythe's fundamental insight. The human rights project is not impossible in a realist world; rather it interacts with the realist world in ways that mean we will always and everywhere see great variation in the promotion and protection of human rights. And this variation is due to the presence of different institutional arrangements, structural constraints and the behavior of powerful states that at times is in alignment with the broad aims of the human rights movement.

From dirty war to genocide: Argentina’s resistance to national reconciliation

Three decades of political, legal and discursive contestation about the violence, military repression and disappearances that troubled Argentina during the 1970s have repeatedly changed the multidirectional memories of adversarial groups and undercut attempts at national reconciliation. The representation of past violence as dirty war, state terrorism or genocide singled out different perpetrators, evoked other remembrances, and called for distinct ways to reconcile Argentine society. These interpretive frameworks succeeded one another in public debates about the past, and generated conflicting collective memories among political opponents. The recent comparison of disappearances with the Holocaust convinced the human rights movement, and certain judicial and academic circles, that genocide had occurred in Argentina. Individual culpability became transformed into collective responsibility, and further complicated national reconciliation. This article demonstrates that the memorialization and continuous narration of past massive violence in Argentina did not advance the coexistence of adversarial groups but intensified their enmity and revived certain repressive practices.

Congo Cases: The Stories of Human Rights History

Congo Cases:The Stories of Human Rights History Eleni Coundouriotis (bio) That human rights history constitutes an identifiable genre becomes apparent when we consider the growing body of work that either tries to tell the history of the human rights movement or examines particular historical events through a human rights lens.1 The human rights lens frames the historiographical project as an exposition of crimes against humanity.2 Human rights history uses the frame of crimes against humanity to analyze contemporary history where it might be instrumental in making the case for legal prosecution, or, alternatively, to revisit events from the deeper past and renarrativize them through its criteria.3 The two centers of gravity (histories of the human rights movement and histories of crimes against humanity) reveal divergent ideas of what human rights history is, but they also work in synergy to highlight an emphasis on narrative, which characterizes both. My focus is on the latter type of human rights history (histories of crimes against humanity), with texts about the Congo as my particular example. I contend that human rights history is shaped by a story of reading in which the author takes evidence previously ignored or misconstrued but pertaining to well-known events and uses the evidence to renarrativize the events, providing a new story with a human rights-inflected moral center. This process of identifying crimes against humanity by narrating a discovery made through reading ultimately serves the larger enterprise of legitimating the history of the human rights movement by arguing for its capacity to create a broad constituency of people who can see past wrongs in a new light and who are empowered by this recognition to participate in the effort to prevent the repetition of such wrongs. Stories of reading, instances in which the author refers to his or her own act of reading, illuminate the ways in which reading is a form of experience. Jonathan Culler defines "stories of reading" as our coming to awareness of an agency that lies in the text itself. We experience reading as if the text has the power to act on us, to transform us, yet it proves no easier to say what is in the reader's or a reader's experience than what is in the text: "experience" is divided and deferred—already behind us as something to be recovered, yet still before us as something to be produced. The result is not a new foundation but stories of reading, and these stories reinstate the text as an agent with definite qualities or properties, since this yields more precise and dramatic narratives as well as creating a possibility of learning that lets one celebrate great works.4 [End Page 133] The boundaries between text and reader are blurred, since it is only in reading that both come to life; and, as reading is an experience over time, it can never be fixed. Instead, the story of reading is incorporated in the form of the text. The human rights history refers to reading, asking us to imagine someone else's reading while we ourselves are reading. In this imaginative act, we see ("constitute" is Culler's word) the text as an agent acting upon the reader. Thus our access to the text's agency is highly mediated. Furthermore, it is this kind of layering that takes up much of the energy of human rights history and where its potential to bring the reader to awareness (its "possibility of learning") lies. Culler's terminology gives us a fresh approach with which to examine the instrumental uses of narrative in human rights discourse. In our stories of reading, we constitute the text as an agent that has wrought change upon us and given us experience. Moreover, Culler deliberately calls this a "reinstatement" of agency, hinting at the infinitely renewable passage to new stories of reading at each occasion of reading. Stories of reading have an empowering effect, giving the reader of human rights history a sense of expansiveness, which comes from the recognition these texts ask us to give. This recognition is often duplicated by the actors in these histories, who themselves undergo a recognition/conversion experience for us...

Professionalizing a Global Social Movement: Universities and Human Rights

Research on the human rights movement emphasizes direct changes in nation-states, focusing on the efficacy of treaties and the role of advocacy in mitigating immediate violations. However, more than 140 universities in 59 countries established academic chairs, research centers, and programs for human rights from 1968–2000, a development that highlights the diffuse penetration of the social movement into core domains of society. We investigate this process with event history models, finding that countries embedded in the human rights regime and countries with dense civil society linkages to the human rights movement are particularly likely to develop a university human rights program. We also find that the structuration of the global human rights regime has an independent positive influence on the rate of country adoption, but national human rights violations, social unrest, and indicators of modernization or development are less salient.

