Doing Justice in South Africa and Canada

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-265
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Mission Field

This chapter highlights the impact on the churches of the human rights agenda in its application to issues of racial justice and the treatment of indigenous peoples. Most discussions of human rights discourse in the second half of the twentieth century begin with the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the consequent adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Third General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris in December of 1948. Ecumenical leaders, influenced by concerns arising from mission field experience in Asia and Latin America, were determined that the Declaration should go further still, incorporating a full statement of freedom of religion, including the increasingly contested right to convert to another religion. In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, human rights discourse acquired a sharper edge. Alongside its older Cold War use as a weapon against communist totalitarianism there developed a radical human rights tradition that addressed the condition of oppressed groups and spoke the language of liberation. This alternative human rights tradition confronted the churches with a choice—either to realign themselves with the demands for liberation, or to pay the price for their apparent collusion with the status quo.

scholarly journals The Material Culture of Human Rights. Consumer Products, Boycotts and the Transformation of Human Rights Activism in the 1970s and 1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Möckel
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
South African ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Everyday Objects ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

During the 1960s and 1970s, human rights NGOs began to use boycotts and other consumer protests to draw attention to their campaigns. The Anti-Apartheid Movement in particular, used consumer products and spaces of consumption for their campaigns against the South African regime. By focussing on the everyday practice of consumption, these campaigns helped to translate human rights discourse from the sphere of international law and politics into the sphere of civil society and everyday life. The entanglement of human rights activism and consumer culture can thus be seen as an important – but so far mostly overlooked – aspect of the so-called ‘breakthrough’ of human rights discourse in the 1970s. The article looks at this development from a material culture studies approach. It argues that everyday objects played an important role in human rights campaigns, particularly in the context of a mediatization and popularization of human rights in the 1970s and 1980s. The article takes the Anti-Apartheid Movement as a case study. By looking at the boycott campaigns as well as the consumer items the movement began to produce itself in the late 1980s, it shows how material objects and social practices became inextricably intertwined in these campaigns.

Human Rights Diffusion in North Korea: The Impact of Transnational Legal Mobilization

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-203
Author(s):  
Patricia GOEDDE
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Legal Mobilization ◽  
Human Rights Protection ◽  
The North ◽  
Domestic Legislation ◽  
Evidence Collection ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article asks how legal mechanisms are employed outside of North Korea to achieve human rights diffusion in the country; to what extent these result in human rights diffusion in North Korea; and whether measures beyond accountability can be pursued in tandem for more productive engagement. Specifically, it examines how the North Korean government has interacted with the globalized legal regime of human rights vis-à-vis the UN and details the legal processes and implications of the UN Commission of Inquiry report, including domestic legislation, and evidence collection. While transnational legal mobilization has gathered momentum on the accountability side, it is significantly weaker in terms of achieving human rights protection within North Korea given the government’s perception of current human rights discourse as part of an externally produced war repertoire. Thus, efforts to engage the North Korean population and government require concurrent reframing of human rights discourse into more localized and relatable contexts.

Contesting Austerity in the 1970s and 1980s

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-316
Author(s):  
Matthias Goldmann
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
The Status ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

While human rights discourse became fundamental for challenging austerity in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, in historical perspective, such a role of human rights represents the exception rather than the rule. Human rights discourse in the context of sovereign debt-induced austerity has varied enormously over time. Far from reflecting progress, its history reveals changing paradigms of human rights law. This chapter focuses on one of these paradigm shifts occurring at the turn from the 1970s to the 1980s. In the 1970s, newly independent states invoked human rights mostly to assert their sovereignty and avert international interference. This structural human rights paradigm abruptly disappeared from austerity debates in the 1980s, when the sovereign debt crisis hit the Global South, creating a need for multilateral liquidity assistance. Faced with pressure to reconsider the social impact of structural adjustment programmes, the International Monetary Fund shifted the terms of the debate from ‘human needs’, a human rights-related term, to ‘human capital’. Consequently, at the time when human rights rose to the status of the ‘last utopia’, they ceased to have relevance for austerity. Hence, whether human rights discourse promotes social ends depends on the particular context and time. The chapter ends by proposing a political paradigm of human rights law reflecting this insight.

