Place Of Rights Research Articles

Sound and Fury: Diefenbaker, Human Rights, and Canadian Foreign Policy

Taking account of recent attention both to Canada's human rights history and to efforts to provide more nuanced examinations of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's time in office, this article explores the place of human rights in Diefenbaker's foreign policy. In doing so, it examines the international context of Diefenbaker's Bill of Rights and other domestic achievements and looks also at the prime minister's handling of South African apartheid, the issue of self-determination as it emerged at the United Nations, and rights violations in Communist countries. Concluding that there are some grounds to praise Diefenbaker, it argues, though, that the fiery prairie populist's rhetoric rarely matched reality. Despite considerable sound and fury, Diefenbaker's promotion of human rights broke little ground in terms of making the protection of rights a major focal point in Canadian foreign policy.

Social unionism and the framing of ‘fairness’ in the Wisconsin uprising

The concept of ‘fairness’ has been used to frame political struggles by politicians and activists across the political spectrum. This article looks at its use in the US State of Wisconsin during the ‘Uprising’ – a series of occupations, protests, recall elections and militant direct action that began in 2011. These events were a response to a ‘budget repair bill’ that sought to strip public sector union members of their collective bargaining rights and to apply severe austerity measures within the State. This article suggests that although ‘fairness’ has a certain broad-based and intuitive appeal, its mutability means that it is unlikely to be successful in framing a structural critique that can build and sustain social action. Instead, it argues that framing this conflict as an uprising suggested a more explicit form of resistance that enabled a wider mobilization, and this can best be understood as an example of social (movement) unionism – the extension of traditional work place rights approaches to include broader agendas of social justice, civil rights, immigrant rights and economic justice for non-unionized workers.

Rule-Consequentialism and the Significance of Species

According to rule-consequentialism, we ought to follow the principles that would result in the best consequences if they were generally accepted. These principles constitute the ideal code. My aim is to make clear what the ideal code says about what we owe to animals. I argue that it accords moral status to them: the rule-consequentialist should acknowledge both general duties and special obligations to animals. However, in the ideal code there is no place for animal rights, conceived as deontological constraints. Within the animal rights debate, I conclude, rule-consequentialism is superior to some of the most prominent ethical theories in its agreement with widely shared moral intuitions. But some of its practical implications regarding the proper treatment of animals remain unclear. This point is illustrated by a discussion of what Jeff McMahan called ‘benign carnivorism’.

A Legal Conventionalist Approach to Pollution

There are no moral entitlements with respect to pollution prior to legal conventions that establish them, or so I will argue. While some moral entitlements precede legal conventions, pollution is part of a category of harms against interests that stands apart in this regard. More specifically, pollution is a problematic type of harm that creates liability only under certain conditions. Human interactions lead to harm and to the invasion of others’ space regularly, and therefore we need an account of undue harm as a basis of assigning legal protections (rights) and obligations (duties) to different agents, which creates standards for holding those agents responsible for harm. Absent such positive standards with respect to pollution at the domestic or international level, it does not make sense to hold agents responsible. This fact has two fundamental implications. First, contrary to what some defenders of environmental justice argue, we cannot hold people responsible for polluting without a system of legal rights in place that assigns entitlements, protections, and obligations, and second, contrary to what opponents of environmental regulation claim, the lack of moral entitlements to pollute creates room for quite extensive legal restrictions on people’s ability to pollute for the sake of the environment and human health. Indeed the scope of those restrictions is wide and open-ended.

Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city

Following recent scholarship on place and place-making, we identify key challenges for contemporary empirical research using the “Right to the City” as an analytic. We seek to distinguish between the aspirational “right” articulated as a political and conceptual call to arms on one hand, and the “actually existing rights” that are carved out through both formal and informal mechanisms (including political protest) in the everyday city on the other. Actually existing rights are defined not through fiat or via momentary revolutionary acts, but through the durability of relationships between multiple actors, including residents, citizens, states, and corporate agents. We re-articulate urban rights as actually contingent and agonistic properties of the relationships that citizens have with places. This paper uses the historic conflict over community gardens in New York as an illustration of how thinking of rights regimes as multiple, overlapping, and placed helps better illuminate potential political interventions. Thinking of rights and places as plural, overlapping, and contingent is analytically productive because it highlights (rather than overwriting) conflicts between competing articulations of rights and privileges in cities.

