Digital Commons Network^™

Cognitive Relatives Yet Moral Strangers?, Judith Benz-Scharzberg, Andrew Knight

Andrew Knight, PhD

This article provides an empirically based, interdisciplinary approach to the following two questions: Do animals possess behavioral and cognitive characteristics such as culture, language, and a theory of mind? And if so, what are the implications, when long-standing criteria used to justify differences in moral consideration between humans and animals are no longer considered indisputable? One basic implication is that the psychological needs of captive animals should be adequately catered for. However, for species such as great apes and dolphins with whom we share major characteristics of personhood, welfare considerations alone may not suffice, and consideration of basic rights may …

Youth Activism, Art And Transitional Artist: Emerging Spaces Of Memory After The Jasmin Revolution, Arnaud Kurze

Arnaud Kurze

This project explores the creation of alternative transitional justice spaces in post-conflict contexts, particularly concentrating on the role of art and the impact of social movements to address human rights abuses. Drawing from post-authoritarian Tunisia, it scrutinizes the work of contemporary youth activists and artists to deal with the past and foster sociopolitical change. Although these vanguard protesters provoked the overthrow of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, the power vacuum was quickly filled by old elites. The exclusion of young revolutionaries from political decision-making led to unprecedented forms of mobilization to account for repression and injustice under …

Sexual Violence In The Field Of Vision, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

'Listen To What You Say': Rwanda’S Postgenocide Language Policies, Lynne Tirrell

Lynne Tirrell

Freedom of expression is considered a basic human right, and yet most countries have restrictions on speech they deem harmful. Following the genocide of the Tutsi, Rwanda passed a constitution (2003) and laws against hate speech and other forms of divisionist language (2008, 2013). Understanding how language shaped “recognition harms” that both constitute and fuel genocide also helps account for political decisions to limit “divisionist” discourse. When we speak, we make expressive commitments, which are commitments to the viability and value of ways of speaking. This article explores reasons a society would decide to say, “We don’t talk that way …

Did The Ancient Greeks Have A Concept Of Human Rights?, Anthony Preus

Anthony Preus

"Although there is no single word in the classical Greek that captures the sense that modern political thinkers give to the word "rights" as it is used in the phrase "human rights," classical Greek and Roman texts have a good deal to contribute to 21st-century discussions of human rights."

Vidura, July-September, 2015, Professor Vibhuti Patel

Professor Vibhuti Patel

When an ad is ‘not an ad’ / Sakuntala Narasimhan • Indian media and reporting of her neighbours / Shastri Ramachandaran • A losing battle for social justice? / Vibhuti Patel • The transformation of a women’s magazine / Sakuntala Narasimhan • A writer recalls her innings with Screen / Shoma A. Chatterji • The feminisation of urban poverty / Vibhuti Patel • Changing face of India’s disinherited daughters / Pamela Philipose • When radio proved to be a lifeline / John K. Babu • Linking folk musicians to new opportunities / Bharat Dogra • Bangladesh war widows have reason …

Reviews Of Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest Of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure The World, By Tracy Kidder; Pathologies Of Power: Health Care, Human Rights, And The New War On The Poor, By Paul Farmer; And The Uses Of Haiti, By Paul Farmer, M. Therese Lysaught

M. Therese Lysaught

No abstract provided.

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

Inciting Genocide With Words, Richard Ashby Wilson

Richard Ashby Wilson

This article calls for a rethinking of the causation element in the prevailing international criminal law on direct and public incitement to commit genocide. After the conviction of Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide was established in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948. The first (and thus far, only) convictions for the crime came fifty years later at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The ICTR’s incitement jurisprudence is widely recognized as problematic, but no legal commentator has thus …

Violence And Pastoral Care In Putumayo, Colombia, Winifred L. Tate

Winifred L. Tate

Inventing Human Dignity, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

Michelle S Jacobs

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, Professor Johnson …

The Global Slavery Index - Seduction And Obfuscation, Anne T. Gallagher Ao

Anne T Gallagher

Critique of the Global Slavery Index. For published version see http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/nov/28/global-slavery-index-walk-free-human-trafficking-anne-gallagher

Movimientos Obreros Y Por Los Derechos Humanos En América Latina: Convergencia, Divergencia Y Consecuencias Para La Promoción De Los Derechos Económicos, Sociales Y Culturales [Labor Movements And Human Rights In Latin America: Convergence, Divergence, And The Implications For The Promotion Of Economic, Social And Cultural Rights], Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] Los derechos propios del trabajo forman parte de los derechos humanos hace mucho tiempo y gozan del reconocimiento de pactos internacionales. La Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos, adoptada por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas, en 1948, enumera los derechos a condiciones de trabajo justas y favorables; a igual remuneración por trabajo de igual valor; a una remuneración equitativa y favorable, y a formar sindicatos y afiliarse a ellos. El Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos (PIDCP) incluye los derechos a la libertad de asociación y a formar sindicatos y afiliarse a ellos. El Pacto Internacional de Derechos …

Human Rights, Women, And Third World Development, Winston E. Langley

Winston E. Langley

As part of the effort to inaugurate a new international socio-political order after World War II, international emphasis was given to certain moral and legal entitlements we have come to call human rights. That emphasis initially found its most forceful expression in the Charter of the United Nations, which not only asserts its members' faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, as well as in the equal rights of men and women of all nations, but also recites its members' commitment to employ international machinery for the promotion of the social and economic …

Four Challenges Confronting A Moral Conception Of Universal Human Rights, Eric Blumenson

Eric Blumenson

This Essay describes some fundamental debates concerning the nature and possibility of universal human rights, conceived as a species of justice rather than law. It identifies four claims entailed by such rights and some significant problems each claim confronts. The designation “universal human rights” explicitly asserts three of them: paradigmatic human rights purport to be (1) universal, in that their protections and obligations bind every society, regardless of its laws and mores; (2) human, in that the rights belong equally to every person by virtue of one’s humanity, regardless of character, social standing, disabilities, or other individual attributes; and (3) …

Kriza, Jedinstvo I Osobne Slobode, Matija Kovačević

Matija Kovačević

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

David Ingram

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

Of Sweatshops And Human Subsistence: Habermas On Human Rights, David Ingram

David Ingram

In this paper I argue that the discourse theoretic account of human rights defended by Jürgen Habermas contains a fruitful tension that is obscured by its dominant tendency to identify rights with legal claims. This weakness in Habermas’s account becomes manifest when we examine how sweatshops diminish the secure enjoyment of subsistence, which Habermas himself (in recognition of the UDHR) recognizes as a human right. Discourse theories of human rights are unique in tying the legitimacy of human rights to democratic deliberation and consensus. So construed, their specific meaning and force is the outcome of historical political struggle. However, unlike …

Migration, Human Rights And Development: A Global Anthology, Anne T. Gallagher Ao

Anne T Gallagher

Migration, Human Rights, and Development presents a unique collection of important, accessible, and sometimes provocative writing in the area of migration—with a particular focus on the human rights and development aspects of modern migration trends and responses. A detailed introduction by the editor is followed by four thematic sections that address: (i) the relationship and connections between human rights, migration, and development; (ii) key issues in migration and development, including impacts on source and destination countries, social costs, and the role of remittances; (iii) key issues in migration and human rights: the legal and policy frameworks and the rights of …

Global Feminism: Feminist Theory’S Cul-De-Sac, Elora Halim Chowdhury

Elora Halim Chowdhury

Global feminism has been critical of the earlier notion of "global sisterhood" and its uncritical attachment to commonalities of women's oppression around the world. However, in this article I argue that global feminism curiously remains inadequately accountable for its differential attitude toward issues of difference and inequality among communities within the U.S. versus those alleged differences and inequalities across the U.S. borders. Consequently, global feminism, using a universal human rights paradigm, constructs for itself the role of the heroic savior, reminiscent of colonialist civilizing mission (Abu-Lughod 2002) and in line with current U.S. imperialist interventions. Strategies for countering this newly …

The Unbordered Borders, Winston Langley

Winston E. Langley

Many have taken on the task of purportedly advancing the cause of human rights by abstractly reciting them and clamoring for their implementation. Some speak about one’s right to free speech and democracy, for example, with a convenient forgetting of the right to education, which can promote the type of dialogical encounter that is sponsoring of liberatory, integrative construction and reconstruction of self and human societies. Others champion the right to freedom, but not the right to food, careless of the fact that the hungry are un-free, left as they are to the crushing dictates of their bellies; and still …

Natural Rights To Welfare, Siegfried Van Duffel

Siegfried Van Duffel

No abstract provided.

Legal Lines In Shifting Sand: Immigration Law And Human Rights In The Wake Of September 11, Daniel Kanstroom

Daniel Kanstroom

In March of 2004, a group of legal scholars gathered at Boston College Law School to examine the doctrinal implications of the events of September 11, 2001. They reconsidered the lines drawn between citizens and noncitizens, war and peace, the civil and criminal systems, as well as the U.S. territorial line. Participants responded to the proposition that certain entrenched historical matrices no longer adequately answer the complex questions raised in the “war on terror.” They examined the importance of government disclosure and the public’s right to know; the deportation system’s habeas corpus practices; racial profiling; the convergence of immigration and …

Russian Orthodoxy And Human Rights, Paul Valliere

Paul Valliere

This essay describes the situation and orientation of the Russian Orthodox Church with respect co human tights. Along the broad spectrum of rights I focus mainly on the civil rights of individuals and nonstate associations rather than the subsistence rights and rights to social services that figure so prominently in socialist theories of rights.

El Regimen De Stroessner (1954-1989), Robert Andrew Nickson

Robert Andrew Nickson

Este capítulo describe las tres etapas principales del régimen de Stroessner: fase de consolidación (1954-1967); fase de expansión (1968-1981); y fase de descomposición (1982-1989), y las circunstancias de su caída. Posteriormente abarca los tres pilares del régimen: el Partido Colorado, las Fuerzas Armadas y el mismo Stroessner en su calidad de Jefe de Estado, Comandante en Jefe de las Fuerzas Armadas y Presidente Honorario del Partido Colorado. Se analiza cinco mecanismos cruciales que le permitieron mantenerse en el poder durante tanto tiempo: una fachada democrática, un sistema de represión eficaz, la corrupción institucionalizada, el uso de la ideología nacionalista, y …

Human Rights As Preconditions For Intercultural Society, Mireille Hildebrandt

Mireille Hildebrandt

In this contribution human rights will be considered not simply as conditions for an intercultural society such as the European Union but as preconditions, or, in other words, human rights will be conceptualized as constitutive and not as causal or moral conditions for 'European Integration'. This means that the level of the analysis is epistemological rather than methodological, though at many points I will indicate the consequences of this approach for the way comparative law can be practiced, if it is to contribute to an intercultural 'area of freedom, security and justice' (art. 29 of the Treaty of the European …

The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

The Local Is Global: Broker For Human Rights “Florence Kitchelt, Connecticut Peace Activist And Feminist,” 1920-1961, Danelle L. Moon

Danelle L. Moon

In this paper, I will explore the role of local peace activist and feminist, Florence Ledyard Kitchelt (1874-1961) in supporting social justice, equality, and world peace. In 1924 Kitchelt accepted a paid position with the Connecticut League of Nation’s Association (CLNA), and for nearly twenty years she served as secretary and director of the organization. Working through the CLNA she canvassed the state promoting peace education and to building support for the League of Nations and the World Court. In 1925 she traveled to Geneva to study the League of Nations and attended the Assembly. Between the wars she worked …

Public Health And The Rights Of States, András Miklós

Andras Miklos

When exercising their public health powers, states claim various rights against their subjects and aliens. The paper considers whether public health considerations can help justify some of these rights, and explores some constraints on the justificatory force of public health considerations. I outline two arguments about the moral grounds for states’ rights with regard to public health. The principle of fairness emphasizes that those who benefit from public health measures ought to contribute their fair share in upholding them. Alternatively, states’ rights might be justified by a natural duty of justice to uphold and not to obstruct institutions implementing public …