Amnesty International

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-203
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Amnesty International ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter centers on Amnesty International, the best-known and largest human rights organization in the world that was established in London in 1961. It highlights how the creation of Amnesty was a major milestone in the emergence of an enduring human rights movement. It also discusses the Cold War context that played a crucial role in shaping Amnesty. The chapter explores the intention of Amnesty to operate worldwide and address the abuses of rights committed by those on all sides of the global struggle. It also talks about the principal founder of Amnesty, Peter Benenson, who was active in the efforts to promote civil liberties several years prior to taking the lead in the formation of Amnesty.

Defying Communism

2020 ◽  
pp. 138-160
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Amnesty International ◽  
Human Rights Organizations ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
International Human ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Communist Countries

This chapter examines the rise of the international human rights movement as significant force in world affairs. It draws attention to the Cold War, in which the context of international human rights took place. It also talks about the “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch” as one of the leading non-governmental human rights organizations operating globally that was established at different stages of the Cold War era. The chapter focuses on the emergence of the human rights movement in the communist countries, as well as its development on the other side of the Cold War divide. It illustrates the demonstration over the arrests of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in 1965, which marked the beginning of the emergence of a human rights movement in the Soviet bloc countries.

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.

Defying Communism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
International Human ◽  
Extra Weight ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
East West

This chapter details how the rise of the international human rights movement as a significant force in world affairs cannot be separated from the Cold War context in which it took place. The Cold War magnified the importance of citizen efforts to promote rights and, though many of those involved in the movement during the Cold War era took significant risks and suffered severe consequences, it was the circumstances of the East–West conflict that attracted many of them to the cause in the first place. Rights activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain became aware that calling attention to abuses of rights by their own governments carried extra weight in an era when a global competition was underway for people's hearts and minds.

scholarly journals From Civil Liberties to Human Rights? British Civil Liberties Activism and Universal Human Rights

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER MOORES
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

AbstractThis article discusses British civil liberties organisations hoping to engage in a broader human rights politics during and immediately after the Second World War. It argues that various movements and organisations from sections of the British Left attempted to articulate a human rights politics which incorporated political, civil, social and economic rights during the 1940s and early 1950s. However, organisations were unable to express this and mobilise accordingly. This reflected the collapse of the popular-front-style alliances forged in the 1930s and the difficulties in articulating political positions distinct from the ideological polarisation that emerged with the onset of the Cold War.

Rights after 9/11

2020 ◽  
pp. 287-318
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
Degrading Treatment ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter highlights the significant role of the human rights movement after September 11, 2001. It points out how Al-Qaeda made no claim to respect rights after 9/11, making them insusceptible to the human rights movement's main weapon: embarrassment. It also details how the United States played a crucial role in the promotion of human rights worldwide during and after the Cold War. The chapter analyzes the consequence of the decision to make prevention the defining concern of U.S. government policy in responding to the threat of terrorism for human rights. It looks at the consequences of the primacy given to prevention that removed one of the restraints on the use of torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

scholarly journals Possession of nuclear weapons – between legality and legitimization

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Tomasz Srogosz
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
The World ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Cold War

Summary Recently in Russian policy there was a return to the Cold War practices, which include, inter alia, nuclear deterrence, and even threatening to use nuclear weapons. That policy, however, is carried out in the changed international space compared with the times of the Cold War. The period of detente in relations between world powers was dominated inter alia by discussion on the humanitarian intervention. Human rights, tied to the value of justice, become the most important component of international order. Thus, justice has become the value of the international legal order equivalent to peace. In such a reality, the legitimacy of nuclear weapons should be based not only on the deterrence, but also on the need to protect human rights, tied with justice. Possession of nuclear weapons per se is contrary to this value. This fact should be taken into account in the world powers’ policies. Banning nuclear weapons, in accordance with the Radbruch formula, should be a result of these policies.

scholarly journals Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332110246
Author(s):  
Marieke Zoodsma ◽  
Juliette Schaafsma
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.

scholarly journals Internal Conflict Displacement Galore in the Horn of Africa: Ethiopia on the Radar

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shadrack Bentil ◽  
George Asekere
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Internal Displacement ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Human Rights Abuse ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

Generally, the world has enjoyed relative peace and stability after the Cold War in 1991, but never the end to insecurity, conflicts, and wars (interstate and intrastate). One outcome of these insecurities is conflictinduced internal displacement. Though not new, its prevalence in recent times has become a hurdle that countries and the international community must reckon with. In fact, conflict-IDPs globally has received about 215 percent hikes in the last two decades, while in Africa, the increase is about 135 percent. However, the Horn of Africa is the hardest hit. As such, the paper provides an overview of conflict displacement and explores the conditions that sustains it, using Ethiopia as a unit of analysis. The paper found several conditions: constitutional, socio-psycho-cultural, political, economic, and human rights abuse as critical to conflict-IDPs deepening. The article further shows the trends of IDPs and its security implications for Ethiopia. Pragmatic solutions have been recommended accordingly.

Rights after 9/11

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
The World ◽  
Substantial Decline ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, some of those active in efforts to promote human rights feared that the era in which their cause held a prominent place on the world stage could be over. That era began about a quarter of a century earlier as an outgrowth of the Cold War, and it had a part in bringing the Cold War to an end. Dictatorships of the Right and the Left had fallen—with help from those denouncing their abuses of human rights—yet those who hoped that there would be a substantial decline in gross abuses worldwide had been disappointed.

Amnesty International

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Full Range ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Amnesty International ◽  
Global Organization ◽  
Human Rights Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Rights Issues

This chapter analyzes Amnesty International, the best known and by far the largest human rights organization in the world, which was established in London in 1961. Its creation was a major milestone in the emergence of an enduring human rights movement. From the start it was intended to be a global organization. That is, those who would participate in its efforts would come from all over the world, and those on whose behalf it campaigned would be persons everywhere who suffered abuses of human rights. Today, Amnesty International is probably somewhat less influential, both in the United States and globally, than it was at its high point in the 1970s and the 1980s. Some would argue that this reflects the extension or dilution of its mandate to cover the full range of human rights issues, including economic and social rights.

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