The Right to Belong and Immigration: A Feminist Pragmatist Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 268-285
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right

The “right to belong” is a human right in two ways. First, there is the right to belong in a limited sense, i.e., to the extent necessary for individuals to secure all other human rights, such as those recognized by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, there is a deeper aspect of the right to belong, that which is necessary to flourish as a human being. To establish, first, that the right to belong in a limited sense should be a human right, I draw upon Hannah Arendt’s claim that stateless persons are without rights, as only communities can grant them. I argue that this limited level of belonging is a necessary but insufficient condition for human flourishing. Full human flourishing requires belonging on a deeper level. To articulate the nature of this deeper level of belonging I draw on Simone Weil’s definition of the “need for roots” and John Dewey and Jane Addams’ constructions of the self as social. I then show how “belonging” in a deeper sense necessarily connects with how a person is perceived and received by individuals and institutions in a community and argue that full perception by and participation in a community is necessary for humans to flourish. Thus, the right to belong imposes an ethical obligation on other members of the community to perceive undocumented immigrants as full human persons with the potential to lead flourishing lives.

scholarly journals The Human Right to Water and Unconventional Energy

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (9) ◽  
pp. 1858 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Palmer ◽  
Damien Short ◽  
Walter Auch
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Oil And Gas Industry ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Governmental Organization ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Access To Water ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Right

Access to water, in sufficient quantities and of sufficient quality is vital for human health. The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (in General Comment 15, drafted 2002) argued that access to water was a condition for the enjoyment of the right to an adequate standard of living, inextricably related to the right to the highest attainable standard of health, and thus a human right. On 28 July 2010 the United Nations General Assembly declared safe and clean drinking water and sanitation a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights. This paper charts the international legal development of the right to water and its relevance to discussions surrounding the growth of unconventional energy and its heavy reliance on water. We consider key data from the country with arguably the most mature and extensive industry, the USA, and highlight the implications for water usage and water rights. We conclude that, given the weight of testimony of local people from our research, along with data from scientific literature, non-governmental organization (NGO) and other policy reports, that the right to water for residents living near fracking sites is likely to be severely curtailed. Even so, from the data presented here, we argue that the major issue regarding water use is the shifting of the resource from society to industry and the demonstrable lack of supply-side price signal that would demand that the industry reduce or stabilize its water demand per unit of energy produced. Thus, in the US context alone, there is considerable evidence that the human right to water will be seriously undermined by the growth of the unconventional oil and gas industry, and given its spread around the globe this could soon become a global human rights issue.

scholarly journals Defining and Achieving Freedom from Hunger: A Rights-Based Approach

2013 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Saurav Ghimire
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Short Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
Wrong Place

If one is born in the right part of the world and in right social class, the problem of being hungry has its solution in the nearest refrigerator. However, if the situation is reverse, one may go hungry throughout one’s short life, as 800million born in the wrong place and in wrong social class are doing as we discuss the concern. Peace cannot exist where the hunger prevails as the former signifies not merely the absence of armed conflict but the establishment of human rights for all people, and no human right is worth anything to a starving person. That is why the freedom from hunger is fundamental to live as human being and is a necessary part of right to life.

scholarly journals Article 1: Definition of a Child

2022 ◽  
pp. 407-412
Author(s):  
Gerison Lansdown ◽  
Ziba Vaghri
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Human Being ◽  
United Nations High Commissioner ◽  
High Commissioner ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
To Come ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Polish Government

AbstractWhile all international human rights treaties apply to children, only the Convention explicitly elaborates who is defined as a child. Article 1 defines the child as a human being who is below the age of 18 years. Majority is set at age 18 unless, under domestic law, it is attained earlier. During the negotiations of the text of the Convention, there was significant debate regarding definitions of both the commencement and the ending of childhood. The initial text, proposed by the Polish Government, drawing on Principle 1 of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959, provided no definition of childhood at all (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Rädda barnen (Society: Sweden), 2007, p. 301). However, government delegates on the Working Group immediately highlighted the need for clarification. The first revision of the text therefore proposed that a child is a human being from birth to the age of 18 years unless majority is attained earlier. However, with regard to the beginning of childhood, the Working Group were unable to come to a consensus. An unresolvable division persisted on whether childhood, in respect of the Convention, commenced from the point of conception, or from birth (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Rädda barnen (Society: Sweden), 2007, pp. 301–313). The conflict was ultimately resolved by removing any reference to the start of childhood.

Securing a Human Right to Peace

2016 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Dale T. Snauwaert
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Human Rights Council ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
United Nations Declaration ◽  
The Right ◽  
Significant Effort

In a groundbreaking session at the United Nations on June 6, 2013 members of civil society and the UN Secretariat opened a very significant inquiry into fundamental questions of the desirability and possibilities of bringing an end to war. Some have posed this query in terms of whether there is a fundamental human right to peace. The United Nations, members of the global civil society, and scholars have engaged in a significant effort to articulate a human right to peace (See, for example, Alston 1980, Roche 2003, Weiss 2010), and the UN Human Rights Council has established an open-ended intergovernmental working group to draft a United Nations declaration on the right to peace (http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/AdvisoryCommittee/Pages/RightToPeace.aspx).This brief essay is intended to launch that same discussion among peace educators.

