scholarly journals Shackled Liberties, or: How Security Came to Trump Everything Else

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Public Security ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Terrorist Threat ◽  
Coercive Measures ◽  
Mass Migration

In this paper, the origins of the “security narrative” in contemporary German political discourse is traced back to the early modern conception of “natural law,” first emphasized by Thomas Hobbes. Underlying this conception is that individuals would – by acknowledgment of their inborn “natural law” – sacrifice their individual liberties for the sake of public security. It is shown that a conception of state based on such a metaphysical premise discounts the existence of any discontent as valid within a society, and allows for top-down coercive measures against anyone who does not buy into this narrative. Those measures, exemplified by political rhetoric in Germany and beyond in the wake of recent mass migration and “terrorist threat,” do quite often impair with even fundamental human rights and appear at odds with the simultaneous claim to represent a liberaldemocratic constitution.

scholarly journals Human Rights and British Citizenship: The Case of Shamima Begum as Citizen to Homo Sacer

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-363
Author(s):  
Mercedes Masters ◽  
Salvador Santino F Regilme
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Public Security ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
The Core ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Global North ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Uk

Abstract In the post-9/11 context, citizenship in the global North has been reoriented towards the concept of public security. Much of this lay in political rhetoric definitions of who is a threat to the security of a nation state, with a particular emphasis on the ‘threatening Other’. The ‘war on terror’ motivated governments to revoke the citizenship of such persons. In February 2019, the British teenager Shamima Begum was branded as such, and swiftly had her citizenship stripped, which the UK authorities justified as a necessary precaution to protect the nation’s safety. This article asks the core question: how does Britain embed notions of hierarchical human rights, particularly in Begum’s case? The article upholds two key arguments. First, the revocation of citizenship suggests hierarchical notions of humanity, whereby the state’s obligations to its constituents differ depending on each individual’s socially constructed racial and gender identities. Second, the legitimization of exceptionalist security politics suggests the deployment of differentiated conceptions of the state’s obligations to its citizens. The case of the revocation of Begum’s citizenship illustrates how persistent colonialist and stratified conceptions of citizenship enable the demotion of a citizen to a bare human or homo sacer.

scholarly journals Mundo da vida e Direito Natural. Uma Fundamentação Fenomenológica dos Direitos Humanos?

Phainomenon ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 22-23 (1) ◽  
pp. 441-454
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Loureiro de Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Modern Age

Abstract The justification of Natural Law is a very controversial issue, not only after the Positivist’s rebuttals, but since its very anthropological foundations in the early modern age. In this paper, I try do give an account of Natural Law and natural rights in terms of a phenomenological description of the background of normative intentionality. Taking a genetic stance, I go from the positive norm and the intentionality that constitutes it to the underling pregiveness that supplies the condition of its possibility. I exhibit it as the experience of the live-world, and I analyze it as an intersubjective world, where persons are given as equals and worth-counting. This is the very root of the concept of human dignity. Starting from it, I develop an account of the sense and content of the concept of Human Rights as a set of eidetic laws creating the framework for authentic human relationships.

scholarly journals Prawo naturalne w ramach radykalnego oświecenia

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century

The main difference between classical (both ancient and medieval) and modern concepts of natural law lies in the assumption of its supernatural (divine) foundation. Early modern philosophical concepts tend to undermine and gradually to deny God or some other metaphysical entity as the source of natural law. Some contemporary scholars (e.g. Habermas, Bobbio) define this process as transition (modernization, rationalization, Positivisierung) of traditional natural law towards the idea of natural rights and human rights. We can distinguish at least three main schools of natural law during the 17th and 18th centuries, each one more radical than the others: de Groot dares to consider the natural law “as if there were no God”. The philosophers of early Enlightenment (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire) were perhaps more daring, nevertheless they were all deists and the “Supreme Being” still validates natural law in their writings. The article aims to examine the most radical view on natural law, i.e. partly forgotten and underestimated ideas of French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet. For they were all thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (J. Israel), all of them were materialists and atheists, and they perceived the nature and natural law as completely separated from God or other supernatural being. Unlike their older colleagues, these radical philosophers demanded equality (for women and ethnical minorities as well), emancipation, and social justice for all classes. This papers describes the idea of natural law within the radical Enlightenment movement,and investigates some political consequences of this interpretation during the French Revolution. While strongly materialistic, progressive, and atheist, the ideas of Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet were also perceived as politically dangerous. All revolutionary attempts to put these ideas into political and social practice have failed. Finally, these ideas were refuted, but they returned during the 19th- and 20th-century debates on human rights.

