Nonhuman Rights Research Articles

Human Rights Due Diligence in Law and Practice: Good Practices and Challenges for Business Enterprises

AbstractThis article considers the practices of companies worldwide in attempting to implement human rights due diligence (HRDD) as envisaged by the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Based on empirical research conducted through surveys and interviews, it analyses corporate practices in this area. It examines the responses of companies with reference to the core elements of implementing HRDD: identifying actual or potential human rights impacts; taking action to address these impacts; and tracking or monitoring the effectiveness of actions. In addition, the article places these practices in the context of the legal developments in the field of HRDD. The research shows the difference that dedicated HRDD – in comparison with non-human rights specific processes – can make in terms of identifying adverse human rights impacts of both the company as well as of those which are part of its business relationships.

Litigating Nonhuman Animal Legal Personhood

In 2017 a New York appellate court issued a landmark ruling rejecting an animal rights organization’s efforts to assign legal personhood status to chimpanzees in Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery. This paper provides context for the ruling, and includes an amicus curiae brief the author filed in the case. The court discussed the amicus curiae brief in explaining its ruling, and a prominent animal law blog described the court’s decision as “citing to and relying on” the brief. The brief asserts and the court ruled that rights are broadly connected to humans’ norm of capacity for legal duties, and that because chimpanzees cannot bear legal duties they cannot be legal persons. Animal personhood litigation is in its infancy. The 2017 Lavery decision will be debated and cited for many years because the court directly embraced legal personhood’s foundational connection to the human community rather than dismissing the case on narrow grounds. This paper illuminates the reasoning behind the court’s decision and the argument that society should focus on evolving norms of human responsibility toward animals’ welfare rather than on the pretense of animal legal personhood.

Technics and Polemics in the Project of Non-human Rights

This article examines the use of technics and polemics within contemporary animal rights discourse. It focuses on the Nonhuman Rights Project, a group which is currently engaged in litigation in the United States aimed at having a non-human animal recognized by the courts as a person and subject of rights. Turning to the work of the late legal historian Yan Thomas, this article explores the degree to which the categories of person and thing have tended to become sacralized in the modern discourse of animal rights in order to refashion them at a polemical and metaphysical level. This is then contrasted with the work of Roman jurisprudence which, in Thomas’s account, was capable on the contrary of filing its metaphysical categories back within the narrow technical world of the civil law. The history of legal categories reveals in this sense some of the tensions which today beset the discourse of rights in relation to the non-human.

Grandes desafíos de la bioética. Escenarios de futuro

Partiendo de las múltiples definiciones de bioética, el autor realiza una serie de esbozos de futuro de la bioética entendida como bioética social y global que trasciende las fronteras de los países desarrollados.Desde aquí plantea ocho desafíos de futuro: la calidad de vida de los más vulnerables y la distribución justa de los recursos, la ética de la gestión del agua, la relación entre ecoética y bioética, los derechos de los seres no humanos, las fronteras entre lo humano y lo ético, la ética gerontológica, el transhumanismo y la eugenesia liberal.

Justifying Force Against Animal Cruelty

Punishing animal cruelty strengthens nonhuman rights and common justice. Today, bystanders should not be liable for reasonably protecting other animals from such abuse. If anything, the law should encourage these interventions by exculpation. This article outlines how existing legal doctrine can serve this end. Three familiar defenses can be made to justify force here, though with varying mileage. A “defense of property” theory would be familiar to the traditional legal status of nonhumans. Yet this permission is ordinarily limited to property owners and non-deadly force, making it a less robust avenue of defense. The historical and lingering inconsistencies of treating other animals solely as items of property also point away from this regime. Instead, arguments may be made that at least in terms of their emerging protection from cruelty, nonhumans are legal persons. Therefore, bystanders who enforce this right should argue that their actions fall under a more permissive theory of “defense of persons,” which has the benefit of allowing a wider range of actors and force. Likewise, appeals to the public good and lesser evil of using moderate force against animal abusers could allow an extension of the situational defense of “necessity.” In any event, due to the shocking nature and unfortunate prevalence of animal cruelty, a reasonable third-party permission to intervene should be discussed.

Will Nonhuman Rights Decrease Human Vulnerability to Zoonotic Diseases?

Zoonotic diseases (ZDs)1Zoonotic Diseases, Center for Disease Control (18 Oct. 2013), http://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/zoonotic-diseases.html. Zoonotic diseases are infectious diseases that pass from a...

