Digital Commons Network^™

Prayas: Social Work In Criminal Justice Prayas_1990@Rediffmail.Com, Prayas.Rnd@Gmail.Com, Professor Vibhuti Patel

Professor Vibhuti Patel

Prayas: Social Work in Criminal Justice prayas_1990@rediffmail.com, prayas.rnd@gmail.com About Prayas Prayas is a Field Action Project of the Centre for Criminology and Justice, School of Social Work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, initiated in 1990. It is a response to the needs of disadvantaged groups being processed by the Criminal Justice System (CJS). It aims at socio legal and economic rehabilitation of persons who are at a greater risk of being criminalised, vulnerable to being trafficked (for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation), or destitution. Mission To contribute knowledge and insight to the current understanding of aspects of …

No Limits To Watching?, Katina Michael, M.G. Michael

M. G. Michael

Little by little, the introduction of new body-worn technologies is transforming the way people interact with their environment and one another, and perhaps even with themselves. Social and environmental psychology studies of human-technology interaction pose as many questions as answers. We are learning as we go: 'learning by doing' through interaction and 'learning by being'. Steve Mann calls this practice existential learning; wearers become photoborgs, a type of cyborg (cybernetic organism) whose primary intent is image capture from the domains of the natural and artificial. This approach elides the distinction between the technology and the human; they coalesce into one.

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 …

Information Effects And Human Rights Data: Is The Good News About Increased Human Rights Information Bad News For Human Rights Measures?, Ann Marie Clark, Kathryn Sikkink

Ann Marie Clark

Changes in quality and availability of information related to human rights violations raise questions about how best to use existing data to assess human rights change. Information effects are discernible both in primary sources of information and data coded by two prominent human rights datasets, the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Set (CIRI). The authors discuss ways that human rights information has changed for the better, evaluate the scales and their primary text sources for countries in Latin America, and compare them with information drawn from regional truth commission data. Extra caution is advised when …

Human Rights Law And Military Aid Delivery: A Case Study Of The Leahy Law, Winifred Tate

Winifred L. Tate

Explicitly prohibiting US military counternarcotics assistance to foreign military units facing credible allegations of abuses, Leahy Law creation and implementation illuminates the epistemological challenges of knowledge production about violence in the policy process. First passed in 1997, the law emerged from strategic alliances between elite NGO advocates, grassroots activists and critically located Congressional aides in response to the perceived inability of Congress to act on human rights information. I explore the resulting transformation of aid delivery: rather than suspend aid when no “clean” units could be found, US officials convinced their Colombian allies to create new units consisting of vetted …

The Cultural Sociology Of Human Rights, Mark D. Jacobs, Lester R. Kurtz

Lester R. Kurtz

These cases of China, Occupy, and Gandhi suggest the value of the sociology of culture for understanding human rights. Since human rights is a cultural construct, human rights issues are in-flected by the same set of semantic tensions as the culture concept itself. The sociology of culture thus recommends a method for studying human rights: to explicate--indeed, to weave into an exegetical deep structure--those various tensions. This helps to see beneath the distortions that power and other forms of domination introduce into the discourse of human rights, and to recognize the full multiplicity of interests and voices.

Knowledge, Attitudes And Perceptions Of Immigrants From Third Countries In Cyprus, On Hiv/Aids And Sexual And Reproductive Health. The Implication Of Nursing Ethics To Healthcare, Christiana Kouta, Constantinos Phellas, Charis P. Kaite

Charis P. Kaite

Background: Cultural, social policy and legal factors contribute to HIV vulnerability amongst ethnic minorities. Insufficient knowledge on HIV transmission and prevention contributes in engaging in risky sexual behaviours that increase the risk of infection. Aim: The aim of the present study was to explore the knowledge, attitudes and perceptions amongst immigrants, foreign students and foreign workers living in Cyprus on HIV/AIDS. Μethods and Material:. The sample consisted of 600 migrant from third countries from two cities in Cyprus (Nicosia, Limassol). Both men and women were included in the study sample. A closed-ended questionnaire referring to the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour …