Human Wrongs Research Articles

The Past as Prologue: Slavery, Colonialism and Modern Human Rights

The article reflects on slavery and colonialism and how both historical crimes affect Africa and its peoples. It argues that the struggle against slavery laid the foundation for the modern human rights movement. The desire to recover the losses suffered from the depredations and plunder of colonialism, in part, shaped the evolution of the right to development. The article calls for reparation for Africa for the damages the continent and its peoples suffered from slavery and colonialism. It argues that the concept of universal human rights is meaningless without some form of atonement for universal human wrongs.

Rereading Ha Jin's Novels in a Transpacific Context: Human Rights and Human Wrongs

This essay rereads Ha Jin's two novels, Waiting and A Free Life, in a transpacific context. I designate this transpacific context to include both the movement of US economic and military expansionism in the Asia Pacific and the possibility of deploying an alternative epistemology and ontology from that geopolitical region as both a response and negotiation. Within this context, I argue that Jin's novels do not simply challenge human rights abuse in China as presumed by critics but rather raise broader historical and cultural questions about different perceptions and understandings of these rights in what Gayatri Spivak theorizes as "responsibility-based" ("Righting Wrongs" 549) and "rights-based" (536) societies.

PAMIĘĆ O KOZAKU UKRAIŃSKIM W UJĘCIU LITERACKIM ROMANTYKÓW UKRAIŃSKICH I POLSKICH

PAMIĘĆ O KOZAKU UKRAIŃSKIM W UJĘCIU LITERACKIM ROMANTYKÓW UKRAIŃSKICH I POLSKICH

From human rights to human wrongs. How local government can negatively influence the situation of an individual. The case of Polish LGBT ideology-free zones

ABSTRACT The article deals with the phenomena of LGBT ideology-free zones, zones created by almost a hundred units of local government in Poland, an EU member state. I argue in this piece that although the resolutions creating these zones were adopted by local government units in Poland, the primary responsibility for them should be attributed to the Polish Government. The article analyses how the government supports LGBT ideology-free zones, as they are with line with so-called culture wars conducted by government, and how the international community (including the European Union and Council of Europe) have reacted to them.

Human Rights and Wrongs: 50 Years of Struggle and Change for Women

This keynote was delivered at the 78th annual conference of the International Council of Psychologists Annual Meeting on December 4, 2020 via Zoom and presents a personal and professional analysis of the successes and failures of feminist psychology as a liberation movement in the last 50 years. I also suggest promising future directions and the work still to be done by future generations.

Book Review: Human Wrongs – British Social Policy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by T. J. Coles

Book Review: <i>Human Wrongs – British Social Policy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights</i> by T. J. Coles

Human Rights and Wrongs in Iran's Drug Diplomacy with Europe

Europe has a strong interest in and a history of assisting Iran in controlling inflows of drugs from Afghanistan. But due to Iran's increasing use of the death penalty in drug trafficking cases, Europe has terminated its cooperation. Based on interviews with Iranian policy-makers and representatives of both human rights organizations and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), this article presents Denmark's withdrawal of drug control funding in 2013 as a case study, analyzing the dilemmas and trajectories of joint Iranian-European drug diplomacy and the prospects for reengagement following the nuclear agreement.

Women’s human rights may be unicorns, but they can fight wicked witches

This essay responds to Alasdair MacIntyre’s skeptical claim that human rights are like “witches” and “unicorns”—as in, they don’t exist, and thus cannot be subject to abstract rational justification. Putting aside the issue of the abstract rational justification of human rights, I focus on the more urgent practical question of how human rights might be meaningfully alleged when they do not yet exist within society, culture, law, or policy. Borrowing from MacIntyre’s narrative theory of ethics to undermine his skeptical view of human rights, I contend that human rights—whether understood as moral rights or as political rights—can be coherently alleged through the same kind of narrative framework that MacIntyre argued was essential to any intelligible ethical system of thought. In particular, imaginative narrative frameworks—such as those found in stories and films—have been crucial for the enterprise of demanding human rights for the powerless, especially girls and women. Putting at its center a feminist interpretation of the classic American film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), this article playfully, yet ultimately seriously, challenges MacIntyre’s dismissal of rights as “witches and unicorns” by showing how allegations of women’s human rights derive much of their power for fighting human wrongs from their historically (although not essentially) imaginative character as well as their deeper narrative structure.

