Power Of Human Rights Research Articles

Analysis of experience using human rights to accelerate WASH access in four countries

Abstract Human rights to water and sanitation have been widely recognised in legal instruments at the international, regional, and national levels of governance. More awareness of states’ obligations has provided additional impetus to promote human rights in policy advocacy. The international non-governmental organisation WaterAid, as a non-state actor specialising in the water, sanitation, and hygiene services (WASH) sector, adopts a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to WASH programming. This paper draws on the experiences from WaterAid WASH projects in four countries – Nepal, Ghana, Mali, and Burkina Faso, to evaluate the practical impacts of the HRBA to ensure that governments fulfil their responsibility to realise universal access to water and sanitation services in different contexts. The outcomes highlight that three important contributions of the HRBA: (1) generates greater awareness among rightsholders and duty bearers about responsibilities and entitlements over safe drinking water and sanitation; (2) promotes constructive engagement between the government and rightsholders; and (3) equips people with the motivation, skills, and agency which are critical dimensions to work on sustainable WASH. The WASH sector should, therefore, embrace the power of human rights and invest in the specific activities and frameworks to integrate human rights into systems strengthening the WASH sector, while continuing to analyse and learn how to adapt and improve the approach in different contexts.

Introduction to human rights on the edge: The future of international human rights law and practice

We convened a conference funded by the National Science Foundation at Arizona State University in April 2021. The 40 papers presented at the conference, a subset of which form this special issue, together demonstrated that, far from collapsing in the face of duress, law is a malleable tool that is deployed in novel ways to promote human rights. Collectively, the conference participants illustrated that the power of human rights lies not in their essentialized transcendence of time, culture, and context, but in their enduring promise that a more just world can emerge from sustained and creative struggle through, against, and at the margins of states, laws, and institutions. Ultimately, the key questions to emerge are not whether human rights law and practice will survive, but rather, what are the forces that continue to sustain, revitalize, and transform them? And what are human rights in the process of becoming?

Southeast Asia’s human rights institutions and the inconsistent power of human rights

This article argues that continuing ambivalence about the importance of rights in Southeast Asia is not based on a perception that rights are a hegemonic ideological imposition of the West, or on a desire on the part of some states to preserve the ability to treat domestic populations however they wish, unhampered by the constraints of international human rights law. Instead, I contend that ambivalence has to do with uncertainty in the application of rights. I use two case studies (Brunei’s introduction of a strict form of Islamic law in 2013; and the attack by Myanmar’s military forces on the country’s minority Muslim population, the Rohingya, in 2017) to test whether rights in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Human Rights Declaration can be specified to an extent that would allow the Declaration to fulfill its role as a common framework for human rights cooperation in Southeast Asia.

The Limits of Human Rights: International Law and Global Organizations

Since the mid-20th Century “human rights” have played a central role in the rhetoric of international relations from the United Nations to other forms of international systems and organisations. The "power” of human rights refers to the claim that individuals "have rights only because they are human" and that these rights belong to all people, hence they are universal. However, the given degree of violence experienced in the 20th century, period, when the concept of human rights has become more dominant in international and national law, questions arise about effectiveness of international human rights protection. This lack of effectiveness gives rise to a certain degree of scepticism about the power of human rights, which may take different interpretations. The notion of human rights based on the principles of humanity and freedom and the assumption that political power must be subjected to “reason” and “law” can be questioned in its very foundations. The present paper analyses the traditional understanding of human rights as included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 and how human rights have been integrated in the law of worldwide organizations to promote integration and liberalisation of trade. This descriptive account will be evaluated against a critical understanding of natural right which involves a critique of reason and of history understood as a progressive thought.

The power of human rights in the modern world

The power of human rights in the modern world

ПРИНЦИП ВЕРХОВЕНСТВА ПРАВА: ІСТОРІЯ СТАНОВЛЕННЯ

У статті аналізується історичний розвиток принципу верховенства права як сполучення справедливості, свободи, рівності, гуманності. Аналіз процесу становлення принципу на різних етапах суспільного розвитку демонструє, що визначені ще в епоху Античності основоположні ідеї панування права є актуальними і нині, а єдність вияву норм права та моралі є визначальною у визначенні змісту принципу.

Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World

These are troubling times, in which we appear to be facing an ever-expanding litany of harms and injustices entirely of our own making. Our awareness of these pathological conditions is expressed through various critical perspectives and platforms, which together reinforce a pervasive sense of crisis. We all contribute to the making of our world in a variety of ways. Few of us can claim to possess entirely clean hands when it comes to accounting for how the world could have become so disenchanted and so unpleasant for so many. However, some may wish to claim that the very purity of their cause provides them with a secure alibi. The sounds of utterly marginalized voices do not carry very far and remain inaudible to those who occupy the various sites of economic, political and legal power. This cannot be said of human rights, which cannot claim the status of ignored outsider. In a relatively short span of time, human rights came to fill the mouths of countless millions of people in their attempts to give voice to “justice.” Human rights, at least according to many of its most ardent supporters, is the language of humanity. Setting aside the metaphysical presumptions of such sentiments, the very fact that so many human beings across the world, including so many of the most and the least powerful of humankind, adopted the language of human rights appeared to confirm its status as the globe’s foremost moral doctrine for the public sphere. The elevated status of human rights does not rest upon rhetoric alone. That human rights occupy a prominent place within the global order is apparent in a variety of ways and settings, one of the most visible of which is the rapid development of an entire body of international human rights law. The moral power of human rights was given hard, concrete form through the hard, concrete institutions of international and domestic law. Through its legal embodiment, human rights became an integral component of the global order and, in so doing, lost the moral alibi afforded those doctrines that seek only to protest and condemn from the sidelines.

Power, Mechanisms, and Denunciations: Understanding Compliance with Human Rights in International Relations

The four volumes on human rights norms reviewed here investigate a puzzle introduced by quantitative studies, which shows that the expansion of commitments with human rights does not guarantee compliance with these rights in practice. Going beyond the classical opposition between constructivism and rationalism, the volumes explore the conditions and mechanisms that are likely to close this ‘compliance gap’. This essay starts by reviewing the arguments of the books before focusing on two major themes: compliance mechanisms and international denunciations. It argues that the introduction of ‘reintegrative shaming’ and ‘stigma’ to compliance research may help refine current knowledge on normative change and resistance to change. Betts A and Orchard P (eds) (2014) Implementation and World Politics: How International Norms Change Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friman HR (2015) The Politics of Leverage in International Relations: Name, Shame, and Sanctions. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hafner-Burton E (2013) Making Human Rights a Reality. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press. Risse T, Ropp SC, and Sikkink K (eds) (2013) The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power by Kathryn McNeilly

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power by Kathryn McNeilly Anna Grear (bio) Kathryn McNeilly, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power (Routledge, 2018), ISBN 9781138690219, 166 pages. Costas Douzinas once wrote that: Human rights are the negative principle at the heart of the social imaginary. The end of human rights, like that of natural law, is the promise of the "not yet," of the indeterminacy of existential self-creation against the fear of uncertainty and the in-authentic certainties of the present. When the apologists of pragmatism pronounce the end of ideology, of history or utopia, they do not mark the triumph of human rights; on the contrary, they bring human rights to an end. The end of human rights comes when they lose their utopian end.1 Kathryn McNeilly's book, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power,2 offers extended reflection upon the "not yet" of human rights and its promise for radical politics—a promise, which like the utopian end explored by Douzinas, is a restless, impossible principle of hope.3 McNeilly constructs an account of human rights emphasizing the persistence and significance of their not yet—a performative, agonistic leaning-forwardness—in which human rights are to be understood as a ceaseless grappling with the political, expressed through ineradicable tensions between power, vulnerability, and alterity. In making her argument, McNeilly draws upon established critical engagements with the multiple paradoxes of human rights. She is fully aware that human rights ascendancy is marked by their extensive violation, as well as by ambivalent dynamics between their emancipatory impulses and their dark complicities with hegemonic power. Mc-Neilly understands, therefore, the skepticism of activists and thinkers concerning human rights. Her central question is animated by a deep recognition of human rights failures in full cognizance of their uneasy role in relation to contemporary crises—including the contemporary crisis of human rights legitimacy. Can human rights, despite all this, "offer possibilities for contemporary radical politics?" This is a question that can only be answered adequately by examining the "relationship between human rights and radical social transformation" under present configurations of power.4 McNeilly's book reaches out to battle weary activists and thinkers to make the case that human rights can be a vehicle for radical politics in confrontation with the hegemony of contemporary power: I advance that an alternative conception of rights compatible with the promotion of different regimes of class, gendered, racial, ablest and heteronormative power and meaningful social equality is made possible through the concept of "human rights to come."5 [End Page 710] "Human rights to come," then, is in essence McNeilly's account of the not yet of human rights. She offers an extended engagement with the "futurity" that Douzinas sees human rights "inscribe [into] law"6 by focusing her attention on the inherent futurity of human rights themselves. There is a way, McNeilly insists, for human rights to offer hope of renewed critical engagement and to recover the vital energies of their inherently political nature. Indeed, it is the very "depoliticization" (following Jacques Ranciere)7 of rights as a result of their widespread codification and positivization, converging with radical politics having "[run] out of tools to meaningfully challenge hegemonic regimes of power,"8 that opens out the promise and urgency of human rights to come. The power of human rights as a language of claim, combined with reclamation of their political nature and the responsiveness of human rights to crisis, suggests that a futural conception of human rights can reinvigorate the power of the political for contemporary politics.9 McNeilly develops her thesis by beginning with the idea, well established in critical human rights thinking, that human rights always contain a movement of (re)articulation, that their meanings remain persistently open (Chapter 2). This dynamic of permanent excess means that human rights are always "inherently 'to come,' and … strive towards a futural conception of living and being that is free from alterity."10 McNeilly posits an interlocking set of four theoretical aspects of human rights to come: performativity (Chapter 3), universality as universalization (Chapter 4), agonistic pluralism (Chapter 5), and the paradoxical vulnerable subject (Chapter...

