Genetic Determinism and Discrimination: A Call to Re-Orient Prevailing Human Rights Discourse to Better Comport with the Public Implications of Individual Genetic Testing

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Eltis
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Genetic Testing ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

“Privacy considerations no longer arise out of particular individual problems; rather, they express conflicts affecting everyone.”Along with the promise of assuaging the scourge of disease, the so-called genetic revolution unquestioningly imports a slew of thorny human rights issues that touch on matters such as dignity, disclosure, and the subject of this article – genetic testing and the social stigma potentially deriving therefrom.It is now rather evident that certain otherwise therapeutically promising forms of research can inadvertently involve social risks exceeding the individual preoccupations of eclectic study participants. With that as the case, the following proposes to examine the peculiar stigma attached to genetic information and its potential human rights implications extending beyond the insurance and employment context. In so doing, it raises the intersection of interests between self-identified members of historically vulnerable groups and the group itself, which the law seems to take for granted in the genetics context.

scholarly journals The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the social model of health: new perspectives

2014 ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penelope Weller
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Model ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
People With Mental Illness ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Health Laws

Contemporary mental health laws are embedded in basic human rights principle, and their ongoing evolution is influenced by contemporary human rights discourse, international declarations and conventions, and the authoritative jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECrtHR). The<em> Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities</em> (CRPD) is the most recent expression of international human rights applicable to people with disability including people with mental illness.3 It provides a fresh benchmark against which to assess the human rights compatibility of domestic mental health laws.

Globalization and Multi-cultural Knowledge of Human Rights

1998 ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Jay Drydyk
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Amnesty International ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

Responding to a call by Pierre Sané, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, for a worldwide political movement to overcome the social damage that has been wrought by economic globalization, this paper asks whether such a movement can invoke current conceptions of human rights. In particular, if human rights are Euro-centric, how well would they serve the self-understanding of a movement that is to be global, culturally pluralistic and counterhegemonic to Northern capital? I argue that it is not human rights that are Eurocentric, but only certain conceptions of human rights. Properly understood, human rights are justifiable from within all cultures. Moreover, current conceptions of human rights are not as narrow as they were in 1948, when the Universal Declaration was drafted. Nearly five decades of international dialogue have transformed human rights discourse in ways that are profoundly anti-Eurocentric, and further transformations are already underway. There are resources of moral and political experience, within all cultures, which argue strongly in favor of these transformations. Therefore, a more consistent and more complete knowledge of human rights can emerge cross-culturally if the dialogue is not abused and if the relevant moral and political experience is let into the dialogue from all quarters.

Ethnocultural Diversity and Human Rights: Legal Categories, Claims, and the Hybridity of Group Protection

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaetano Pentassuglia
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Arctic Region ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Group Status ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Ethnocultural Diversity ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
The Impact

In this article I explore the interface between theoretical accounts of the field, the overlapping dimensions of international legal categories in framing ethnocultural claims, as well as the impact of international legal practice, particularly human rights jurisprudence, on addressing those claims both on their own merits and within the wider context of human rights law. By doing so, I seek to provide a perspective on ethnocultural diversity in human rights discourse that is less concerned with issues of group status and right-holding and more interested in capturing complex overarching dimensions surrounding the field. I argue that looking at the nature and structure of claims is as important as discussing how to maximise protection for tightly construed classes of groups – universally and in the Arctic region. In this context, I also argue for a hybrid understanding of group protection that puts strains on rigid conceptual dichotomies between the individual and the group in human rights law.

scholarly journals Human Rights: Setting the Stage for Protecting Refugee Women

Refuge ◽  
1998 ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Maryanna Schmuki
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Women Refugees ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Human Rights Regime ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women’S Human Rights ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Women's Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

This paper explores the social construction of women refugees from the perspective of the human rights regime with an eye to revealing whether the voices of refugee women are reflected. To this end the paper examines the development of women refugees as a category within human rights discourse and how this category has been bolstered by the concept of women's human rights within the last decade.

scholarly journals Less is More or More is More? Revisiting Universality of Human Rights

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanel Kerikmäe ◽  
Katrin Nyman-Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Less Is More ◽  
Legal Literature ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

