Modern Human Rights Movement 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.

The Religions of Human Rights

AbstractThe modern human rights movement arose during a moment of unprecedented encounter between global religions in the mid-twentieth century. Yet attempts to parse the historical relationship between human rights and religious thought have almost exclusively taken the form of case studies of individual religious traditions. This focus on intellectual genealogies obscures the fact that much of human rights doctrine emerged from interreligious contacts and conflicts between Judaism and Christianity, particularly in the context of the decolonizing Middle East. This article retraces this interreligious encounter through the writings of Amnesty International founder Peter Benenson, diplomat and theologian Charles Malik, and rabbi and activist Maurice Perlzweig. Together they represent three different theopolitical responses to the problem of religious pluralism after global empire: minoritarian human rights, majoritarian human rights, and cosmopolitan human rights. Recovering these interrelated human rights conceptions exposes the frames of religious difference embedded in the modern Western human rights imagination.

A Renewed Call for a Robust Labor and Human Rights Agenda

Research Article| March 01 2020 A Renewed Call for a Robust Labor and Human Rights Agenda Cathy Feingold Cathy Feingold CATHY FEINGOLD is a leading advocate on global workers’ rights issues. As director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department, Feingold is a committed and passionate advocate, strategic campaigner, and policy expert. In 2018, Feingold was elected deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation, the organization representing 200 million unionized workers worldwide. She has more than twenty years of experience in trade and global economic policy, and worker, human, and women’s rights issues. Her work in both global and grassroots fora reflect her commitment to strengthening the voice of working people in global policy debates. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2020) 17 (1): 113–121. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-7962864 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Cathy Feingold; A Renewed Call for a Robust Labor and Human Rights Agenda. Labor 1 March 2020; 17 (1): 113–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-7962864 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search In his recent book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Samuel Moyn argues that the modern human rights movement has failed to challenge the neoliberal economic model and the growing economic inequality of the past decades. His thesis underscores tensions that have existed between a human rights movement that has focused mostly on addressing individual civil and political rights versus the conceptions of collective economic and social rights proposed by unions and allied labor rights organizations. While some traditional human rights organizations continue to argue that social justice remains outside their mandate, other smaller human rights organizations are shifting resources to increase their work on economic rights and strengthen transnational partnerships between human, labor, women’s, and social rights movements that challenge the current economic model and call for new economic rules that promote the well-being of workers and... Copyright © 2020 Labor and Working-Class History Association2020 You do not currently have access to this content.

The Human Rights Movement and the Prevention of Evil: The Need to Look Inward as Well as Out

The modern human rights movement began as a response to great evil perpetrated by individuals and nations against others during and preceding World War II. The movement has been dedicated to protecting the rights of individuals by confronting evil and holding nations accountable should efforts to prevent it fail. This article contends that while the human rights movement is good at confronting evil “out there,” it has failed in important ways to recognize flaws within itself. In particular, it displays a hubris that shows itself in two ways. First, the movement has embraced a utopian expansion of rights to be protected. We assume that if we simply identify something as a fundamental human right, that right will be promoted and enforced. Second, the movement has a utopian view of the bodies created to enforce human rights. The assumption is that if we set up an organization with a noble purpose, it will achieve noble aims. Both assumptions are false. And by operating on these false assumptions, the movement endangers itself and its ability to protect fundamental human rights. The article explores these assumptions and then offers suggestions for how the human rights movement can, with humility and proper expectations, better confront evil and protect human rights.

Human rights in the news: Balancing new media participation with the authority of journalists and human rights professionals

From the outset the modern human rights movement has relied on the press and media as an essential partner in its work to hold governments accountable for human rights violations. When Peter Benens...

Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns by Katja Kurz

Reviewed by: Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns by Katja Kurz James Dawes (bio) Katja Kurz. Narrating Contested Lives: The Aesthetics of Life Writing in Human Rights Campaigns. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015. ISBN 978-3825363499, $60.00. Narrating Contested Lives, which examines the role of activist autobiographies in human rights campaigns, is an important contribution to the burgeoning interdiscipline of literature and human rights. Published the same year as the Modern Language Association’s Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies, Katja Kurz’s monograph is a valuable demonstration of the important ways this subfield seeks to import the methods and goals of the modern human rights movement into humanities research and, potentially, to export humanities expertise to the work of human rights. Narrating Contested Lives takes up one of the most important questions in human rights work that relies upon storytelling: What communication strategies—from the details of narrative technique to decisions around staffing and publishing networks—determine the relative success or failure of empathy-based human rights campaigns? The value of Kurz’s approach to this question is best understood as part of a much broader context. Human rights monitoring and evaluation is a field unto itself, complete with specialized positions within rights organizations and consulting agencies that offer external reviews. As a report from the Association of Women’s Rights in Development points out, however, a great deal needs to be done to expand the techniques we use for understanding impact in human rights work, lest we end up neglecting valuable, long-term strategies that do not fit neatly into our existing frameworks: Women’s empowerment and gender equality initiatives have been under increasing pressure to measure their impact over the past two decades. At the same time, donor support for certain kinds of women’s empowerment or rights work has decreased, at least partly, because it is considered too slow, amorphous, or intangible. There is growing evidence, in fact, that the lion’s share of investment in gender equality has shifted to a handful of “magic bullets” like microfinance and political representation, precisely because the results of these interventions are far easier to assess. (Batliwala and Pittmann 7) [End Page 228] Academic work in the humanities like Kurz’s can certainly play an important role in literary studies, connecting the work of literary classrooms to the promotion of human flourishing. It may also play a niche role in human rights campaigns by supplementing perspectives in existing monitoring and evaluation frameworks. The methods of literary history and theory can deepen our understanding of the ethical complexities of representing atrocity; they can also bring analytic rigor to evaluating the “amorphous” and “intangible” ways audiences receive—and act upon—political storytelling. Narrating Contested Lives is organized around a series of case studies. It begins by contrasting the autobiographies of the internationally famous model Waris Dirie and the lesser known Fadumo Korn, both of whom became globally important activists dedicated to ending the practice of FGM (female genital mutilation). Without resorting to easy judgments, Kurz discusses the potential strengths and limits of their respective strategies: Dirie embedded her work in “a discourse on beauty and focused on criminalization of the practice,” while Korn “construed FGM within the discourse of disability and focused on mediation and participation of communities” (244). In developing her argument, Kurz pays particular attention to the narrative tropes and subgeneric conventions used in each autobiography, going so far as to track how the backgrounds of different co-authors affected public perception of the activists and their goals. Kurz describes, for instance, the progression of Dirie’s serial memoirs as a movement from a survivor’s story and celebrity memoir to a “‘return-to-Africa’ tale as an ethnographic journey” (63) designed in part to “correct some of the mistakes” (52) in the first memoir’s simplifying portrayal of Somali culture—an aim tied into the decision to employ as coauthor an academic with experience in Africa. From this pairing, Kurz moves on to analyze the autobiographies of former child soldiers Ishmael Beah and Emmanuel Jal, exploring how commercial collaboration and sponsorship raise compelling questions about the way corporations can...

The Failure of Constitutional Torture Prohibitions

AbstractThe prohibition of torture is one of the most emblematic norms of the modern human rights movement, and its prevalence in national constitutions has increased steeply in the past 3 decades. Yet little is known about whether constitutional torture prohibitions actually reduce torture. In this article, we explore the relationship between constitutional torture prohibitions and torture practices by utilizing new data that correct for biases in previous measures of torture and a recently developed method that mitigates selection bias by incorporating information about countries’ constitutional commitments into our research design. Using these new data and this new method, as well as more conventional data sources and methods, we find no evidence that constitutional torture prohibitions have reduced rates of torture in a statistically significant or substantively meaningful way.

The Inefficacy of Constitutional Torture Prohibitions

The prohibition of torture is one of the most emblematic norms of the modern human rights movement, and its prevalence in national constitution has increased steeply in the past three decades. Yet little is known about whether constitutional torture prohibitions actually reduce torture. In this paper, we explore the relationship between constitutional torture prohibitions and torture by utilizing new data that corrects for biases in previous measures of torture, and a recently developed method that mitigates selection bias by incorporating information on countries’ constitutional commitments into our research design. Using this new data and method, as well as more conventional data sources and methods, we do not find any evidence that constitutional torture prohibitions have reduced rates of torture in a statistically significant or substantively meaningful way.

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature ed. by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg & Alexandra Schultheis Moore (review)