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 Protection AgainstRefoulementfrom Europe: Human Rights Law Comes to the Rescue

1999 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
Convention Against Torture ◽  
Domestic Jurisdiction ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse ◽  
Scope Of Protection

A growing opinion has appeared in refugee and human rights discourse that the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the European Convention) provides more extensive protection againstrefoulementthan the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (the Refugee Convention). However, uncertainties remain as to whether the protection offered by the 1984 UN Convention against Torture (the Torture Convention) and the 1966 UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the Political Covenant) may substitute, or, rather, reinforce, that of the European Convention. Which of these four instruments offers the greatest protection against a decision ofrefoulementfrom a European country? The answer to this question is far from being academic. The rule that an international organ may only be competent to consider an individual petition or communication provided “the same matter is not being examined under another procedure of individual investigation or settlement” is embodied in all three instruments providing a procedure for individual complaints. It is therefore crucial for an asylum-seeker to give his or her best shot first, even if, as rightly pointed out by Liz Heffernan, the Strasbourg organs and the Geneva organs are not in competition.1This article will review the scope of protection afforded under the three of these treaties which provide an international enforcement mechanism to persons who have sought refugee status in the domestic jurisdiction.

Human Rights Organizations in Turkey

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Başak Çalı
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Eu Membership ◽  
Human Rights Organizations ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Impact

This chapter analyzes the origins and the development of human rights organizations in Turkey since 1945. It first offers an overview of the limited number of elite organizations established between 1946 and 1974 and the initial skepticism toward human rights activism in the country in the 1960s and 1970s among grass-roots political movements. It then discusses the importance of two major events, the military coup in 1980 and the start of the armed conflict between the Turkish security forces and the PKK in 1984, for the development of human rights–based activism in the 1980s. The chapter then turns to the 1990s, characterized by the proliferation of human rights organizations and diversification of focus areas, ranging from LGBT rights to the rights of women to manifest their religion by wearing headscarves. It links these dynamics to the global rise of human rights activism in the 1990s and the subsequent appropriation of the human rights lexicon by a wide range of domestic social movements. The chapter moves forward with a discussion of the further proliferation of human rights organizations well into the 2000s as Turkey’s EU membership process boosted democratization and pluralism. The chapter ends with an assessment of the impact of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi’s authoritarian turn on the transformative power and horizons of human rights organizations in the 2010s.

scholarly journals Disability and the Right to Have Rights

2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (1/2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobin Siebers
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Nation State ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
The Status ◽  
International Human ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Right ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

A major debate over human rights discourse concerns whether human rights should be guaranteed by the nation-state based on citizenship or whether they should be guaranteed internationally on the basis of the status of the rights-bearing person as human. This essay intervenes in this debate, via an analysis of Hannah Arendt's idea of the right to have rights, to argue that disability, as a critical indicator of universal human frailty, should provide the basis for international human rights.

Memories of Universal Victimhood: The Case of Ethnic German Expellees

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Levy ◽  
Natan Sznaider
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Specific Event ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

Images of German victims have become a ubiquitous feature of political debates and mass-mediated cultural events in recent years. This paper argues that changing representations of the Holocaust have served as a political cultural prism through which histories of German victimhood can be renegotiated. More specifically, we explore how the centrality of the Holocaust in Germany informs how the postwar expulsion of twelve million ethnic Germans has been remembered during the last sixty years. Most interpretations of the destruction of European Jewry and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia and their corresponding memory cultures treat these memories as mutually exclusive manifestations of competing perceptions of national self understanding. We suggest that memories of both the Holocaust and expulsions are entwined. The Holocaust remains a specific event but also spans a universalizing human rights discourse that conceals the magnitude of the Holocaust as a particular historical occurrence; at the same time, the expulsion stops being a particular event and is being reframed as a universal evil called "ethnic cleansing." Examining recent political and public debates about how the expulsions of ethnic Germans are politicized and remembered reveals how comparisons to other incidents of state sanctioned violence and claims of singularity shape the balance of universal and particular modes of commemoration.

The Trauma of Vulnerability: Human Rights and the Real

Somatechnics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-314
Author(s):  
Debra Bergoffen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Cycle Of Violence ◽  
Human History ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Human Rights Discourse

The history of human rights is ambiguous and uncertain. Appeals to rights have been used to secure the privileges of the powerful and to legitimate the status quo. Appeals to rights have been used to expose the evils of cruelty and oppression. Given this muddied history we cannot assume that calls for human rights will operate in the name of justice. Cognizant of this history, I argue that human rights discourses can be a force for justice if: (1) we read human rights demands as an attempt to respond to the experience of the destabilizing, destructive and incomprehensible forces that Lacan calls the Real and that Adriana Cavero calls horrorism; and (2) if we use human rights discourses to respond to the trauma of encountering this horror by defining the human dignity and bodily integrity that human rights claims are intended to protect in terms of the dignity and integrity of the vulnerable body. I argue that if we persist in fleeing our vulnerability by using human rights discourse to insist on our autonomous sovereignty we will perpetuate the cycle of violence endemic to human history.

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