Human Rights NGOs: The Power of Persuasion

1999 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 151-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Korey
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
International Standards ◽  
World War ◽  
Core Element ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Channel Information ◽  
International Discourse ◽  
The Media ◽  
United Nations Charter

At the end of World War II, the phrase “human rights” was virtually unknown, whether in the media, in standard textbooks, or as a guideline for state conduct in the emerging international community. It was nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that made the phrase a core element of the United Nations Charter in 1944, even as they pressed for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted three years later. This was but the beginning of a historic effort to make the Declaration a fundamental standard for measuring progress in civilized society. If the principal motivation was the prevention of another Holocaust, NGOs would fulfill the indispensable function, projected by Eleanor Roosevelt, of serving as the “curious grapevine” that would enlighten everyone about their rights and channel information about human rights violations to the world community.This essay is about the “curious grapevine,” an extraordinary tale of how NGOs, through their persuasion, have made human rights a major item in international discourse in the media, state chancellories, and international institutions. NGOs have played the leading role in the creation of international standards and in establishing legally binding treaties incorporating these standards. They are central to the process of adopting implementing organs to these treaties and in providing the essential documentation and briefings to make these organs work.

scholarly journals (Re) constructing Europe after 1945: the Council of Europe and the new political and normative architecture

2015 ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
Ana Isabel Xavier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
World War ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Fundamental Freedoms ◽  
High Standards

Since its foundation, the Council of Europe has played a leading role both in the post-World War II, and after the Berlin Wall fall, striving for the adoption of high standards of protection of fundamental freedoms and human rights. Although the constitutive Treaty of the Council of Europe was signed in London in 1949, its headquarters were set halfway between Paris and Prague, recognising the importance of linking “two former Europes” economical and socially devastated by the two world wars. After more than 50 years, it’s important to recall the origins and the evolving role of the Council of Europe, as well as discuss the future prospects of one of the most important but also probably one of the less recognized, and frequently misunderstood, European political Organisations of the post 1945.http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/1647-6336_13_4

“The heart above the ruins”: Miriam Waddington’s Poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and Jewish Canadian Literature

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Canadian Literature ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
War Consequences

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.

Human Rights Naturalized

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
The Status ◽  
Naturalistic Theory

This chapter helps to confirm the explanatory power of the naturalistic theory of moral progress outlined in previous chapters by making two main points. First, it shows that the theory helps to explain how and why the modern human rights movement arose when it did. Second, it shows that the advances in inclusiveness achieved by the modern human rights movement depended upon the fortunate coincidence of a constellation of contingent cultural and economic conditions—and that it is therefore a dangerous mistake to assume that continued progress must occur, or even that the status quo will not substantially deteriorate. This chapter also helps to explain a disturbing period of regression (in terms of the recognition of equal basic status) that occurred between the success of British abolitionism and the founding of the modern human rights movement at the end of World War II.

Country Radio

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Weisbard
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Internet Access ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Programming Approach ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
New Business ◽  
The Media ◽  
New Business Models

This chapter considers the role played by radio in popularizing and defining country music. Radio as a format pursued a commercially driven mediation of identity that worked against applying an artistically driven musical genre definition. In particular, these debates revolved around gendered presentation and women as listeners and performers. From the 1920s through World War II, radio’s prominence in country turned on live radio shows as the media introduction of southern whites. A second era, from the end of the war to mid-1970s, saw a shift to disc jockeys and records: personality radio. Format radio country, a tighter programming approach, solidified from the mid-1970s to the mega mergers of the late 1990s. Most recently, in an era of Internet access and new business models for music, country has confronted the less sympathetic position of networked radio.

scholarly journals ‘Little Gunshots, but with the blaze of lightning’: Xavier Herbert, Visuality and Human Rights

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-105
Author(s):  
Jane Lydon
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
World War ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The North ◽  
Significant Difference