Abstract Human rights are much talked about and much written about, in academic legal literature as well as in political and other social sciences and the general political debate. Indeed, they are so oft en referred to and used as a basis for claims of various kinds that there may be a risk of certain “inflation” in that so much is said to be a human right that the notion loses its essential meaning. Th is article argues that the universality of basic human rights is one of the values of the concept of rights. Th e rights and the understanding and interpretation of rights may have to be purist. Th is may be the way universal human rights as a concept can survive at all. In the modern world there are different trends that to some extent conflict, like the trend of globalisation but also the re- emphasising in different parts of the world of traditional values, whether from a religious background or something else. It appears that the basic dogma of human rights - which has also been called the first universal ideology - that it is the individual and her rights and freedoms that should always be in the centre of any human rights discourse, is abandoned all the more oft en as the central principle. Instead the banner of human rights is used for various political and economic aims

Current Environmental Enforcement Issues: Some International Developments and Their Implications for the UK

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Hagger
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Regulatory System ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
The Common ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Ec Law ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

This article will examine enforcement possibilities available in the UK and the domestic implications of some international developments. This will involve an evaluation of the regulatory system in relation to environmental protection, followed by an overview of alternative methods of enforcement which include opportunities for the individual and/or non-governmental organisation (NGO) to use EC law, judicial review and the common law as well as the prospects provided by expanded statutory civil liability and any developments that take place in relation to human rights. While the locus of the human rights discourse seems to have moved from a substantive to a procedural perspective, this article will argue that, given the shortcomings of current (and proposed) methods of enforcement, there should be a realignment of the debate. It is advanced that such a right would underpin environmental protection to the extent that it would need to be considered within all aspects of enforcement and be in a position to override other rights.

scholarly journals Human rights and global citizenship in social studies standards in the United States.

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anatoli Rapoport
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Studies ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Global Citizenship ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Standards ◽  
Us States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

There is a synergetic complementary relationship between human rights education (HRE) and global citizenship education (GCE). Historically, however, HRE began to develop earlier than GCE. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and to what degree a human rights narrative in the social studies standards of individual US states facilitates the introduction of the concept of global citizenship, and whether social studies standards connect human rights and global citizenship, contextually or thematically. The analysis demonstrates that despite an increased visibility of both concepts, state standards still fall short of demonstrating a clear connection between human rights and global citizenship or utilising a human rights discourse and paradigm to advocate for a broader exposure and acceptance of global citizenship

scholarly journals Human Rights and Revolutions

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-187
Author(s):  
Amyn B. Sajoo
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Radical Islam ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Revolutionary History ◽  
Final Essay

"For liberals committed to the priority of the individual and theinviolability of individual rights, religion and revolution are both suspect,"observes Timothy McDaniel in this volume's final essay, "The StrangeCareer of Radical Islam." Although the sentiment is intended to usefullycomplicate the canvas of contemporary human rights discourse, it iscurious that the nexus of religion with human rights and revolutionsreceives no analytical attention at all in the volume's twelve precedingcontributions - not even in Lynn Hunt's otherwise trenchant openingsurvey of "The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights." Ostensibly, whatthis book casts as the paradox of revolutions, as both fueling and underminingthe pursuit of human rights, is played out by revolutionary Islamicmovements that profess liberation (according to their own lights), onlyto deliver repression. But the result is that "radical Islam," which isundefined, becomes the sole context in which the reader is invited to reflecton the religion-human rights nexus, much less the particular interfaceof Islam and Muslims with the welter of rights-movements, ideas andpractices.Which is all the more regrettable in view of Hunt's insightful groundingat the outset, (Chapter One), of the interplay of democracy and humanrights in attitudes toward the autonomy of the individual, coupled withcommunal recognition of key elements of the human condition. Drawingon French revolutionary history, she illustrates how newly robust claims onbehalf of the person - as in the opposition to what had been the casualinfliction of "legal" torture to elicit confessions and information, or tolettres de cachets that allowed parents to jail disobedient offspring -emerged alongside a print culture of novels and newspapers that exposedthe psyche of social strangers. The upshot, for Hunt, is an "imaginedempathy" (after Benedict Anderson's "imagined community") - a keypsychological field of identification with other autonomous individuals,often female, as being like oneself. Surely there is abundant scope forapplying this notion to the unfolding of human rights discourses, whether"traditionalist" or "modem," in the Muslim world (or for that matter to ...

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