Showing papers on "Fundamental rights published in 2015"

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights

Abstract: In accordance with Article 14, paragraph 1 of the Council Regulation (EC) No 168/2007 (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Regulation’) of 15 February 2007 establishing a European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights () (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Agency’), the Management Board of the Agency shall appoint a Scientific Committee which shall be comprised of eleven independent persons, highly qualified in the field of fundamental rights.

The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice

Abstract: Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That's a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era-but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it? Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas - housing redevelopment in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan's admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company - Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences. Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.

Mind the Gap: State Capacity and the Implementation of Human Rights Treaties

Abstract: According to recent studies, international human rights treaties are ineffective, counterproductive, or else beneficial for only those countries that tend to respect human rights regardless of treaty membership. Analysts often attribute gaps between human rights principles and practices to willful disobedience, self-interested defection, and ineffective enforcement. Using two-stage regression models to analyze compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, I examine whether countries' inability (as opposed to unwillingness) to implement treaty terms is also responsible for the gap between commitment and compliance. I find that one dimension of state capacity in particular—bureaucratic efficacy—enhances levels of compliance with civil, political, and physical integrity rights provisions. These findings lend credence to an important aspect of the managerial approach—that noncompliance is often inadvertent and conditioned by a state's ability to implement treaty terms.

Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference

Abstract: Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this paper, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that there exists a difference between organizational rights – most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties – and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that organizational rights increase de facto rights protection, because they create organizations with the incentives and means to protect the underlying right, which renders these rights self-enforcing. Such organizations are not necessarily present to protect individual rights, which could make individual rights less effective. We test our theory using a variety of statistical methods on a dataset of constitutional rights for 186 countries. The results support our theory: organizational rights are associated with increased de facto rights protection.

Human Rights Education, Postcolonial Scholarship, and Action for Social Justice.

Abstract: In our global age, educational researchers and practitioners need tools that can be applied in a range of contexts and scales: local, national, and international. This article argues that human rights education (HRE) is a site of struggle in which human rights and democracy need to be constantly renewed. It contextualizes HRE within a critical, reflective postcolonial framework that nonetheless recognizes modernist principles of universal rights. It focuses on 2 concepts—universality and recognition—to develop a theory of HRE that meets the needs of multicultural, multi-faith, yet secular societies that are characterized by asymmetrical power relations and anti-democratic political movements. An evolving theory of HRE needs to embrace the ethics of recognition by extending this concept beyond that expounded in human rights instruments and building on learners’ experiences. Individual narratives are starting points for new collective narratives to enable the strengthening of human rights and social...

The development of disability rights under international law: from charity to human rights [Book Review]

Abstract: Disabled people are the world’s largest growing minority, yet until very recently they were invisible in international human rights law. Disabled people are not listed among the groups explicitly p...

The European Convention on Human Rights: A Commentary

Abstract: Part One: Introduction Part Two: The European Convention on Human Rights Part Three: Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights Part Four: Protocol No. 4 to the European Convention on Human Rights securing certain rights and freedoms other than those already included in the Convention and in the First Protocol thereto Part Five: Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights concerning the abolition of the death penalty Part Six: Protocol No. 7 to the European Convention on Human Rights Part Seven: Protocol No. 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights Part Eight: Protocol No. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights concerning the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances Part Nine: Protocol No 16 to the European Convention on Human Rights

Extending experimentalist governance? : the European Union and transnational regulation

Abstract: A. GOVERNING THE NEIGHBORHOOD B. PROTECTING CONSUMERS AND THE ENVIRONMENT C. REGULATING COMPETITION AND FINANCE D. ENSURING SECURITY, JUSTICE, AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

Human rights education: educating about, through and for human rights

Abstract: The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training (2011) is the first instrument in which international standards for human rights education are officially proclaimed by the United Nations. Most importantly, it contains a framework of key components necessary for the provision of holistic human rights education – education about, through and for human rights. This article highlights the usefulness of this framework for assessing and comparing state practice in the provision of human rights education. But it argues that comprehensive and effective national strategies for human rights education are likely to follow only from more detailed guidance and support for states at the international level.

Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming control

Abstract: Our global food system is undergoing rapid change. Since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, a range of new issues have come to public attention, such as land grabbing, food prices volatility, agrofuels and climate change. Peasant social movements are trying to respond to these challenges by organizing from the local to the global to demand food sovereignty. As the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina celebrates its 20th anniversary, this book takes stock of the movement’s achievements and reflects on challenges for the future. It provides an in-depth analysis of the movement’s vision and strategies, and shows how it has contributed not only to the emergence of an alternative development paradigm but also of an alternative conception of human rights. The book explores why La Via Campesina was successful in mobilizing a human rights discourse in its struggle against neoliberalism, and assesses efforts by the movement to achieve the international recognition of new human rights for peasants at the international level, namely the «right to food sovereignty» and «peasants’ rights». It also explores the limitations and potential pitfalls of using the human rights framework. The book shows that, to inject subversive potential in their rights-based claims, La Via Campesina activists a) developed an alternative conception of rights, that is more plural, less statist, less individualistic, and more multi-cultural than dominant conceptions of human rights; b) deployed a combination of institutional (from above) and extrainstitutional (from below) strategies to demand new rights and reinforce grassroots mobilization through rights.

Cultural rights versus human rights: A critical analysis of the trokosi practice in Ghana and the role of civil society

Abstract: In this article, I examine critically the culture versus human rights debate, and the crucial role and tactics of civil society organisations, drawing on insights from transnational advocacy networking, in the struggle to extend human rights to vulnerable people with reference to the trokosi practice in Ghana. This trokosi system turns virgin girls into slaves of the gods to atone for crimes committed by their family members. Theoretically, universal human rights must take precedence over any demand for cultural rights. In practice, however, the actual enforcement of human rights laws that conflict with other cultural values and practices can be more messy and complex than it is often conceptualised. Essentially, universal human rights accommodate, recognise and promote cultural rights; however, the latter ends at a point where its observance is likely to result in the violation of the fundamental human rights of others. I conclude that, although the call for cultural pluralism and the need to celebrate and respect the diversity of cultures sound legitimate, this demand cannot be allowed to trump the minimum package of the fundamental human rights that protect human dignity, wellbeing and integrity within the context of human rights protocols that state parties already have ratified. Yet, for this to materialise, stronger civil society organisations with a solid broad-based networking capacity and tenacity of purpose are crucial. This article helps to extend our current knowledge of human rights struggles and the implications these have for the furtherance of universal human rights.

Realising women’s human rights in Malaysia : the EMPOWER report

Abstract: Why do activist groups representing some of society’s most marginalised employ legalistic forms of “rights talk” when the reality of securing rights via the judicial system is almost unimaginable? The article considers this question in relation to the work of the Malaysian non-governmental organisation (NGO) EMPOWER which, in 2012, produced the Malaysian women’s human rights report focusing attention on the rights of informal sector workers, refugees and sexual minorities, and women’s rights under non-Islamic family law. The engagement of a legalistic human rights perspective is important to this group – the existence of some constitutional guarantees for socioeconomic rights and Malaysia’s commitments to CEDAW do, after all, provide scope for activism. Yet such activities take shape within the context of rising Islamic conservatism within the political and legal system, commitments to an economic development model in which the interests of labour are subordinated to those of capital, and state au...

Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law. Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology

Abstract: Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Smartness and Agency 3. The Onlife World 4. The Digital Unconscious: Back to Diana 5. Threats to Fundamental Rights in the Onlife World 6. The Other Side of Privacy: Agency and Privacy in Japan 7. The Ends of Law: Address and Redress 8. Intricate Entanglements of Law and Technology 9. The Fundamental Right of Data Protection 10. The End of Law or Legal Protection by Design 11. References Index

The Influence of History on States’ Compliance with Human Rights Obligations

Abstract: There is considerable variation in countries’ respect for human rights. Scholars have tried to explain this variation on the basis of current conditions in countries—such as democracy and civil war—and events from the recent past, such as ratification of human rights treaties. This literature has ignored the influence that geographic factors and historical events may have on human rights performance. Drawing on the literature on economic development, which has shown that institutions, events, and conditions from the distant past heavily influence the rate of economic growth across countries today, we argue that scholars should study whether the same factors have influenced modern human rights performance. Our exploratory look at the data suggests that respect for human rights today may be related to the geographic location of affected populations centuries ago, the nature of the institutions that emerged at that time, and cultural traits that have been passed down from generation to generation. These preliminary results suggest that human rights scholars could make substantial progress by building on the work of development economics.

Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’

Abstract: We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.

Fostering freedom online: the role of internet intermediaries

Abstract: "Fostering Freedom Online: the Role of Internet Intermediaries” is the third title in the UNESCO Internet freedom series. With the rise of Internet intermediaries that play a mediating role on the internet between authors of content and audiences, UNESCO took a joint initiative, with the Open Society Foundations, the Internet Society, and Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, to examine this recent historical phenomenon and how it impacts on freedom of expression and associated fundamental rights such as privacy. The case study research, collaboratively delivered by 16 international researchers led by Ms Rebecca MacKinnon and Mr Allon Bar, as well as 14 members of International Advisory Committee, covers of three categories of intermediaries: Internet Service Providers (fixed line and mobile) such as Vodafone (UK, Germany, Egypt), Vivo/Telefonica Brasil (Brazil), Bharti Airtel (India, Kenya), Safaricom (Kenya), Search Engines such as Google (USA, EU, India, China, Russia), Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia) and Social Networking Platforms such as Facebook (USA, Germany, India, Brazil, Egypt), Twitter (USA, Kenya), Weibo (China), iWiW (Hungary). The research showed that internet intermediaries are heavily influenced by the legal and policy environments of states, but they do have leeway over many areas of policy and practice affecting online expression and privacy. The findings also highlighted the challenge where many state policies, laws, and regulations are – to varying degrees - poorly aligned with the duty to promote and protect intermediaries’ respect for freedom of expression. It is a resource which enables the assessment of Internet intermediaries’ decisions on freedom of expression, by ensuring that any limitations are consistent with international standards. The research also recommends specific ways that intermediaries and states can improve respect for internet users’ right to freedom of expression. This is through promoting: adequate legal frameworks and policies consistent with international norms, multi-stakeholder policy development, transparency of governance, accountability in self-regulation, mechanisms for remedy, and public information and education. UNESCO has succeeded in raising awareness and promoting good practice through past research in the UNESCO Series on Internet Freedom: Freedom of connection, freedom of expression: the changing legal and regulatory ecology shaping the Internet (2011) and Global survey on Internet Privacy and Freedom of Expression (2012). This rich material in this, the third in UNESCO Series on Internet Freedom, will be of great value to all stakeholders. These are industry actors, UNESCO Member States, technical community, Intergovernmental organizations, private sector, civil society, and others both national and international. This research is linked to UNESCO draft conceptual framework of “Internet universality” which draws from UNESCO decisions on the Internet, and recognises that four core principles should inform cyber actors. These principles are that the Internet should be human rights-based, open, accessible for all and governed by multi-stakeholder participation. The research also helps to inform UNESCO’s implementation of a comprehensive and consultative multi-stakeholder Internet study as mandated by the Organization’s 37th General Conference Resolution 52. The study, due in 2015, covers UNESCO’s key competence areas of access to information and knowledge, freedom of expression, privacy, and ethical dimensions of the information society, and contains possible options for future actions.

The Changing Standard of Accountability and the Positive Relationship between Human Rights Treaty Ratification and Compliance

Abstract: Researchers have puzzled over the finding that countries that ratify UN human rights treaties such as the Convention Against Torture are more likely to abuse human rights than non-ratifiers over time. I present evidence that the changing standard of accountability --- the set of expectations that monitoring agencies use to hold states responsible for repressive actions --- conceals real improvements to the level of respect for human rights in data derived from monitoring reports. Using a novel dataset that corrects for systematic changes to human rights reports over time, I demonstrate that the ratification of human rights treaties is empirically associated with higher levels of respect for human rights over time and across countries. This positive relationship is robust to a variety of measurement strategies and model specifications. Overall, a new picture emerges of improving levels of respect for human rights, which coincides in time with an increasing number of countries ratifying an increasing number of the international human rights treaties.