Towards a Legally Binding Instrument on Business and Human Rights

This paper examines key options for the negotiation of a new "internationally legally binding instrument on Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and Other Business Enterprises with respect to human rights", in accordance with the terms of resolution 26/9 of the UN Human Rights Council adopted in June 2014. It first recalls the historical background of the debate (Part II). It then reviews four options for the negotiation of such an instrument (Part III). The first option is for the new instrument to define in greater detail the content of the States' duty to protect human rights by regulating transnational corporations. A new instrument could usefully clarify certain implications of this obligation of States concerning extraterritorial obligations, the parent-subsidiary and business (contractual) relationship and the right of victims to have access to justice. The second option is for the new legally binding instrument to take the form of a Framework Convention on Business and Human Rights, imposing on States to adopt national action plans or strategies on business and human rights, and to report on the progress made in this regard. These first two first options essentially aim to strengthen the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights endorsed by the Human Rights Council in 2011, by transforming the recommendations they contain into binding legal obligations. In contrast, the third and fourth options appear more ambitious. Yet, they too build on existing precedents in international law. The third option would be to directly address corporate behaviour, beyond what is already achieved in this regard through the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council (including the Working Group on Business and Human Rights). This could be done by providing that States bound under the new instrument accept that the corporations operating under their jurisdiction can be attributed human rights wrongs where the domestic remedies available to victims have proven insufficient to remedy such harms. It could also be achieved by providing that corporations under the jurisdiction of the State concerned can be prosecuted for serious human rights violations or violations of humanitarian law amounting to international crimes, where national jurisdictions have failed to address such international crimes.Finally, the fourth option is that of a new instrument on business and human rights that would provide for legal mutual assistance between States. One major source of impunity for transnational corporations which commit human rights violations is that the States concerned generally do not lend themselves such assistance, for instance in order to take evidence, to perform searches and seizures, to freeze or to recover assets following a judgment favorable to the victims. An instrument focused on legal mutual assistance would aim to fill this gap. Such an instrument would have a strong added value. It would also seem to have the support of a wide range of States, from the different regional groups. It would present the advantage of being easy to defend on the ground that the transnational nature of the activity of corporations poses specific challenges that this instrument would seek to address.These four options are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Any internationally legally binding instrument in the area of business and human rights could contain elements of each. Part IV of the paper concludes by illustrating which combination of these various items could achieve the best balance between the need to improve the protection of victims, and the need to move towards proposals that are politically achievable.

Balancing liberty and security: Human rights, human wrongs

Balancing liberty and security: Human rights, human wrongs

Human rights, human wrongs: literatures of captivity

Following Richard Rorty's lead, this article does not foreground debates on human rights to the exclusion of the literary; instead, it examines bodies of literature that articulate and express these concerns about human rights, sometimes explicitly, but more often by implication. It is within this context that we argue that a new sub-genre of writing can be discerned and shaped, one we label ‘literatures of captivity’. This article considers the ways in which these narratives manifestly open a discursive space that both allows and enables the exploration of what, exactly, constitutes human rights. This exploration of the violation of human rights, in a manner not so freely available in state-sponsored discourse (the law), is also disseminated and packaged in ways that reach and influence a considerably wider readership or audience than codified statutes. We suggest that this is especially pertinent to life writings, focusing in particular upon case studies drawn from Japanese American internment narratives and memoirs of northern Korean labour camps.

Workers' right to freedom of association under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and in three selected African Union member states

When the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) was adopted in June 1981, it was hailed as one of the most progressive regional human rights instruments that could help Africa progress from a continent of ‘human wrongs’ it used to be, to the one of ‘human rights’. The right to freedom of association is one of the rights entrenched in the ACHPR. This article examines workers’ right to freedom of association under the ACHPR with illustrations from three African countries that are parties to this regional instrument; namely, Ghana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. These countries provide three different but complementary scenarios which may help in assessing the protection of human rights in Africa in general and workers’ right to freedom of association in particular. This article concludes with recommendations for the promotion of workers’ right to freedom of association which is critical to socio-economic development in Africa.

America's Virgin Islands: a history of human rights and wrongs

America's Virgin Islands: a history of human rights and wrongs

Human Rights and Social Wrongs: Issues in Safeguarding Adults with Learning Disabilities

This paper uses a framework of human rights to explore the high levels of bullying and abuse experienced by adults with learning disabilities. It will identify the different needs of people with different degrees of learning disability before moving on to focus on the particular needs of those with mild learning disabilities who are targeted within local communities. It goes on to suggest a need for a change in assessment practice, away from task-oriented functional assessments and towards assessments which pay greater attention to social abilities and community dynamics. In concluding, the authors argue that present policies and their underpinning principles are at times too dogmatic and call for a greater recognition of the diversity of needs and vulnerabilities which exist across the learning disability spectrum.