The Role of Human Rights in Setting the Boundaries of Sovereignty and the Autonomy of the EU Legal Order

Human rights in the eighteenth century were regarded as acquired rights within a certain legal context, for a specific legal community. However, during revolutions, such as in France, they have also been seen in the light of ‘universal natural law’. At the same time, constitutional rights may also be seen as further developed civil rights. In that case, however, not much is left over to do for the emancipatory power of human rights when it comes to the inviolable individual, human dignity and the humanization of society. Human rights should be placed at the forefront when devising the State’s Governmental apparatus and continue to function in the light of their universal origins. It is, therefore, disappointing that the European Union has taken it upon itself to determine the content and reach of human rights based on the autonomy of the European legal order by refusing to join the European Convention on Human Rights.

The international human rights discourse as a strategic focus in socio-environmental conflicts: the case of hydro-electric dams in Brazil

This article examines the mobilisation of human rights in campaigns against hydro-electric dams in Brazil. The symbolic and legal power of human rights has allowed activists to challenge official accounts of the impact of dams while deploying domestic and international legal frameworks. Although the politicisation of natural resources in Brazil has limited the effectiveness of anti-dam mobilisations, an appeal to the human rights agenda has translated into a powerful critique of the social impact of Brazil’s development agenda, thereby making a moral and legal claim for justice.

The Dilemma of Attraction-Autonomy Deficits

Other SectionsAbstractATTRACTION-AUTONOMY DEFICITS: DUAL CONCERNS ABOUT MARGINALIZATION VIS-?-VIS MAJOR INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIESASEAN’S DILEMMA OF ATTRACTION-AUTONOMY DEFICITS AT THE REGIONAL LEVELOBSERVATIONSINSTITUTIONALIZING HUMAN RIGHTS IN ASEANINSTITUTIONALIZED ACCEPTANCE OF HUMAN RIGHTS: THE STORY OF 2003CONCLUSIONFigureFootnoteReference

Making Human Rights a Reality. By Emilie M. Hafner-Burton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 296p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance. Edited by Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 372p. $95.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Making Human Rights a Reality. By Emilie M. Hafner-Burton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 296p. $75.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance. Edited by Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 372p. $95.00 cloth, $34.99 paper.