Reviewed by: Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature ed. by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg & Alexandra Schultheis Moore J. Paul Martin (bio) Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg & Alexandra Schultheis Moore eds., Routledge, 2012), 302 pages, ISBN 978-0-415-89097-7. Those of us committed to the interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights studies will welcome these rich and varied studies on potential and actual literary contributions brought together [End Page 254] by Elizabeth Goldberg and Alexandra Moore. This sub-field (sub both to human rights and humanities) and this volume are dominated by the framework suggested by Joseph R Slaughter. He has emphasized the interactive development over the last couple of centuries between the Bildungsroman (the coming of age novel) and, using the title of his contribution to this study, International Human Rights Law (notably in Human Rights Inc: The New World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law, New York, Fordham University Press, 2007). Those of us who have come to human rights through other scholarly and advocacy routes may be not so sure that literature has had such a one-on-one impact. Perhaps both have grown out of the shared globalizing world. Either way, testimonies in all their fictional and non-fictional forms, as well as literary analyses now play a major role in the modern human rights movement. It is, therefore, important for human right scholars to understand literature’s dynamic and its impact as well as, the criteria used to measure and assess their impact. This volume comprises fourteen chapters written by fourteen different authors, including one chapter each by the editors. Its contents cut across human rights, literary writing and literary criticism in a variety of ways. The chapters address different forms of discourses and narratives, norm universality, theories of human rights, individual topics such as violence and women’s rights, as well as the work of an extensive range of authors, notably J.M. Coetzee, Edwidge Danticat, Vyvyane Loh, Salman Rushdie, Joe Sacco, Indra Sinha and others. The resulting themes and insights are complex and diverse. Nothing short of reading the book could do justice to the emotional and intellectual territory covered, not to mention the variety of literary genres, legal, literary, ethical and esthetical premises. The chapters identify the fascinating array of roles played by literature with respect to human rights. They include literature as a witness, as a wake-up call, as a mobilizer, as documentation, as a living memory or archive, as a social critique, as a re-interpretation of events, as a voice of the voiceless, as seeking to make sense of cacophony and the incomprehensible, and as an identification, analysis and reflection on subjectivities. A closer reading of the chapters would identify additional roles. The editors sought to encompass the core forms of human rights writing, including the analysis of testimonial and autobiographical forms of witness literature, the literature of protest, traditional and post-modern narratives and satires, the role of all kinds of drama and poetry, as well as fictional accounts of human rights events, claims and advocacy. The core questions for readers are when, where, and how do literary writings and literary criticism address and engage human rights. When is there intellectual or practical engagement, and when is it merely a question of re-labeling or story-telling? When, for example, is the search of a community for its identity a rights process, especially when the search is at the expense of other communities? The volume raises but provides no single answer to this range of questions. It is, however, an important step in that it offers substantial material for thought and analysis on the part of the reader. One has only to look back at the above list of roles and potential roles for literary and literary criticism to see some of the ways in which they can benefit the human rights enterprise. From no matter which starting or reference point you choose, the human rights fields of scholarship, advocacy, and diplomacy have now achieved a high degree of global ideological and ethical prominence. Today, the current international human rights regime, its principles, [End Page 255] institutions, and practices form the most...

The Future of the Human Rights Movement

The modern human rights movement is at a critical juncture in its history. It has been nearly seventy years since the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and some of the oldest and most active human rights organizations have been operating around the world for about forty years. More than twenty years have passed since the end of the cold war, and the time when people spoke in triumphal terms of the global success of Western values is now a fading memory. International human rights are ensconced as firmly as ever in international law and institutions, but what about the future of the “human rights movement”?

‘Less than human’: the detention of irregular immigrants in Malta

The treatment of irregular migrants in Malta is problematic from a human rights perspective, for it contravenes the principle of universalism that is intrinsic to human rights philosophy. Malta is unusual among states in that it imposes mandatory detention on such migrants, including asylum seekers. Based on a reading of foundational documents of the modern human rights movement, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the article argues that the principle of human dignity underlies the concept of human rights, but that the bypassing of this principle enables the Maltese government to continue its detention policies while claiming to uphold human rights. It is an approach contested by NGOs in this area, which point to the dehumanising effects of detention on migrants. It is not just the appalling conditions in which migrants are held that renders their lives miserable, but the dehumanisation produced by detention itself.

Violence-Focus of the International Human Rights Discourse: Blind Spots, Tunnel Vision, and Distorted Versions

The post-World War II international human rights discourse categorizes our social practices into binaries of violence/non-violence, with the purpose of conditioning our responses to view the former as illegitimate, harmful, and wrong, and the latter as an accepted arena of social activity. As I shall argue in this paper, this violence focus of human rights is a cumulative outcome of the birth of the modern human rights movement as a reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust; the grounding of the self understanding of the human rights discourse in Western liberal philosophies; and, the self-conscious strategies used by human rights activists to bring their agendas within the human rights regime. However, I argue that this violence focus of human rights is problematic as it has adverse consequences for the uniform, universal and humane application of the discourse. It also raises concerns of cultural relativism in non-Western societies. I will argue that there is a need to build a more pluralistic foundation for the human rights discourse, and will suggest that the notion of “choice,” which reflects the experiences of the decolonization movement (particularly that of South Asia), but also subsumes notions of opposition to violence, is one alternative approach to re-conceptualizing human rights. I will also sketch out the practical impact of this paradigm-shift on human rights theory and advocacy in general and in the South Asian context in particular.