Human wrongs, animal rights

‘Of course I didn't eat your shoe’. We all know that look of innocence in a pet's eyes when they are lying to us. Or do we? Are we really in touch with their emotional world.

The end of monkey research?

Kevan A. C. Martin, a neurobiologist and director of the Institute of Neuroinformatics—a joint institute of the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—has a moral dilemma. For the past four years, he has not hired any postdoctoral fellows or PhD students. He feels he cannot take them on in good conscience because he cannot guarantee they will be able to do research. It was another moral debate that put him in this position; his work on rhesus macaques has been put on hold and he is uncertain when, or if, it will resume in Switzerland. > …the real impact on primate labs might come from pending revisions to legislation in Europe and the USA that could potentially end research on apes and monkeys altogether In 2004, the Swiss Constitution was changed to acknowledge “the dignity of living beings,” which, according to Martin, was intended to address concerns about transgenic experimentation, rather than animal research in general. Nevertheless, the change resulted in some members of a local external advisory committee on animal experimentation legally challenging the 2006 renewal of Martin's license to use the monkeys for neurobiological research. Similar legal action was taken against Daniel Kiper at the same institute, whose research on brain plasticity in monkeys has relevance for stroke patients. A third researcher, whose work on motor systems has implications for patients with spinal cord damage, has decided to leave Switzerland (Staub, 2007). All three of these projects were approved by the Zurich Canton's Veterinary Office, which controls experiments on animals. Martin's case has been working its way through the Swiss courts and is finally before Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court. In the meantime, Martin, who established the Institute in Zurich with Rodney Douglas 13 years ago, has been limited to using post‐mortem monkey brains. These are …

The Rejection of Human Rights Framings: The Case of LGBT Advocacy in the US

This article explores why many advocates concerned with lesbian, gay, and transgendered (LGBT) rights in the US have not chosen to frame their struggles in human rights terms. The article recognizes that framing a cause in human rights terms can be an effective way of claiming the moral high ground and of asserting affinity with others throughout the world who seek to condemn human wrongs and promote human dignity. However, this is not always the case. This article uses a historical review of LGBT organizing in the US to explain why human rights framings also may be viewed as unduly restrictive and even detrimental when identity is the central organizing factor.

Spinoza's Normative Ethics

Spinoza presents his ethics using a variety of terminologies. Propositions that are, or at least might be taken for, normative include only very few explicit guidelines for action. I will take this claim from Vp10s to be one such guideline:Vp10s: So that we may always have this rule of reason ready when it is needed, we should think and meditate often about common human wrongs and how and in what way they may best be driven away by nobility.

Forced to flee: human rights and human wrongs in refugee homelands

Chapter 1 Introduction: Ideas that Work Chapter 2 Papua and the Issue of Enclave Development Chapter 3 Ethiopia and the Issue of Terror Chapter 4 Bosnia and the Issue of Concentration Camps Chapter 5 El Salvador and the Issue of Disappearance Chapter 6 Sudan and the Issue of Genocide Chapter 7 Palestine and the Issue of Internal Displacement Chapter 8 Conclusion: Interventions that Work

Animal rights, human wrongs?

The balance between the rights of animals and their use in biomedical research is a delicate issue with huge societal implications. The debate over whether and how scientists should use animal models has been inflammatory, and the opposing viewpoints are difficult to reconcile. Many animal‐rights activists call for nothing less than the total abolition of all research involving animals. Conversely, many scientists insist that some experiments require the use of animals and want to minimize regulation, arguing that it would impede their research. Most scientists, however, try to defend the well‐established and generally beneficial practice of selective experimentation on animals, but struggle to do so on an intellectual basis. Somehow, society must find the middle ground—avoiding the cruel and unnecessary abuse of animals in research while accepting and allowing their use if it benefits society. In any debate, one should first know the facts and arguments from each side before making an educated judgement. In the Talking Point in this issue of EMBO reports , Bernard Rollin provides ethical arguments against animal experimentation (Rollin, 2007). Rather than simply demanding adequate regulations to ensure animals are well treated and do not suffer unnecessary and avoidable pain, Rollin questions the assumption that humans have an automatic right to make decisions for other animals. In his expansive and stimulating article, he concludes that there is no logical basis for the way in which we treat animals in research; in fact, we would not tolerate such treatment if the animals were Homo sapiens ; therefore, we cannot tolerate such treatment for other sentient creatures that, like us, are able to experience and suffer pain. Practicing scientists will be comforted by the views …