Journal of Human Rights Practice 

About: Journal of Human Rights Practice is an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Human rights & Political science. It has an ISSN identifier of 1757-9619. Over the lifetime, 435 publications have been published receiving 4335 citations. The journal is also known as: JHRP.

‘Stop Stealing Our Stories’: The Ethics of Research with Vulnerable Groups

Abstract: The article discusses the challenges and opportunities faced when integrating participatory methods into human rights-based research. It describes the development of a participatory action research approach designed to fulfil the aim of undertaking advocacy-focused research grounded in human rights and community participation. It reflects the principles of anti-oppressive social work and the ethics of undertaking research with vulnerable populations. In line with other contributions to this special issue, the article explores questions such as: ‘Where does knowledge about the story come from and how is it passed on?’; ‘What spurs ethical thinking at an individual and organizational level?’; and ‘How can ethical sensitivity and strategic effectiveness be combined?’

South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign: Combining Law and Social Mobilization to Realize the Right to Health

Abstract: This article summarizes the experience and results of a campaign for access to medicines for HIV in South Africa, led by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) between 1998 and 2008. It illustrates how the TAC mobilized people to campaign for the right to health using a combination of human rights education, HIV treatment literacy, demonstration, and litigation. As a result of these campaigns, the TAC was able to reduce the price of medicines, prevent hundreds of thousands of HIVrelated deaths, but also to force significant additional resources into the health system and towards the poor. The article asks whether the method of the TAC has a wider application for human rights campaigns and, particularly, whether the protection of the right to health in law, and the obligation that it be progressively realized by the State, provides an opportunity to advance human rights practice.

On Transitional Justice Entrepreneurs and the Production of Victims

Abstract: What kinds of politics are (re)produced when a transitional justice expert seeks out the victim, elects to rescue him from his marginality, categorizes him and represents him on the world stage? More specifically, given the fact that transitional justice experts legitimize their existence on the basis of speaking about and for victims, is it ever possible for the expert to exercise ‘responsibility’ to the victim’s story in ways that contribute to the genuine empowerment of the victim? The main aim of this contribution is to make some tentative remarks on how, and what kind of, victims are ‘produced’ by the transitional justice industry. In the first section I make some generalized observations regarding the political subjectivity of victims produced when transitional justice experts speak about and for victims. In the second section I then look at how Khulumani Support Group, a South Africanbased social movement of over 55,000 members, has negotiated the contradictions brought about by the transitional justice industry and its representations – in a sense of speaking both about and for victims. I conclude that since ‘the story’ is the main point of encounter between the authoritative expert and the marginalized victim, ‘responsibility to the story’ should mean more than being nice to victims or adhering to rigorous scientific and ethical standards; it should also, if not principally, be about redistribution of resources and power. In exercising responsibility to the story experts need to dismantle trusteeship and reproduction of colonial relations.

The Populist Challenge to Human Rights

Abstract: The nationalistic, xenophobic, misogynistic, and explicitly anti-human rights agenda of many populist political leaders requires human rights proponents to rethink many longstanding assumptions. There is a need to re-evaluate strategies and broaden outreach, while reaffirming the basic principles on which the human rights movement is founded. Amongst the challenges are the need to achieve more effective synergies between international and local human rights movements and to embrace and assert economic and social rights as human rights rather than as welfare or development objectives. It will be crucial to engage with issues of resources and redistribution, including budgets, tax policy, and fiscal policies. There is a need for collaboration with a broader range of actors, to be more persuasive and less didactic, and to be prepared to break with some of the old certainties. Academics should pay attention to the unintended consequences of their scholarship, and everyone in the human rights movement needs to reflect on the contributions each can make.