DEFINITION OF THE PUBLIC SECURITY AND ORDERLINESS ENSURING MECHANISM IN UKRAINE

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (11) ◽  
pp. 155-163
Author(s):  
Marina Aleksandrovna Kalievskaya
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
State Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Public Security ◽  
National Priority ◽  
Institu Tions ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
Definition Of

In this article, a model of the mechanism of ensuring public security and orderliness in accordance with the principles and tasks of the relevant institu- tions in public administration, taking into account resources, technologies, mea- sures for the state policy implementation in the spheres of ensuring the protection of human rights and freedoms, the interests of society and the state, combating crime, maintaining public security and order. It was found that ensuring public security and order in Ukraine is a mechanism for the implementation of national goals of state policy in the areas of ensuring the protection of human rights and freedoms, the interests of society and the state, combating crime, maintaining public security and order, by defining tasks according to certain principles. The idea is that if one considers the state policy in the spheres of ensuring the protec- tion of human rights and freedoms, the interests of society and the state, combat- ing crime, maintaining public security and order as a national priority (purpose, task), then the mechanism of ensuring public security and order in Ukraine needs coordination with the state development strategy. From the point of view of the implementation of the state policy in the areas of ensuring the protection of hu- man rights and freedoms, the interests of society and the state, combating crime, maintaining public security and order, the mechanism of ensuring public security and order in Ukraine can be considered as the main system providing intercon- nection such elements as institutions (implementing the specified state policy), resources (human resources, logistical, natural and so on, with the help of which it is possible to implement state policy), technologies (skills, knowledge, means and so on the implementation of state policy), measures (action plans), as well as external (internal) threats.

scholarly journals God, New Natural Law Theory, and Human Rights

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Christopher Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Full Theory ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Epistemological Dimension

Critics of the “New” Natural Law (NNL) theory have raised questions about the role of the divine in that theory. This paper considers that role in regard to its account of human rights: can the NNL account of human rights be sustained without a more or less explicit advertence to “the question of God’s existence or nature or will”? It might seem that Finnis’s “elaborate sketch” includes a full theory of human rights even prior to the introduction of his reflections on the divine in the concluding chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. But in this essay, I argue that an adequate account of human rights cannot, in fact, be sustained without some role for God’s creative activity in two dimensions, the ontological and the motivational. These dimensions must be distinguished from the epistemological dimension of human rights, that is, the question of whether epistemological access to truths about human rights is possible without reference to God’s existence, nature, or will. The NNL view is that such access is possible. However, I will argue, the epistemological cannot be entirely cabined off from the relevant ontological and motivational issues and the NNL framework can accommodate this fact without difficulty.

On American Values, Unalienable Rights, and Human Rights: Some Reflections on the Pompeo Commission

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Risse
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
American Values ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The U.S

AbstractIn July 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a Commission on Unalienable Rights, charged with a reexamination of the scope and nature of human rights–based claims. From his statements, it seems that Pompeo hopes the commission will substantiate—by appeal to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and to natural law theory—three key conservative ideas: (1) that there is too much human rights proliferation, and once we get things right, social and economic rights as well as gender emancipation and reproductive rights will no longer register as human rights; (2) that religious liberties should be strengthened under the human rights umbrella; and (3) that the unalienable rights that should guide American foreign policy neither need nor benefit from any international oversight. I aim to show that despite Pompeo's framing, the Declaration of Independence, per se, is of no help with any of this, whereas evoking natural law is only helpful in ways that reveal its own limitations as a foundation for both human rights and foreign policy in our interconnected age.

scholarly journals The Right to Dignity of Refugees: A Response to Fleur Johns

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 193-195
Author(s):  
Elspeth Guild
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
International Protection ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Refugee Protection ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
International Refugee Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

Fleur Johns' thesis about the increasing role of data in the verification of the condition of the world and how this impacts on international law is stimulating and bears reflection. This is an extremely interesting and innovative approach to the issue of data and its role in state engagement with mass migration. From the perspective of a scholar on international refugee law, a number of issues arise as a result of the analysis. One of the contested aspects of mass migration and refugee protection is the inherent inconsistency between two ways of thinking about human rights—the first is the duty of (some) international organizations to protect human rights in a manner which elides human rights and humanitarian law, and the second is the right of the individual to dignity, the basis of all human rights according to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1949. The first enhances the claims of states to sovereign right to control their borders (mediated through some international organizations), while the second recognizes the international human rights duties of states and international organizations to respect the dignity of people as individuals (including refugees). Fleur is completely correct that human rights abuses are at the core of refugee movements. While there are always many people in a country who will stay and fight human rights abuses even when this results in their sacrifice, others will flee danger trying to get themselves and their families to places of safety; we are not all heroes. Yet, when people flee in more than very small numbers, state authorities have a tendency to begin the language of mass migration. The right to be a refugee becomes buried under the threat of mass migration to the detriment of international obligations. Insofar as mass migration is a matter for management, the right of a refugee is an individual right to international protection which states have bound themselves to offer.

scholarly journals Human Rights and Human Nature

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-534
Author(s):  
Jean Rhéaume
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Positive Law

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.

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