Responsible citizens? How children are conceptualised as rights holders in Irish primary schools

This article draws on data gathered in Irish primary schools as part of a survey of primary teachers' understandings of human rights and human rights education. Using these data, the article analyses how teachers conceptualise the dynamic between rights and the children in their classrooms. While teachers recognised a place for human rights and human rights education in their teaching, the research findings suggest fragmented understandings of human rights and children's rights. The teacher attitudes, as well as the school and classroom practice and policy captured in the data, reflect ad hoc approaches to human rights education, which promote a culture of conformity and responsibility, rather than one of rights. In particular, this article highlights a tendency amongst teachers to conceptualise their pupils as duty-bearers in relation to rights rather than as rights-holders.

International Human Rights Norms and State Sovereignty

Human rights have gained widespread acceptance as international norms which have defined state sovereignty in new terms. State sovereignty is not likely to disappear from international politics but it is being restricted by internationally recognized human rights. Any state violating human rights is considered to be violating international norms which may give rise to a situation posing a threat to international peace and security. In such scenario the UN Security Council may take enforcement action. The present paper analyses the place of international human rights norms vis-a-vis state sovereignty.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking: A Turbulent Decade in Review

In 2004, largely in response to external developments, the predecessor to the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons with an explicit mandate to address the human rights aspects of trafficking. This article critically assesses the first decade of that mandate—identifying important achievements but also acknowledging substantial challenges in securing effective responses to trafficking that both protect and advance human rights. In looking ahead it considers the broader lessons that this experience may hold for the emergent global movement against human exploitation—and the place of human rights in the dynamic but often chaotic and schismatic environment that has emerged around trafficking over the past decade.

Judicial Enforcement of Social Economic and Cultural Rights in Kenya: Health and Housing

The place of human rights in evaluating the level of civilization of a society cannot be overstated. Modern constitutional-making processes endeavor to entrench progressive bills of rights in their architecture. General recognition of human rights in constitutional documents has become the bromide of constitutional law since after WWII. Constitutional designs have therefore shifted from giving prominence to civil and political rights, to the global recognition of social, economic and cultural rights ("SER's") as well. Undoubtedly, recognition of SERs has given rise to the debate whether SERs are legally binding constitutional provisions or mere political aspirations to be achieved overtime. As a result, the question of whether they are justiciable has emerged. This paper tries to answer this philosophical hypothesis by exploring judicial enforcement of SERs in Kenya and the effect entrenched SERs have in a constitutional dispensation they obtain.

Sovereignty, Repatriation, and the Archival Imagination

Sovereignty is an often invoked, yet notoriously misunderstood and misused term in relation to the political, territorial, cultural and economic needs, aspirations, and goals of Indigenous peoples living in post-colonial settler states. Archives were established as places where official records became anchors for nations in the making as they documented the accepted demise of their first peoples. As a result, the archival imagination is both a process of political work and ideological maneuvering. In the post-colonial imagination, archives have become hotbeds for revising the historical fictions and fantasies that allowed for the erasure and presumed demise of Indigenous peoples. As archives shift to include Indigenous voices, and as Indigenous archives assert their own prominence in the landscape, the archival imagination expands. This article analyzes the emergent archival imagination through the lens of sovereignty, repatriation movements, and digital technologies to expose the place of Indigenous rights, histories, and imaginations in the practical work of archives in post-colonial settler states. Using examples from my own collaborations in the United States and Canada with Indigenous communities and my work as the director of Mukurtu CMS, I examine how multiple stakeholders grapple with and infuse archival practices, tools, and work with the many nuances of sovereignty.

Geographies of Human Rights: Mapping Responsibility

AbstractGeography has much to contribute to the critical study of human rights. To date, geographic scholarship has tended to follow international trends in connecting the rights discourse to social and environmental justice agendas. Human rights, in these contexts, are assumed to be part of emancipatory politics. It is in challenging this assumption that I suggest critical geographic inquiry has more to offer. In this paper, I review critical geographic literature that explicitly focuses on the spatial processes of human rights around the world. Through this review, I identify a gap in the literature regarding the negotiations of responsibility that shape human rights discourses and practices. I draw on feminist and postcolonial theories of responsibility to highlight geography's potential for examining such negotiations to illuminate how responsibility is claimed, denied, ascribed, enacted, and avoided. Ultimately, I suggest mapping negotiations of responsibility as they cross scales, traverse space, and shape place will provide us with new and evocative lenses for critiquing the place of human rights within an emancipatory politics.

