Law Commons^™

Developing A Practice In Remote Sensing For Next-Generation Human Rights Researchers, Theresa Harris, Jonathan Drake, Umesh K. Haritashya, Wumi Asubiaro Dada, Fredy Cumes

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Remote sensing is increasingly recognized as an important tool for documenting human rights abuses. When used alongside interviews, case studies, surveys, forensic science, and other well-established research methods in human rights and humanitarian practice, remotely sensed data can effectively geolocate and establish chronologies for mass graves, forced displacement, destruction of cultural heritage sites, and other violations. But as a highly technical field of science that relies on ever-changing technologies, remote sensing and geospatial analysis are not readily accessible for human rights and humanitarian practitioners. The community of practice grew out of innovative work by practitioners at NGOs and specialized inter-governmental …

Migration And Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, And Survival In The Americas, Miranda Cady Hallett, Joseph Nevins, Jamie Longazel, Amelia Frank-Vitale, Alicia Yvonne Estrada, Abby C. Wheatley

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

This panel presents research from the new edited volume Migration and Mortality (edited by Longazel and Hallett, Temple University Press, 2021). Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of …

Contesting Human Rights Defenders At The Un Human Rights Council, M. Joel Voss

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Human rights defenders are being increasingly targeted across the globe. The rise of nationalist, populist regimes is of great concern to both human rights defenders and those that advocate for the rights of defenders. The problem is not only of domestic concern. The UN Human Rights Council, the UN’s preeminent human rights institution, is also seeing an increasing number of attacks on defenders, both in formal settings like discussions on resolutions and the Universal Periodic Review process and informally, through threats to participants at the Council.

This paper attempts to better understand and predict which states will both try to …

Homophobia, Human Rights And Diplomacy, Douglas Janoff

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Multilateral human rights diplomacy is a product of the triad relationship between intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), and states. This paper examines the emergence of LGBT rights within the context of the UN human rights system. Recently, the global debates around LGBT rights have become much more public and increasingly complex: Ministers, leaders, and even the UN Secretary-General routinely call on states to do more to protect sexual minorities. Countries such as Uganda and Russia are labeled “homophobic” — not just by human rights activists, but by other states. These “accusations” are delivered both bilaterally and in multilateral …

Gender, Displacement And Transitional Justice, Sinead Mcgrath

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In the past fifteen years, there has been huge emphasis on the need for gendered mechanisms dealing with both forced migration and peacebuilding. The UN landmark resolution on Women, Peace and Security (S/RES/1325) and the gender-mainstreaming of the 1951 Refugee Convention have urged all actors to increase the participation of women in peacebuilding and their protection in instances of displacement. An underdeveloped link between these issues has not been addressed by the academic community, particularly when looking at societies in transition and the relationship of displaced women to international migration organisations in the context of transitional justice. This study aims …

Agency, Equality And Courage: A Case Study Of Women On The Front Lines Of Egypt’S 2011 Revolution, Carol Gray

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

How were women involved in Egypt’s 2011 revolution/uprising? What role did they play vis-à-vis male activists? To what degree were Egyptian women “equal” during those 18 days in Tahrir Square? These questions will be explored within the context of interviews conducted by this writer in Cairo during and following Egypt’s 18-day revolution (uprising). This essay will explore the public/private sphere split, political consciousness-raising, and gender equality within the context of the stories of Egyptian women on the front lines of protest.

Much of the recent literature on women's protests in Egypt has focused on women's victimization. Critical gender theorist Ann …

The Business Of Being Good: How It Pays To Be A Humanitarian State, Taylor Benjamin-Britton, Danielle Scherer

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

In an era where human rights increasingly take a position of primacy in international relations, certain states have donned the mantle of the humanitarian, prioritizing human rights over nearly every other item on the foreign policy agenda and mainstreaming humanitarianism in other areas of foreign policy.

Existing arguments find that states that advance humanitarian policies are coerced, socialized, or mimicking, but they fail to seriously consider that states may choose and benefit from humanitarianism in several ways. We do not focus on explaining or theorizing why states have chosen to engage in humanitarianism; rather, we offer an analysis of the …