Against Human Rights

Philosophy ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 65 (253) ◽  
pp. 341-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
John O. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Right ◽  
United Nations Charter ◽  
The U.S

Let me first explain what I am not attacking in this paper. I am not attacking, for instance, the right of free speech or any of the other specific rights listed in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights or the United Nations' Charter. I am, rather, attacking any specific right's being called a ‘human right’. I mean to show that any such designation is not only fraudulent but, in case anyone might want to say that there can be noble lies, grossly wicked, amounting indeed to genocide.

To the Concept of Asylum. Right or Duty of the State?

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-74
Author(s):  
Olga O. Semyonova
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The State ◽  
International Standards ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right

Introduction. The article is devoted to the concept and legal characteristics of asylum. The relevance of the topic is due to the eclectic character of the research available in the literature on this issue. Purpose. Definition of the concept of asylum, as well as research on whether asylum is a right or an obligation of the state. Methodology. The study of problems was carried out on the basis of scientific analysis and synthesis, formal-logical, system, comparative-legal methods, the method of interpretation of law, etc. The theoretical basis of the research is the scientific works of domestic and foreign legal scientists, practicing lawyers in the field of general theory of state and law, public international law, constitutional law of Russia and Germany. Results. Asylum should be considered in three aspects: as a legal institution, as a form of protection of human rights, and as a legal position. Asylum as a form of protection is the temporary territorial protection of fundamental human rights granted by the state to a refugee (as defined in the 1951 Convention relating to the status of refugees), whose main characteristics are security, dignity, fundamental human rights and freedoms, family unity and confidentiality. The human right to asylum as temporary protection is a fundamental human right. The provision of permanent protection and integration in the state of asylum is the sovereign right of states. Conclusion. For the effective functioning of the asylum system in Russia and to avoid conflicts in law enforcement practice, it is necessary to consolidate the concept of asylum at the legislative level. When improving the legal framework for granting asylum in Russia, it is necessary to take into account the following characteristics of the right to asylum in accordance with international standards and to provide legal guarantees for granting asylum on a temporary basis.

The citizen as mere human: Litigating denationalization in post-9/11 UK

2020 ◽  
pp. 146349962093135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caylee Hong
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Spatial Control ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Citizenship ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right

Since the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, Hannah Arendt’s phrase the ‘right to have rights’ and her claim that having rights depends on belonging to and being recognized by ‘some kind of organized community’ have become key provocations on citizenship, statelessness and human rights. Arendt, however, has been criticized as perpetuating a state-centric framework that scholars and activists alike have sought to reimagine. In particular, the French political theorist Jacques Rancière argues that Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ formula is based on an artificial distinction between the social and the political, which creates an overly narrow definition of the political subject. This article contends that in the post-9/11 era, the distinction, often attributed to Arendt, between ‘Man’ and ‘Citizen’ is increasingly blurred; yet it suggests that this blurring does not necessarily offer any emancipatory potential. It argues that while national citizenship is still meaningful, being a citizen may not be so different from being a mere human in certain contexts. The article examines three sets of cases shaping the United Kingdom’s ‘regime of nationality deprivation’ in which people are stripped of their UK citizenship for terrorism-related offences: Al-Jedda (2013), Pham (2015, 2018) and K2 (2015). First, it explores the tensions in the regime’s attempt to reconcile a fundamental inconsistency between the recognition of the human right to nationality and the sovereignty of the state to define the citizen; and second, it considers the regime’s spatial control of the denationalization process whereby denationalization orders are commonly issued and thus also contested when the targeted citizen is outside the UK’s jurisdiction.

Nostalgic memories and human rights: Integrating subjective experiences with universal needs

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 853-862
Author(s):  
Theofilos Gkinopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Right

In this comment, I focus on the integration of memories and human rights. The claim for the “self-evident” declares the claim for human rights not only of minorities, or oppressed and forgotten groups but, more broadly, of the self and different others. I consider human rights as they emerge from the content of intergenerational nostalgic memories and are reflected on the right to remember, the right to forget, the right to long for the past, and the right to life. I give a brief account of studies on intergenerational nostalgic memories and I argue for remembering processes as a fundamental human right. Finally, I discuss theoretical implications of integrating memory studies and human rights debates.

Arguing the Right to a Safe Climate under the UN Human Rights System

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-212
Author(s):  
Ademola Oluborode Jegede
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Right

Abstract The link between climate change and human rights is being made under the instruments as well as charter and treaty bodies constituting the United Nations (UN) human rights system. Despite the efforts, the right to a safe climate does not exist under the UN human rights system. Based on the vulnerability of human populations and the essential compliance with yardsticks for a new human right, the article argues for the creation of the right to a safe climate and advances two approaches by which it can be achieved under the UN human rights system.

Freedom of Language: A Universal Human Right to Be Recognised

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Andrássy
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Right

Human rights as legal rights originate from human rights as pre-existing moral rights; however, as pre-existing human rights are unwritten and invisible, it is uncertain whether all of these rights have been recognised and defined properly. This article advances the thought that if there are any human rights at all and if the civil and political rights recognised and defined by the United Nations represent these pre-existing human rights, then there must be at least one more such right, the right of all to freedom of language and, therefore, the United Nations ought to recognise and define this right too.

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