Human Rights Law Commons^™

Promising Criminal Justice Practices In Human Trafficking Cases: A County-Level Comparitive Overview (2005-2010) With An Emphasis On Cases Involving Children, Angela Inzano

Center for the Human Rights of Children

The aim of the project is to review and analyze other similarly sized counties as Cook County, with large, metropolitan centers across the country, in order to identify best practice, challenges and efforts that have led to successful case outcomes. This research project identifies and synthesizes cases from 2005-2010 that involved human trafficking and developed at county-level law enforcement agencies and task forces across the United States. Where possible, cases involving minors will be high-lighted, in order to address distinct issues facing children who have been victimized by human trafficking. Best practices in victim identification, case investigation, perpetrator prosecution, and …

Measuring Human Rights: A Review Essay, David L. Richards

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Measuring Human Rights. By Todd Landman & Edzia Carvalho. New York, NY: Routledge, 2010. 163pp.

Brazil’S Upcoming “Mega-Events” Human Rights Legacy, Thomas Pegram

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Preparations for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games are well underway in Brazil, with local government officials in Rio de Janeiro trumpeting the “major success” of initiatives intended to address notoriously high levels of violent crime.

In an attempt to head off widespread concerns, which preceded South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup, the apparent success of initiatives such as the Police Pacification Units (PPUs) cracking down on insecurity in Rio’s shantytowns (many, such as Rocinha, close to popular tourist areas and venues for Olympic events) has been loudly hailed by local politicians and duly reported by …

From Fragmentation To Constitutionalization, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

This short essay, prepared for a panel on “The Impact of a Wider Dissemination of Human Rights Norms: Fragmentation or Unity?,” explores the connection between two popular, but seemingly contradictory discourses in international law: fragmentation and constitutionalization. After disentangling and categorizing the various types of fragmentation international law may be experiencing, the essay focuses in on one form in particular, the “fragmentation of the legal community.” This most radical version of fragmentation, the essay argues, has spurred a number of responses, many of which suggest the beginnings of a constitutional conflicts regime for international law. The essay ends by suggesting …

The Modern Hiv/Aids Epidemic And Human Rights In The United States: A Lens Into Lingering Gender, Race, And Health Disparities And Cutting Edge Approaches To Justice, Brook Kelly

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Private Sectors Pivotal Role In Combating Human Trafficking, Jonathan Todres

Faculty Publications By Year

Human trafficking is big business, with industry estimates running in the billions of dollars annually. Much of that profit accrues to traffickers, illegal profiteers, and organized crime groups. However, the private sector also reaps economic benefits, directly and indirectly, from human trafficking. Despite these economic realities, the dominant approach to combating human trafficking has been to rely almost exclusively on governments and social services organizations to do the job. Little has been asked of the private sector. Two important bills - one adopted by the State of California and the other introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives - might …

Universal Moral Grammar: An Ontological Grounding For Human Rights, Vincent Walsh

Societies Without Borders

In this article I connect the principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights to the issue of global social justice, and ask the question: is there a genetically endowed Universal Moral Grammar common to all human beings comparable to the Universal Grammar for language acquisition demonstrated so convincingly by Noam Chomsky and others?

“Social Science Without Borders: Looking Back, Looking Forward”, David L. Brunsma, Keri E. Iyall Smith, Mark Frezzo

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Refugees And Asylum, James C. Hathaway

Book Chapters

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European governments enacted a series of immigration laws under which international migration was constrained in order to maximise advantage for States. These new, largely selfinterested laws clashed with the enormity of a series of major population displacements within Europe, including the flight of more than a million Russians between 1917 and 1922, and the exodus during the early 1920s of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Turkey. The social crisis brought on by the de facto immigration of so many refugees - present without authorisation in countries where they enjoyed no protection …

Prosecutorial Discretion In Assisted Dying In Canada: A Proposal For Charging Guidelines, Jocelyn Downie, Ben White

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

English Abstract: An Expert Panel of the Royal Society of Canada and a Select Committee of the Québec National Assembly both recently recommended the issuance of permissive guidelines for the exercise of prosecutorial discretion on voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide and “medical aid in dying” respectively. It seems timely, therefore, to propose a set of offence-specific guidelines for how prosecutorial discretion should be exercised in cases of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canadian provinces and territories. We take as our starting point the only existing guidelines of this sort currently in force in the world (i.e. the British Columbia …