Torture and Terror

Torture and Terror John Prados (bio) Jess Bravin . The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay. New Haven : Yale University Press , 2013 . 440 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper). Alfred W. McCoy. Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. Madison : University of Wisconsin Press , 2012 . xv + 401 . Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 . There was a time when Americans worried—and protested—what was known as the “Imperial Presidency.” Those were the bad old days of the Vietnam War. The specter seemed to have lifted with the end of the Southeast Asian conflict and the waning of the Cold War, but to hear these authors tell their stories, the excesses they describe amount to imperial behavior—and are not bounded by the Cold War or even the “war on terror” which began with the attacks of September 11, 2001. By these lights, imperial presidents never gave up the ghost, and 9/11 has led to a further acceleration of questionable activities and accretion of power within the U.S. executive branch. For the sake of the Republic, these disturbing trends need to be examined. Let’s start with chapter before verse. Alfred W. McCoy (author of Policing America’s Empire, 2009) here offers an overview of torture and its effects, and he also studies the evolution of the techniques of torture in U.S. practice. On the first point, the analysis goes beyond the observation that torture dehumanizes the individual to observe that both victim and torturer are impacted: the victim by personality suppression, the oppressor by a sense of empowerment. McCoy uses his extensive research in the Philippines to bring the argument full circle, maintaining that empowered torturers impact the state by bringing pressure on it—up to and including coups d’etat—to ensure they have impunity for their deeds. Perpetrators initially insist that torture is merely the resort of a few bad apples, next they invoke national security as justification, and finally they appeal for national unity as a reason to ignore misdeeds. If these arguments fail, extra-legal methods follow. The Philippine case is a stark one, in which a certain cohort of officers conducted a series of coups between 1986 and 1989, and one member of the [End Page 564] group, an architect of the torture program, ended up as a powerful figure in the Philippine Senate. The author makes lesser references to torturers’ impact on the state in Latin America (primarily Argentina) and Africa. He could have done more with Algeria, where French officers who tortured indeed participated in a coup against the French state and some then joined in a secret army organization that fought their own government for the purpose of extending the counterinsurgency war. The Algerian case also has something to say about impunity, the other end of McCoy’s arc of evolution. In France, the sense of responsibility and guilt for torture preoccupied the society. Preemptive pardons from the National Assembly and even the French presidency did not make the issue go away. As recently as the last decade, fifty years after their misdeeds in Algeria, torturers were still being hauled before the court of public opinion, if not criminally charged. The rise of Human Rights as a formal international norm poses a major obstacle to the “torture system,” if it can be called that. McCoy argues that Human Rights has retarded impunity but feels it has a limited scope and reach. This, however, represents a moving target. The growing list of national and international criminal prosecutions of former torturers—from Argentina, Chile, Peru, El Salvador, Rwanda, and elsewhere—suggests that the power of Human Rights’ norms is increasing. The torturers are still ahead but, as the Algerian case illustrates, society has reached the point where torturers cannot expect perpetual immunity. The book outlines the development by the United States of a practice of psychological torture, which McCoy postulates as the most significant advance in these infernal techniques in centuries. Initiated by the Central Intelligence Agency, abetted by real scientific research, codified in a CIA manual, and further evolved since, this history is among the most interesting aspects of Torture and...

Norms, Power, and Human Rights

If there is one field within the study of international affairs where progress has undeniably been made over the past two decades, it surely is the study of human rights, which has grown from a marginal enterprise in which only a few scholars were engaged to a full-blown subfield of international affairs that attracts some of the most talented scholars publishing in the most prestigious outlets. Kathryn Sikkink and Emilie Hafner-Burton have each made remarkable contributions to our knowledge in this field. Sikkink's work, especially Activists Beyond Borders (Keck and Sikkink 1998) and the Power of Human Rights (Risse-Kappen, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999), continues to have an enormous influence on how scholars theorize about human rights and on how they design their case studies. Emilie Hafner-Burton has become, along with Beth Simmons, the most prolific human rights scholar primarily (though not exclusively) using quantitative methods. Now both scholars have written books that are aimed not just at academic audiences but also at policymakers and the educated public. Both books do a majestic job translating scholarly research for a broader audience. Both books also have normative agendas: they wish to improve current policies, practices, and institutions.

Noncommunicable Diseases and Human Rights: A Promising Synergy

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) have finally emerged onto the global health and development agenda. Despite the increasingly important role human rights play in other areas of global health, their contribution to NCD prevention and control remains nascent. The recently adopted Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of NCDs 2013-2020 is an important step forward, but the lack of concrete attention to human rights is a missed opportunity. With practical implications for policy development, priority setting, and strategic design, human rights offer a logical, robust set of norms and standards; define the legal obligations of governments; and provide accountability mechanisms that can be used to enhance current approaches to NCD prevention and control. Harnessing the power of human rights can strengthen action for NCDs at the local, national, and global levels.