Against depolitization: Prison-museums, escape memories, and the place of rights

This essay compares postdictatorial transformations of former spaces of confinement for political prisoners into shopping malls, such as the Buen Pastor prison in Córdoba (Argentina) and the Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo (Uruguay). It places these within the context of past and current debates on the human rights of “common prisoners,” as distinct from those of “political ones.” Yet precisely the omission of the political is mirrored at the prison-malls in the architectural erasure of territorial marks of repression (the cells) but also of all material traces of a poetics of freedom within the site, such as a window through which political prisoners had once successfully plotted a mass escape. These erasures can be read, I suggest, within a program of invisibilization of acts of freedom in the reconfiguration of memorial practices and places. Here, I want to ask, How are escapes being remembered/forgotten in current sites of memory, where the dominant imaginary neutralizes political content? Can we conceive of an “architecture of affect” that would relate to memories of escape?

Smoking bans for private vehicles: children's rights and children's voices

Smoking bans have recently expanded to private vehicles in which children are present. This study considers the place of children's rights and children's voices in this policy initiative, with respect to the Canadian context, where vehicular smoking bans have been widely adopted. First, we examine print media reports, finding children's right to health was acknowledged less frequently than an array of competing adult rights. Children's voices were largely absent from the record. Second, we report on focus groups involving 23 young people in Edmonton, Alberta, highlighting participants' strong support for bans, based on their knowledge of health harms, aversion to smoke, and awareness that children have limited ability to contest adult authority in vehicles. We conclude that vehicular smoking bans may address the situation whereby children are forced to share an unhealthy environment, in breach of their rights.

The place of human rights in Nigeria's democracy

Human Rights are ontological, inherent and intrinsic to all human beings in as much as they are human, irrespective of nationality, sex, ethnicity, origin, colour or any other status. These rights can be protected in a functional democratic setting that anchors its foundation in the rule of law. In democracy, the rule of law protects the rights of individuals, preserves order, and limits powers of government. In Nigeria’s democracy, the reverse seems to be the case. Human rights are not respected. Extra-judicial killing, unlawful detention, and other series of human rights abuses are still prevalent in Nigeria democracy. To discuss the human rights in Nigerian democracy, the paper undertakes the following: Meanings of human rights, historical development of human rights, democracy, rule of law, human rights and Nigerian democracy, fundamental rights in 2011 constitution (As Amended), conclusion and finally recommendation.

Introduction to a New Theory in Intellectual Property Law: Legal Protection without a Property Right

The main concern of this preliminary research is to establish the place of the intellectual property rights within the classical classification of rights used by theory of law, in rights in rem and rights in personam, or as they were called by Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, multital rights and paucital rights. The analysis is based on contemporaneous legal systems, both national (Anglo-American and continental) and international and involves arguments relating to absolute and relative rights, to natural and positive law. If at the beginning it seems another complex and unanswered question regarding the intellectual property rights legal regime comparing to the classical property rules involving Lockean, Hegelian, utilitarian and monopolistic arguments, at the end my conclusion is that the intellectual property rights, more precisely the economic ones represents rights in personam, relative rights, paucital rights corresponding to a propter rem obligation of the intellectual creation material or electronic support, which cannot reproduce it or in some case even use it without intellectual property right infringement. This propter rem obligation is limited in time and so is the paucital intellectual property right, considering that an intellectual creation by its nature, cannot be appropriated by a person, being conceived, even before the creation, for the use of the general public, in order to enrich universal patrimony and the general knowledge, and not for a personal exclusively use.

Resisting LGBT Rights Where “We Have Won”: Canada and Great Britain

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) human rights are often assumed to travel from the core to the periphery, namely from the Global North to the Global South. However, these rights flows and resistances are more complex than a unidirectional model might suggest. Using a transnational perspective, we consider resistances to LGBT rights in places where LGBT rights are supposedly assured. In Canada and Great Britain, where various forms of equities legislation for LGBT people have been enacted, there is an increasing opposition to LGBT gains. The transnational circulation of these oppositional discourses can be seen in how Canadian and British organizations talk to, and about, each other and illustrate transnational networks that create resistances in the places where “we have won.” This questions a sole focus on resistances in places that do not have LGBT equalities legislation, usually those outside the Global North and associated with “less developed others.”