The Failures And Possibilities Of A Human Rights Approach To Secure Native American Women’S Reproductive Justice, Barbara Gurr

Societies Without Borders

This article has three purposes: the first is to bring to light current violations of Native American women’s basic right to health as these violations are produced by the federal government and imposed through the Indian Health Service. The second is to articulate the challenges of current human rights discourse in articulating and providing for Native Americans’ human rights within the United States. Third, this article offers a potential strategy for understanding and redressing the violation of Native women’s right to health through the rubric of reproductive justice. Drawing from over ten years of participant observation as well as semi-structured …

Challenges In Localizing Global Human Rights, Ranita Ray, Badana Purkayastha

Societies Without Borders

Drawing from ethnographic and historical data combined with document analysis, this article addresses two issues related to the mechanisms involved in localizing global human rights ideas: 1) the disharmony that may results when global ideas are concretized in the form of domestic laws and come in conflict with the ever shifting local rights consciousness and 2) the role of habitus in determining how human rights advocates respond to changing local rights consciousness. By examining the ways in which violence against women is addressed by a human rights commission in an Indian state, the disjuncture between local appropriations of global human …

‘Woman As…’: Personhood, Rights And The Case Of Domestic Violence, Stacy Missari, Christine Zozula

Societies Without Borders

This article uses the first domestic violence case filed against the United States in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to discuss the politics of gender and domestic violence. We discuss how gender-neutral frameworks of the case in the U.S. ignore the interpersonal gender and power issues which often attend domestic violence cases. The case before the IACHR was arguably more successful in addressing gender by drawing from the human rights literature on women’s rights. However, given that this case is the first human rights charge against the United States by a domestic violence survivor, the specifically gendered framework …

Trafficking Risks For Refugees, Annie Wilson

Societies Without Borders

This article examines a number of risk factors in the life situation of refugees that place them in danger of falling prey to human traffickers. Among the factors discussed are protracted refugee situations, conflict situations and security, precarious economic conditions, the circumstances of women and children, the prevalence of sexual and gender-based discrimination and violence, physical and psychological trauma, and the absence of legal protection. The article examines the unintended consequences of enforcement and border controls in increasing trafficking risks for refugees. Stronger refugee protection is the fundamental building block for reducing trafficking risk. Additionally, mapping, assessment and targeted programs …

Help Create Order; Beggars Opera; Communication, George Snedeker

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Review Of Anarchy As Order: The History And Future Of Civic Humanity By Mohammed Bamyeh, Dana M. Williams

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

“Learning The Truth And Stating The Facts”: Us State Department Claims-Making And The Construction Of “Human Rights”, Nancy A. Matthews

Societies Without Borders

Official US discourse claims US leadership and benevolence in promoting human rights worldwide. But US action on human rights is more complicated and paradoxical. My aim is to problematize “human rights” in particular discursive contexts in order to discover what is encompassed by this set of concepts and how the discourse about human rights exposes the relations of ruling (Smith 1990). I examine the discourse of the powerful, i.e., the US State Department in its Annual Country Reports on Human Rights. The repetition of facts, assertions, and ideas by a hegemonic institution constructs a reality that is difficult to counter. …

Just Places: Creating A Space For Place In Environmental Justice, Damayanti Banergee

Societies Without Borders

This paper explores how discourses on sense of place and cultural heritage inform environmental justice conflicts. I argue that while economic distribution remains the overarching frame within environmental justice scholarship, cultural entitlement concerns are rarely discussed in the literature. I argue that environmental justice scholarship can draw upon place and cultural research to explore how cultural entitlement claims can be incorporated in environmental justice. I draw upon place literature to propose a three-dimensional typology of place. I call these three dimensions – political place, cultural place, and moral place. The proposed typology allows us to examine how discourses of place …

Symposium On The Implications Of The Asa Human Rights Statement For Research, Teaching And Service, Mark Frezzo, Judith Blau, Louis Edgar Esparza, Davita Silfen Glasbert, Bruce K. Friesen