Human Rights Advocacy Groups in Malaysia: The Case of the Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM

This paper is inspired by an interest to understand the roles and contributions of human rights advocacy groups to Malaysia and society. It aims to assess their effectiveness in advocating human rights, and the limitations that they face by referring the Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) as the case study. SUARAM has over the past two decades become one of the visible non-state actors in the country in its role to achieve better human rights protection. This study is concerned with how SUARAM has evolved, with a special focus on its work in the area of civil and political rights. Despite changes in the political landscape of the country and the increase of civil actions and public awareness on the work of civil society groups, this paper argues that they can claim little achievements for the past years of human rights activism due to the rigid government policy, the non-human rights friendly legislation, and also its own internal organizational weaknesses. One significant aspect is the close link of human rights advocacy groups with the political parties that can lead to problems of credibility and transparency.

Nonhuman Rights to Personhood

Nonhuman Rights to Personhood

Science Podcast

The show includes semiconductor nanocrystals, nonhuman rights, your Letters to Science , and more.

Article Review of Environmental Ethics and Nonhuman Rights, <em>Environmental Ethics</em>

Article Review of Environmental Ethics and Nonhuman Rights, <em>Environmental Ethics</em>

International progress and regress on animal rights

This paper addresses the social forces, such as cultural traditions, economic structures, and legal systems, affecting animal (human and nonhuman) rights. Also considered are the cross‐cultural degrees of societal advancement on rights, as illustrated by cultures that are stagnant on rights, progressive on rights, and regressive on rights. The definition of “advanced” versus “primitive” cultures is somewhat complicated with the argument being that technologically and materially advanced cultures can be primitive on rights issues, as found in the present‐day US. The right‐wing Bush administration, greatly aided by the “war on terrorism”, has devolved human rights by reducing civil liberties, freedom of assembly, educational opportunities, and economic equality. This repression of human rights has repercussions for environmental protection and nonhuman rights, as demonstrated herein.

II. AVENA AND OTHER MEXICAN NATIONALS {MEXICO v UNITED STATES OF AMERICA), PROVISIONAL MEASURES, ORDER OF 5 FEBRUARY 2003

The International Court of Justice is not a human rights court but it does hear human rights cases.1This is hardly remarkable. As Professor Ian Brownlie has pointed out ‘[h]uman rights problems occur in specific legal contexts. The issues may arise… within the framework of a standard-setting convention, or within general international law.’2Because human rights treaties normally have their own dispute settlement procedure, the situations in which the International Court of Justice is more likely to have to grapple with human rights issues lie within the realms of general international law or in non-human rights specific treaty provisions, which may, nevertheless, raise such issues. In addition, some human rights treaties, such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 1948, contain provisions specifically referring disputes to the International Court of Justice.3Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Court has been involved in a number of cases involving human rights questions.

On vegetarianism, morality, and science: A counter reply

I recently took issue with Kathryn George's contention that vegetarianism cannot be a moral obligation for most human beings, even assuming that Tom Regan's stringent thesis about the equal inherent value of humans and many sentient nonhumans is correct. I argued that both Regan and George are incorrect in claiming that his view would permit moral agents to kill and eat innocent, non-threatening rights holders. An “unequal rights view”, by contrast, would permit such actions if a moral agent's health or life is at stake. I then argued that current nutritional research does not support Professor George's claim that some wealthy adult males (and many fewer wealthy women) are the only persons whose health does not require the consumption of nonhuman animals and their products. In her 1992 response to my critique, George did not address my moral argumentation. She concentrated her entire paper on a wholesale rejection of my discussion of nutrition. Although she now takes a somewhat more moderate position on who can safely contemplate strict vegetarianism, she still believes that most people are not in a position to follow such a diet. In my counter-reply, I argue that her rejection is based upon numerous distortions, omissions, and false charges of fallacy. She even devotes a substantial section of her paper to criticizing me for saying the opposite of what I actually wrote. As I did in my earlier paper, I cite current research, including George's own preferred source on the topic of vegetarianism, to support my view. I conclude that Professor George has still not shown that for most human beings it is dangerous to follow a diet that omits nonhuman animals and their products. Moral agents who take the rights of humansand nonhumans seriously will find vegetarianism well worth considering.

Who can be morally obligated to be a vegetarian?

Kathryn Paxton George has recently argued that vegetarianism cannot be a moral obligation for most human beings, even if Tom Regan is correct in arguing that humans and certain nonhuman animals are equally inherently valuable. She holds that Regan's “liberty principle” permits humans to kill and eat innocent others who have a right to life, provided that doing so prevents humans from being made worse off. George maintains that obstaining from meat and dairy products would in fact make most humans worse off. I argue that Regan's “liberty principle” either contradicts his “equal rights view” or does not permit the slaughter of another for food. I show that a different view recognizing the moral rights of nonhumans but according them less value than normal adult humans, “the unequal rights view”, would permit such action if human survival or health depended upon it. However, it would also permit the slaughter of innocent humans in the same circumstances. Finally, I argue that current nutritional research does not support George's contention that most humans would suffer if they ceased eating other animals and their products.

Environmental Ethics and Nonhuman Rights

Environmental Ethics and Nonhuman Rights