Social Rights and Human Welfare

Abstract: Part 1: Social Rights in Theory 1. The Social Rights of Citizenship 2. Human Needs and Human Rights 3. Ethics and Social Welfare 4. Critiques of Social Rights Part 2: Social Rights in Practice 5. Social Rights in Global Context 6. Rights to Livelihood 7. Rights to Human Services 8. Rights of Redress Part 3: Re-Thinking Social Rights 9. Social Rights and Social Development 10. The Future of Social Rights

Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina's Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years

Abstract: This article explores how human rights framing by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has evolved over the last 20 years. It discusses how the movement has worked towards institutionalizing new categories of rights, such as the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’, thereby contributing to the creation of new human rights standards at the United Nations (UN). It also critically addresses some of the challenges the movement has been confronted with when framing its demands in terms of rights. Its overall argument is that LVC has managed to tap the potential of the rhetoric of rights to find common ground, thanks to its innovative use of non-codified rights. This has enabled activists to ‘localize’ human rights and make them meaningful to their various contexts. However, it contends that further advancing the movement's goals will require serious consideration of some of the key limits of the human rights framework.

On the Foundations of Human Rights

Abstract: This paper provides an account of the grounds of human rights, considered as moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity. It identifies two such grounds: a plurality of universal human interests and the value of human dignity (the intrinsic and non-derivative value of being a human being). It also offers an extended account of the 'threshold' at which considerations of universal interests and human dignity generate duties in the case of all human beings. The paper concludes by showing that this pluralistic view of the grounding of human nights is superior to both a needs-based and a personhood-based approach.

The domestic effectiveness of international human rights monitoring in established democracies. The case of the UN human rights treaty bodies

Abstract: Although the reporting process under UN human rights treaties is considered one of the most important universal mechanisms to monitor the implementation of human rights, its actual domestic effects have hardly been studied. This is surprising in the light of the rather extensive work involved and resources spent on the reporting process by states and UN human rights treaty bodies. This article attempts to fill the scholarly neglect by examining the effectiveness of this process in three countries, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Finland. It also explores some more general conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues with respect to the definition and measurement of effectiveness of international (human rights) standards at the domestic level. The empirical results, which are based on extensive document analysis as well as 175 interviews, are used to test two hypotheses based on domestic and transnational mobilization as well as reputational and legitimacy-based explanations. The article especially finds support for the liberalist mobilization thesis, while only limited support is found for reputational and legitimacy-based explanations, at least in established liberal democracies.

When Humans Become Migrants: Study of the European Court of Human Rights with an Inter-American Counterpoint

Abstract: This book examines the opposing ways in which the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights treat claims lodged by migrants. It combines legal, sociological, and historical analysis to show that the two courts were the product of different backgrounds, which led to differing attitudes to migrants in their founding texts, and that these differences were reinforced in their developing case law. The book assesses the case law of both courts in detail to argue that they approach migrant cases from fundamentally different perspectives. It asserts that the European Court of Human Rights treats migrants first as aliens, and then - but only in a second step of its reasoning - as human beings. By contrast, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights approaches migrants as human beings in the first instance.

A Magna Carta for all Humanity: Homing in on Human Rights

Abstract: INTRODUCTION: The Magna Carta: marvel or myth? SECTION ONE: HUMAN RIGHTS: A TIME TRAVELLERS' GUIDE. 1. First stop: in search of British values. 2. Fast -forward to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 3. Exploring the Human Rights Ethic. 4. The meaning of 'universal'. 5. Conclusion: inspiration or foundation? Section One Anthology of other work by the author. SECTION TWO: WHEN UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS HIT HOME: THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT CONTROVERSY UNCUT. 6. The disputed parentage of the ECHR. 7. On the road to the HRA. 8. Principles and values. 9. Critiques and Controversies. 10. Back to the future? 11. Conclusion: Human Rights: endgame or lit flame? Section Two Anthology of other work by the author.