Friends or Foes? The Commonwealth and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in the Courts

National human rights institutions (NHRIs), quasi-governmental agencies intended to protect human rights, constitute one of the most common institutional innovations advocated by the modern human rights movement. Among other things, they are intended to facilitate government compliance with human rights standards. This article examines the extent to which one particular NHRI, Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), has performed this function by using its authority to intervene in litigation that involves claims of unlawful discrimination or human rights violations. Focusing on cases in which both the HREOC and Commonwealth government participated, it shows that the HREOC's rate of intervention has varied relative to the party in power and that the HREOC has experienced limited success in leveraging law and courts as a means of challenging the government's policies.

The challenge of human rights: origin, development, and significance

Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Human Rights in History. Ancient Classical World. World of the Bible. Medieval World. Renaissance and Reformation Thought. Hobbes and Rousseau. Revolution in England. American Independence. French Declaration of the Rights of Man. English Resistance to Human Rights. German Developments: Kant and Marx. 2. Modern Human Rights Movement. Charter of the United Nations Organization. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Continental Developments. 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. Wider Human Rights Developments. British Developments. Conclusion. 3. Clarifying Human Rights. Some Useful Distinctions. Rights and Duties. Proliferation of Rights. Individuals-in-Society. Selfishness and Social Divisiveness. Ethical Imperialism?. A Challenge to All Cultures. Strengths of Human Rights. 4. Establishing Human Rights. A Matter of Belief. An Essential Requirement. Nature of Persons. Intuitionist Approaches. Human Dignity. The Wonder of Our Being. Major Opponents. Conclusion. 5. Globalizing of Human Rights. Global Expansion. Seeking a Global Ethic. Cultural Relativism. Global Human Rights. Towards Cosmopolitanism. Inadequacies of States. Principled Cosmopolitanism. Human Solidarity. Bibliography. Index

Equality and human rights

There is a puzzling disconnect between recent philosophical literature on equality and the modern theory and practice of human rights. This disconnect is puzzling because the modern human rights movement is arguably the most salient and powerful manifestation of the commitment to equality in our time. One likely source of this disconnect is the tendency of contributors to the philosophical literature on equality to focus on justice within the state, considered in isolation. This article begins the task of connection. Section II outlines a philosophical conception of human rights, the Modest Objectivist View, according to which the list of human rights is grounded in descriptive and normative egalitarian assumptions about what is required to help ensure that every individual has the opportunity for a minimally good or decent human life. Next, I explore the resources of the Modest Objectivist View for rationally reconstructing the conventional conception of human rights. Section III examines challenges to the Modest Objectivist View’s egalitarian assumptions. Section IV explores the question of whether the minimal egalitarianism of the Modest Objectivist View is compatible with the more robust egalitarianisms advanced in recent philosophical literature. I conclude that the minimalist egalitarianism of human rights is compatible with more robust egalitarian principles, once we understand the distinctive function of human rights as standards of transnational justice.

Francis Hutcheson on the Rights of Society

In Enlightenment tradition came chiefly to mean human rights, reposing in individuals. Initially few general-in a classic enumeration, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness-human rights have multiplied in modern times through international declarations, convenants, conventions. Several of these rights concern demographic matters, notably reproductive rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in December 1948 (its 50th anniversary being celebrated in 1998), states in Article 16: Men women offull age ... have right to marry to found a family. The Proclamation of Teheran, issued by International Conference on Human Rights held in Teheran in 1968, states that Parents have a basic human right to determine freely number spacing of their children (Paragraph 16). The World Population Plan of Action formulated at 1974 Bucharest conference changed parents to all couples added words and to have information, education means to do so (Paragraph 14(f)). This is also phrasing that appears as Principle 8 in Chapter 2 of Programme of Action of 1994 Cairo conference. The qualifier responsibly must presumably be read as a restriction on right to reproduce, limiting freedom to choose to decisions made with reference to a larger set of interests. Those interests are spelled out in Bucharest statement in these terms: the responsibility of couples individuals in exercise of this right takes into account needs of their living future children, their responsibilities towards community. Similar language, with added to community, is found in recommendations of 1984 Mexico City conference (Paragraph 26). Consideration of obligations of individuals to society-in other words, rights of society over its members-is a complementary line of thought to human rights, older but in recent times far less emphasized. (The comparative neglect of such obligations of need for a balance between two sets of rights has been a criticism of modern human rights movement.) This is subject treated

Domestic Human Rights Organizations in Africa: Problems and Perspectives

The modern human rights movement, as it is known today, is largely the product of the horrors of the mainly European war of 1939-45. Its rise is mostly a direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. The two principal documents of the movement—the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—largely establish negative rights that either limit or prohibit altogether government intrusion into the so-called “private realm.”

Domestic Human Rights Organizations in Africa: Problems and Perspectives

The modern human rights movement, as it is known today, is largely the product of the horrors of the mainly European war of 1939-45. Its rise is mostly a direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. The two principal documents of the movement—the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)—largely establish negative rights that either limit or prohibit altogether government intrusion into the so-called “private realm.”