A Most Unlikely Case: Chile, Pinochet and the Advance of Human Rights

This article argues that Chile has had a disproportionate effect on the international politics and law of human rights. Understood in traditional realist terms, Chile is a relatively small country that only recently joined the OECD and that should not have a great deal of impact on international affairs. Yet, for the 40 years since the 1973 military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende it has received a tremendous amount of attention from other states (particularly the United States), inter-governmental organisations and international non-governmental organisations, while at the same time has had a great deal of impact on the public discourse and understanding around human rights in ways that have advanced international law and policy making. The article examines the unlikely nature of Chile’s influence on human rights at the international level while recognising that very little true justice has been achieved at the domestic level for the gross violations of human rights that had been committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. The case of Chile is thus an illustrative example of ‘the power of human rights’ that has contributed to the ‘justice cascade’ in significant way, even though true justice at home has been slow in coming.

A Most Unlikely Case: Chile, Pinochet and the Advance of Human Rights

This article argues that Chile has had a disproportionate effect on the international politics and law of human rights. Understood in traditional realist terms, Chile is a relatively small country that only recently joined the OECD and that should not have a great deal of impact on international affairs. Yet, for the 40 years since the 1973 military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende it has received a tremendous amount of attention from other states (particularly the United States), inter-governmental organisations and international non-governmental organisations, while at the same time has had a great deal of impact on the public discourse and understanding around human rights in ways that have advanced international law and policy making. The article examines the unlikely nature of Chile’s influence on human rights at the international level while recognising that very little true justice has been achieved at the domestic level for the gross violations of human rights that had been committed during the Pinochet dictatorship. The case of Chile is thus an illustrative example of ‘the power of human rights’ that has contributed to the ‘justice cascade’ in significant way, even though true justice at home has been slow in coming.

Toward a recalibrated human right to a clean and healthy environment: making the conceptual transition

Despite many noble efforts to champion the right to a clean and healthy environment and related regulation, the official recognition and jurisdictional reach of this right is highly limited. It does not matter if it is understood as an entitlement derived from other substantive rights, as a substantive right autonomous unto itself, or as a cluster of procedural entitlements. Our highly decentralized and far too voluntarist international legal order is far more concerned with privileging commercial imperatives than in protecting human rights and environmental values. However, we may be approaching a ‘Grotian Moment’ that presents an unusual opening for change. A variety of civil resistance movements, new sorts of Internet-based collaboration and governance, and dissenting schools of thought in economics, environmental stewardship and human rights, are gaining both credibility and adherents – locally, nationally, regionally, globally, and points in between. This convergence points to a new paradigm of law, economics, and governance that could provide a practical new way to reframe the human right to environment as the human right to commons- and rights-based ecological governance – what we call ‘Green Governance.’ Unlike the right to environment now practiced – theoretically appealing but troublingly indeterminate operationally – the human right to Green Governance would be anchored in a cognizably well-defined, rich history of both substantive and procedural justice. As we explain, Green Governance can provide a powerful means for challenging the State/Market's structural limitations by drawing upon the power of Human Rights, Vernacular Law, and Self-Organized Governance as a complement or substitute for State-based governance. A human right to Green Governance could help protect the creations of nature and related societal institutions that we inherit jointly and freely from our forebears, hold in trust for future generations and seek to manage democratically in accordance with human rights principles. To advance this vision, we offer a Universal Covenant Affirming a Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Governance of Earth's Natural Wealth and Resources, a declaration ready for immediate adoption by and for all levels of concerned society worldwide.

The practical power of human rights: how international human rights standards can inform archival and record keeping practices

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is the preeminent international instrument elaborating on the rights of Indigenous peoples. It contains the minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of Indigenous peoples all over the world. As a consequence, the Declaration provides a blueprint for Indigenous peoples, governments and other third parties around the world to respect the rights and roles of Indigenous peoples within society. At its core, the Declaration is based on the principles of self-determination, good faith and participation in decision-making. In this paper, I outline how the principles of the Declaration can and should influence archival and record keeping practices. I suggest we need to harness the practical power of human rights. In exercising our right to participate in decision-making, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples can demonstrate this practical power. It is critical that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are substantive and major stakeholders in determining appropriate archival and record keeping processes for Indigenous culture, cultural property and knowledge.