scholarly journals Young Children’s Human Rights: a sociological analysis

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priscilla Alderson

Children tend to be missing from the literature on human rights. Sociology can help to fill the gap by providing evidence about the importance and benefits of recognising children's human rights, the dangers of not doing so, and joint rights-promoting work by adults and children. However, sociology has paid relatively little attention to human rights, and to the related topics of the Holocaust, human nature, real bodies, universal principles and moral imperatives. This paper examines splits in sociology around a central absence, which could partly explain these omissions. Then it considers how inter-disciplinary approaches and critical realism can help to theorise and validate “the inherent dignity and…the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”. The youngest children's rights illuminate meanings in all human rights, which depend less on the rational person approach than on recognising human nature, vulnerability and solidarity interacting with social structures.

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 382-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Waites

This article proposes a new critical framework for analysing transnational human rights-claiming and contestation: a ‘critical model of the boomerang effect’, that can embody sociological understanding and insights from decolonizing analyses. The article develops a critique of Keck and Sikkink’s well-known model of the ‘boomerang effect’, from politics and international relations. The new critical model is needed to analyse contestations including global queer politics, particularly to examine where and how actors in formerly or currently colonized states from the Global South can draw on the United Nations human rights system. The new model requires analysis of four themes, with a decolonizing enquiry applied to each: (1) articulation of human rights; (2) social structures and resources; (3) socio-cultural contexts; and (4) subjectivation. These themes are examined to illuminate two pivotal cases claiming decriminalization of same-sex sexual acts: Caleb Orozco in Belize, and Jason Jones in relation to Trinidad and Tobago – generating a new research agenda.


PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1674-1677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Taylor

Human Rights violations traumatize more than the immediate victims of “barbarous acts.” they wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights locates rights primarily in the individual (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”), it is clear that “the human family” invoked in the opening sentence both sustains claims to inalienable rights and suffers from their transgression. Nonetheless, most responses to violations focus on individual victims almost to the exclusion of family and the broader community. Several countries sponsor “torture clinics” to reintegrate victims into society or find them asylum elsewhere. Survivors are diagnosed, and therapists help them work through their trauma in different ways, usually involving individual, group, and family therapy. These important programs medicalize trauma as individual pathology and attempt to reduce symptoms and empower survivors. However, even when particular programs are successful, problems and contradictions abound. Not all communities have access to mental health care. Not all governments are willing to sponsor programs that recognize the traumatic effects of their political actions. The wider impact of criminal politics on society as a whole remains unexplored. The question of whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment is left unexamined. The individual becomes both the exclusive site of traumatic injury and the subject to be healed.


Fully Human ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Lindsey N. Kingston

THE PREAMBLE TO THE United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (...


Comma ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-86
Author(s):  
Trudy Huskamp Peterson

On 10 December 1948 the Third General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: a universal declaration, not a United Nations declaration. The Preamble of the Declaration begins by proclaiming that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”. As archivists know, the nexus between human rights and archives is strong and complex, because records are essential both to protecting these rights and to obtaining recourse when these rights are violated. This essay illuminates some of the relationships of records to rights, looking at each of the 30 Articles in turn.


1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 202-206 ◽  

Whereas, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-534
Author(s):  
Jean Rhéaume

At least two important consequences follow from the fact that human rights are based on human nature. First, they exist according to natural law even in cases where positive law does not recognize them. Secondly, they cannot evolve because the nature and purpose of the human being does not change: only their formulation and level of protection in positive law can vary according to the socio-historical context.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Kaur Dhamoon

AbstractIn settler societies like Canada, United States, and Australia, the bourgeoning discourse that frames colonial violence against Indigenous people as genocide has been controversial, specifically because there is much debate about the meaning and applicability of genocide. Through an analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this paper analyzes what is revealed about settler colonialism in the nexus of difficult knowledge, curatorial decisions, and political debates about the label of genocide. I specifically examine competing definitions of genocide, the primacy of the Holocaust, the regulatory role of the settler state, and the limits of a human rights framework. My argument is that genocide debates related to Indigenous experiences operationalize a range of governing techniques that extend settler colonialism, even as Indigenous peoples confront existing hegemonies. These techniques include: interpretative denial; promoting an Oppression Olympics and a politics of distancing; regulating difference through state-based recognition and interference; and depoliticizing claims that overshadow continuing practices of assimilation, extermination, criminalization, containment, and forced movement of Indigenous peoples. By pinpointing these techniques, this paper seeks to build on Indigenous critiques of colonialism, challenge settler national narratives of peaceful and lawful origins, and foster ways to build more just relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA HUNEEUS

AbstractThis article argues that human rights law – which mediates between claims about universal human nature, on the one hand, and hard-fought political battles, on the other – is in particular need of a richer exchange between jurisprudential approaches and social science theory and methods. Using the example of the Inter-American Human Rights System, the article calls for more human rights scholarship with a new realist sensibility. It demonstrates in what ways legal and social science scholarship on human rights law both stand to improve through sustained, thoughtful exchange.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document