Xavier Herbert published his bestseller Capricornia in 1938, following two periods spent in the Northern Territory. His next major work, Poor Fellow My Country (1975), was not published until thirty-seven years later, but was also set in the north during the 1930s. One significant difference between the two novels is that by 1975 photo-journalism had become a significant force for influencing public opinion and reforming Aboriginal policy. Herbert’s novel, centring upon Prindy as vulnerable Aboriginal child, marks a sea change in perceptions of Aboriginal people and their place in Australian society, and a radical shift toward use of photography as a means of revealing the violation of human rights after World War II. In this article I review Herbert’s visual narrative strategies in the context of debates about this key historical shift and the growing impact of photography in human rights campaigns. I argue that Poor Fellow My Country should be seen as a textual re-enactment, set in Herbert’s and the nation’s past, yet coloured by more recent social changes that were facilitated and communicated through the camera’s lens. Like all re-enactments, it is written in the past conditional: it asks, what if things had been different? It poses a profound challenge to the state project of scientific modernity that was the Northern Territory over the first decades of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Politicizing Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”

scholarly journals Human Rights at Stake: Shirley Jackson’s Social and Political Protest in “The Lottery”

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Zaid Ibrahim Ismael ◽  
Sabah Atallah Khalifa Ali
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
World War ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Social Custom ◽  
American Author ◽  
The One

Nowhere is American author Shirley Jackson’s (1916-1965) social and political criticism is so intense than it is in her seminal fictional masterpiece “The Lottery”. Jackson severely denounces injustice through her emphasis on a bizarre social custom in a small American town, in which the winner of the lottery, untraditionally, receives a fatal prize. The readers are left puzzled at the end of the story as Tessie Hutchinson, the unfortunate female winner, is stoned to death by the members of her community, and even by her family. This study aims at investigating the author’s social and political implications that lie behind the story, taking into account the historical era in which the story was published (the aftermath of the bloody World War II) and the fact that the victim is a woman who is silenced and forced to follow the tradition of the lottery. The paper mainly focuses on the writer’s interest in human rights issues, which can be violated even in civilized communities, like the one depicted in the story. The shocking ending, the researchers conclude, is Jackson’s protest against dehumanization and violence.

What Future for Human Rights?

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Nickel
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
The Cold War

Like people born shortly after World War II, the international human rights movement recently had its sixty-fifth birthday. This could mean that retirement is at hand and that death will come in a few decades. After all, the formulations of human rights that activists, lawyers, and politicians use today mostly derive from the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the world in 1948 was very different from our world today: the cold war was about to break out, communism was a strong and optimistic political force in an expansionist phase, and Western Europe was still recovering from the war. The struggle against entrenched racism and sexism had only just begun, decolonization was in its early stages, and Asia was still poor (Japan was under military reconstruction, and Mao's heavy-handed revolution in China was still in the future). Labor unions were strong in the industrialized world, and the movement of women into work outside the home and farm was in its early stages. Farming was less technological and usually on a smaller scale, the environmental movement had not yet flowered, and human-caused climate change was present but unrecognized. Personal computers and social networking were decades away, and Earth's human population was well under three billion.

Contemporary Issues

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tolan ◽  
Gilles Veinstein ◽  
Henry Laurens
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
First Century ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
World War ◽  
Independent States ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Newly Independent States

This chapter chronicles the struggles of the Muslim world and Europe during World War II as well as its aftermath. It shows how the war had helped to end European rule and begin the process of decolonization for Muslim nations such as Libya. And with the Muslim state now independent of direct European domination, the second half of the chapter explores the ways in which the Muslim world tackled the issue of development as well as a fresh wave of problems regarding human rights, universality, and other pitfalls of newly independent states struggling to survive in a world that has changed profoundly after a series of major conflicts. The chapter also reflects on the still-intertwined relationships between the Muslim world and Europe as history progresses into the twenty-first century.

18. Human Rights

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
World War ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Regime ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Human

This chapter examines the concept of human rights, which derives primarily from the Charter of the United Nations adopted in 1945 immediately after World War II. It first provides a brief account of the history of the concept of human rights before describing the international human rights regime. It then considers two persistent problems that arise in applying the concept of human rights to the developing world: the relations between the claim that the concept is universally valid and the realities of cultural diversity around the world; and the relations between human rights and development. In particular, it explores cultural imperialism and cultural relativism, the human rights implications of the rise of political Islam and the so-called war on terror(ism), and globalization. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the new political economy of human rights.

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