Unstrategic essentialism: material culture and Hawaiian articulations of indigeneity

Often rendered synonymous with deep historical attachments to particular landscapes, indigenous identities are inseparable from questions of geography. The meeting ground of place and nativeness is fecund with politics. All over the world, claims of indigeneity have become indispensable in struggles over territory, natural resources, and basic political rights in place. This article focuses on both a handful of cases from the secondary literature and empirical research on Hawai′i's Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail. It discusses essentialist expressions of indigeneity around the preservation and interpretation of Native Hawaiian material culture. Engaging with the literature on articulation theory and indigeneity, it suggests that these essentialisms emerge unintentionally rather than strategically. Its central claim is that the materiality of heritage objects, artifacts, sites, and landscapes plays an unnoticed role in shaping discourses around indigenous identity. The article concludes by suggesting that such unstrategic essentialisms pose real political risks for Native Hawaiians and offer suggestions for a more intentional engagement with the essentializing properties of indigenous material culture.

E. de Wet and J. Vidmar (eds), Hierarchy in International Law: The Place of Human Rights

The book under review, Hierarchy in International Law: The Place of Human Rights, is one outcome of a research project at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. The broader project has the title: ‘The emerging international constitutional order: the implications of hierarchy in international law for the coherence and legitimacy of international decision-making’. The debate on whether and in what manner the international legal order should be conceptualised in constitutional terms is long running and includes various theoretical perspectives. Hierarchy in International Law does not attempt to add another strand of theory to this debate. Rather it seeks to contribute to the debate by examining how international human rights law has been treated by judicial bodies when it conflicts with other international law. The premise of the book is that if international human rights law is treated by courts in a favourable manner when it conflicts with other international...

The Place of Human Rights in American Efforts to Expand and Universalize Healthcare

This article explores the very limited cases historically in the twentieth century when human rights was used in American policy debate as a defending principle for the provision of government-guaranteed universal healthcare. It discusses these cases and examines various reasons as to why this is so, noting the major emphasis in American political culture on negative rather than positive liberty. It examines the shift in political culture from the Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson eras that embraced social and economic rights and defined them as such to the post-Reagan era when conservative ideologies were ascendant. These ideologies reject the legitimacy of social and economic rights and remain dominant in the United States. It comparatively situates the American refusal to consider universal healthcare a human right with European affirmations of such a right and to those found in various treaties of international law. Finally, it analyzes how Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—while not adopting the rhetoric of human rights does, functionally, enable as a matter of public policy an entitlement to healthcare.

Special Issue: New Directions in the Sociology of Human Rights Foreword

New Directions in the Sociology of Human Rights is a contribution to both sociology and to human rights research, particularly where these are oriented to challenging power relations and inequalities in contemporary societies. It expands and develops the sociology of human rights as a sub-field of sociology and of interdisciplinary human rights scholarship. The volume suggests new directions for the use of social and sociological theories to analyse issues such as torture and genocide; and addresses a range of issues and themes which have not previously been a sustained focus in the sociology of human rights literature, ranging from climate change and the human rights of soldiers to corporate social responsibility and children’s rights in relation to residential care. The collection is thus multi-dimensional, examining a range of specific empirical contexts, and also considering relationships between sociological analysis and human rights scholarship and activism. Hence in a variety of ways it points the way for future analyses, and also for human rights activism and practices. It is intended to widen our field of vision in the sociology of human rights, and to spark both new ideas and new forms of political engagement. We have co-edited this volume as conveners of the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Rights Study Group. 1 New Directions in the Sociology of Human Rights is a successor to our previous special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights, titled ‘Sociology and Human Rights: New Engagements’, which was published in November 2010 and edited by the same team. 2 That original volume included an introductory article outlining the history of the relationship between sociology and human rights and the state of our sub-field as we saw it, 3 together with contributions by members of the study group, on a wide range of themes. The collection was subsequently published as a book of the same title. 4 More recently we have co-edited the annual special issue of the British Sociological Association’s journal Sociology, presenting a volume titled The Sociology of Human Rights which was published in October 2012. 5 That volume originated with a Call for Papers which received 83 submissions, and we were informed this was the highest number in the recent history of Sociology, demonstrating a huge appetite for the development of the sociology of human rights as a field. ‘The Sociology of Human Rights’ included a range of articles which delineated and engaged with the major analytical axes and conceptual parameters of the sociology of human rights, as suggested in a substantial editorial foreword; it thus offered an extensive map of the field in theoretical terms, while simultaneously including research from a number of empirical contexts internationally. New Directions in the Sociology of Human Rights by comparison is distinctive for opening up and addressing a wide range of substantive issues, empirical contexts and topics in the sociology of human rights, with a somewhat greater emphasis on examining the application of human rights in practice, while also pressing forward sociological analysis in areas where its deployment is underdeveloped. The collection addresses the place of human rights in relation to key social