Human dignity's false start in the Supreme Court of Canada: equality rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Human dignity functions largely as a rhetorical trope in contemporary human rights jurisprudence. In 1999 the Supreme Court of Canada began a jurisprudential experiment in which the concept of dignity was elevated to the status of a legal rule in interpreting the equality rights provision of the charter. Equality rights challenges to laws and programmes were to be judged largely on the basis of the feelings of affront experienced by claimants. This dignity test proved to be highly subjective and hence judicially unmanageable. While the politics of human dignity are effective precisely because rights claims are emotionally charged, a human dignity test based on feelings of affront has operated poorly in the Canadian constitutional context. Canada serves as a cautionary tale in the maturation and institutionalisation of the human rights movement.

Thinking Critically about Armed Groups and Human Rights Praxis

This article critically examines the relationship between the human rights movement and armed groups. Drawing upon a wide array of case studies, it examines some of the most important legal and policy developments which have shaped this field since the 1980s. It also critically explores some of the theoretical and practical models of interventions which have been deployed by different human rights organizations concerning abuses by armed groups. The paper then explores the dilemmas of engagement with armed groups while managing the difficulties associated with conferring legitimacy on such groups. It also explores how human rights groups deal with the realities of the involvement of some armed groups in governance functions within their own communities. Finally, we identify two areas where we believe important future developments in this field could be directed: the framework of transitional justice, and the role of human rights organizations in navigating the increasingly blurred boundaries between some armed groups and organized crime

Globalization: A Twenty-First Century Challenge to Catholicism and Its Church

Roman Catholicism is more than a global Christian denomination, and the Catholic Church is more than a worldwide religious organization. Taken together, Catholicism, as a faith, and the church, as its enabling institution, are intertwined in two significant and interrelated missions, one spiritual and one social. In this equation, however, Catholicism's spiritual purpose is paramount. Catholics claim that Jesus mandated his followers to teach, preach, and sanctify souls, and that as a result, Catholicism operates pastorally on transcendent principles. Using a framework of dogma, spiritual doctrines, and social teachings (magisterium), Catholicism necessarily impels and requires its church, as a social institution, to serve others and to operate within the context of history, time, and the structures of man's world.1 By working to promote the common good, the institutional Church works to carry out a historical and evolving social message and a social, cultural, economic, and political agenda based on Jesus' teachings. Thus, today it supports public movements for human rights, social justice, and the equitable economic development of peoples and states.

Decision-Makers in the Dock: How Trials, Human Rights Advocacy and International Law are Shaping the Justice Norm

Abstract The mid-1980s marks the start of what has become a rapid shift towards new norms and practices of providing more accountability for human rights violations through the use of trials. This dramatic increase in human rights prosecutions is the direct result of the activism of the human rights movement. The increase in trials in turn has aided the development of international criminal law and has promoted the formal institutionalization of new accountability standards for international organizations. This article traces the emergence and diffusion of the justice norm. Then using two sets of case studies it examines how international law and human rights activism have interacted to create new opportunities for domestic prosecution in Argentina and the process through which the United Nations came to adopt formal standards on prosecutions and amnesties

The Human Rights Movement at U.S. Workplaces: Challenges and Changes

The concept of workers' rights as human rights has only recently begun to influence the formation and implementation of labor policy in the United States. In the workplace, the growing human rights movement challenges long-held beliefs and practices in labor relations. The author explores this issue and its implications for U.S. labor policy and practice, focusing specifically on individual versus collective rights, exclusive representation, coverage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), employer resistance to workers' freedom of association, the right to strike, the statutory purposes of the NLRA, and the underpinnings of the traditional U.S. industrial relations system. These challenges also affect U.S. legal isolationism, the role of labor unions, the status and implementation of economic as well as civil and political rights, and the U.S. labor and employment relations research agenda.

O direito à terra como um direito humano: a luta pela reforma agrária e o movimento de direitos humanos no Brasil

O objetivo deste texto é analisar, por meio da história recente dos movimentos sociais que lutam pela reforma agrária no Brasil, a construção do direito à terra como um direito humano. A partir dos anos de 1970, a interação de movimentos camponeses da Igreja Católica progressista e da rede transnacional de direitos humanos confluiu na produção dessa ideia da posse da terra como um direito humano, que marcou não apenas a luta pela terra no Brasil, como também influenciou a forma como o próprio movimento de direitos humanos foi construído no país e na maneira como ele se inseriu nessa rede transnacional de ativistas.