Rights and Autonomy

Abstract: H. L. A. Hart has recently taken note of and applauded a discernible paradigm shift in political and legal theory from the "widely accepted old faith that some form of utilitarianism . .. must capture the essence of political morality" to one of "basic human rights . .. , if only we could find some sufficiently firm foundations for such rights."' Hart argues that recent exponents of this paradigm shift, whether associated with libertarian conservatism (Nozick) or the liberal welfare state (Dworkin), powerfully make their negative point against utilitarianism, but fail to lay adequate foundations for their constructive alternatives.2 Such theorists are, in the terms of Hart's paper, "between utility and rights": they have begun to develop the long overdue transition from one paradigm to another, but they are too much in thrall to the utilitarianism they reject clearly to justify a constructive alternative. In this essay, I take Hart's argument as both premise of and challenge to my own inquiry; his arguments, with characteristic brilliance and incision, reveal our needs for fundamental conceptual work in the concept of human rights in a spirit which puts behind it the obsession with the inadequacies of utilitarianism and freshly faces the task of clarifying the deontological alternative. In order to do so, we must, in the spirit of the recent works of John Rawls3 and Alan Gewirth,' articulate in defensibly contemporary terms the perspective on human rights of its greatest classical philosophers, in particular, Rousseau and Kant. The idea of human rights represents a major departure in civilized moral thought. When Rousseau and Kant gave the idea its first articulate and profound theoretical statements, they defined a way of thinking about the moral attitude to personality that was, in ways I must explain, radically new. The practical

Human rights, leisure and leisure studies

Abstract: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by the United Nations in 1948, includes the right to leisure time, to cultural participation and to travel. While the idea of human rights permeates many aspects of national and international life, it has not permeated the field of leisure studies to any great extent. The purpose of this paper is not to remedy this situation but to argue that this neglect is unjustified and to suggest that leisure researchers might incorporate the idea of human rights and leisure rights into their work. The paper is divided into six main parts. First, it considers the parallels between the neglect of human rights in sociology and in leisure studies. Second, it considers the basis of human rights in general. Third, it examines the nature of the leisure rights declared in the Universal Declaration. Fourth, the place of leisure in the general critique of economic, social and cultural rights is assessed. Fifth, the relationship between human rights and a number of themes in ...

Business and Human Rights in Historical Perspective

Abstract: This special issue of the Journal of Human Rights features articles from leading academics in Business and Human Rights (BHR), as well as timely contributions by practitioners describing recent dev...

It is time: Critical Human Rights Education in an age of counter-hegemonic distrust

Abstract: Propelled by the global dominance of human rights discourse and the well-established international consensus on its importance, Human Rights Education (HRE) has proliferated from the mid-1990s onwards. Instead of advancing criticality as a central purpose of education, HRE, as co-constructed within the agencies of the United Nations, became the uncritical legitimating arm of human rights universals. Thus, it has ultimately contributed to the counter-hegemonic distrust in human rights that we experience today. Popular and dominant formulations of HRE, I argue, lack the conceptual and practical resources to be transformative, let alone emancipatory. Steering my reasoning through the historical development of HRE, I contend that the time for Critical Human Rights Education has arrived.

European Consensus and the Legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights

Abstract: © Kanstantsin Dzehtsiarou 2015. In order to be effective, international tribunals should be perceived as legitimate adjudicators. European Consensus and the Legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights provides in-depth analyses on whether European consensus is capable of enhancing the legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Focusing on the method and value of European consensus, it examines the practicalities of consensus identification and application and discusses whether State-counting is appropriate in human rights adjudication. With over 30 interviews from judges of the ECtHR and qualitative analyses of the case law, this book gives readers access to firsthand and up-to-date information and provides an understanding of how the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg interprets the European Convention on Human Rights.

Rights Enabled: The Disability Revolution, from the US, to Germany and Japan, to the United Nations

Abstract: Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a variety of original sources, Katharina C. Heyer examines three case studies - Germany, Japan, and the United Nations - to trace the evolution of a disability rights model from its origins in the U.S. through its adaptations in other democracies to its current formulation in international law. She demonstrates that although notions of disability, equality, and rights are reinterpreted and contested within various political contexts, ultimately the result may be a more robust and substantive understanding of equality. Rights Enabled is a truly interdisciplinary work, combining sociolegal literature on rights and legal mobilization with a deep cultural and sociopolitical analysis of the concept of disability developed in Disability Studies. Heyer raises important issues for scholarship on comparative rights, the global reach of social movements, and the uses and limitations of rights-based activism.