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Review Of Fallgirls: Gender And The Framing Of Torture At Abu Ghraib By Ryan Ashley Caldwell, Amina Zarrugh

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Review Of Inside Al-Qaeda And The Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden And The 9/11 By Saleem Shahzad, Sikandar Tangi

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

A Comparative Analysis Of Mexican-And Europe And European- Origin Immigration To The United States: Proposing An Interactive Colonization Theory, Manuel Barajas

Societies Without Borders

From the 1970s, Latin American immigration, mainly from Mexico, increased rapidly surpassing European migration in the 1980s for the first time in US history and now constituting over half of the total foreign-born population in the United States. In this paper, I compare this newer, Latin American wave of immigration to earlier, European waves and find that though a combination of push-pull and structural perspectives does much to explain the European experience, it fails to explain Mexican-origin migration and nature of incorporation. Therefore, I argue for an interactive colonization approach to understanding the uniqueness of the Mexicanorigin immigration experience.

Indirect Violence And Legitimation: Torture, Surrogacy, And The U.S. War On Terror, Eric Bonds

Societies Without Borders

This paper contributes to the sociological study of legitimation, specifically focusing on the state legitimation of torture and other forms of violence that violate international normative standards. While sociologists have identified important discursive techniques of legitimation, this paper suggests that researchers should also look at state practices where concerns regarding legitimacy are “built in” to the very practice of certain forms of violence. Specifically, the paper focuses on surrogacy, through which powerful states may direct or benefit from the violence carried out by client states or other armed groups while at the same time attempting to appear separate from and …

“American Exceptionalism”—On What End Of The Continuum?, Assem Hasnain, Josh King, Judith Blau

Societies Without Borders

This paper draws from global understandings about Human Rights, recasting them in terms of a sociological conception of the dimensions of a Decent Society. We pose our questions within the framework of American Exceptionalism, because the assumptions that underlie that term have never been empirically examined. Can we conclude on the basis of this analysis that America, when compared with other countries, advances human rights? No. Can we conclude on the basis of this analysis that America, when compared with other countries, is a Decent Society? No. Can we conclude on the basis of this empirical analysis that America, when …

State-Society Incompatibility And Forced Migration: The Violent Development Of Afghanistan Under Socialist, Islamist, And Capitalist Regimes, Jeremy Hein, Tarique Niazi

Societies Without Borders

The state-centric theory of forced migration presents the nation-state as the ultimate sanctuary of citizen rights. It posits that forced migration results from state instability, which is caused by geopolitical or national identity conflict. In either case, it contends that the sources of forced migration are exogenous to the state. This paper argues that under certain conditions the state becomes an endogenous cause of refugees and internally displaced persons. These conditions occur when the state deploys violence to dominate society. Using the case of Afghanistan, we document that since 1973 a series of Socialist, Islamist, and Capitalist regimes have engaged …

Ethnopoetics: A Jamaican Deportee Tells His Story, Tanya Golash-Boza

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Review Of Security And Everyday Life Edited By Vida Bajc And Willem De Lint, Toni Y. Sims-Muhammad

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Review Of Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, And Nicosia By Jon Calame And Esther Charlesworth, Daina Cheyenne Harvey

Societies Without Borders

No abstract provided.

Accomplishments Behind, Barriers Ahead: Doing Sociology Without Borders, Dave Overfelt

Societies Without Borders

The mission of Societies Without Borders (SWB), to bring “scholars from different continents closer together by showing their different approaches of the same research materials”, creates a space for scholarship like none other. In this article I assess several approaches to doing a sociology without borders that have emerged from SWB, explore some of the remaining barriers to doing this sociology, and offer some ideas on how we might break down the borders that still impede our lives and sciences.

The Collaborative Dialogue Panel: Changing The Model Of The Professional Sociology Conference, Kenneth A. Gould

Societies Without Borders

The emergence of Sociologists Without Borders opened up new opportunities for social justice oriented intellectual engagement and collaboration. Given the opportunity to re-imagine the structure and function of professional conferences, a number of us who were focused on issues of environmental justice as a human right came together in 2006 to challenge the traditional model of serial paper presentations at panel sessions. The collaborative dialogue panel brings together sociologists focused on a specific social problem or issue, and asks them to work together to generate questions and answers in a public forum in dialogue with each other and with others …