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Human Rights Violations (human + right_violation)
Selected AbstractsHuman Rights Violations, Corruption, and the Policy of RepressionPOLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 1 2008Alok K. Bohara Quantitative cross-national research on human rights violations and repression has made considerable progress in identifying and eliminating economic and political factors that influence the use of torture and killing by governments. Warfare tends to increase violations, democracy,notably full democracy,and trade tends to inhibit violations. Where motives have been considered, this research has generally assumed a strategic motivation for government use of repression. Repression is employed to counter threats from the opposition as represented by the presence of warfare. Less attention has been given to the effect of implementation on levels of repression. Theory suggests that agents are likely to make a substantial independent contribution to the level of repression, if given the opportunity. In this article we develop this argument and present cross-country comparative evidence that suggests that agents' opportunities for hidden action measured by perceived levels of financial corruption substantially influences the incidence of torture in a political system, after controlling for the strategic motive of governments and the other factors found influential in earlier research. We show that the results are robust and not sensitive to alternative modeling, measurement, and research-design decisions. [source] The Anonymous Matrix: Human Rights Violations by ,Private' Transnational ActorsTHE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 3 2006Article first published online: 27 APR 200, Gunther Teubner Do fundamental rights obligate not only States, but also private transnational actors? Since violations of fundamental rights stem from the totalising tendencies of partial rationalities, there is no longer any point in seeing the horizontal effect as if rights of private actors have to be weighed up against each other. On one side of the human rights relation is no longer a private actor as the fundamental-rights violator, but the anonymous matrix of an autonomised communicative medium. On the other side, the fundamental rights are divided into three dimensions: first, institutional rights protecting the autonomy of social discourses , art, science, religion - against their subjugation by the totalising tendencies of the communicative matrix; secondly, personal rights protecting the autonomy of communication, attributed not to institutions, but to the social artefacts called ,persons'; and thirdly, human rights as negative bounds on societal communication, where the integrity of individuals' body and mind is endangered. [source] Poverty as a human rights violationINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 180 2004Genevičve Koubi Difficult as it is to admit, poverty cannot be defined in law. In the tension between dealing with poverty and focusing on extreme poverty, there is an indeterminacy that makes democracies inattentive to the economic and social dynamics of poverty as inequality. As a result, responses to extreme poverty, especially when they are explicitly targeted or preferential, violate the fundamental equality of rights and dignity that they are supposed, formally, to express. Measures for the underprivileged thus do not offer them a way out from their status, but rather, paradoxically, lead them to qualify their suffering, and to find in favours received the strength to think of themselves as poor without being exposed to the terrors of extreme poverty. In a sense, such people, who depend on minimal welfare granted to them, have no "rights". Should we thus learn to think of poverty as an inevitable and unavoidable phenomenon in a world that claims to work to guarantee human rights, civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights? [source] Of Rights and Rhetoric: Discourses of Degradation and Exploitation in the Context of Sex TraffickingJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2008Vanessa E. Munro International condemnations of people trafficking (particularly of women and girls for prostitution) as a human rights violation have proliferated in recent times. The deployment of human rights in this context has been supported by those who seek to challenge narrow victim hierarchies, but these accounts fail to clearly articulate which particular aspects of the activity violate which particular rights, and how. This article examines the applicability of protections against slavery and inhuman/degrading treatment, arguing that, in the context of the diversity and complexity of contemporary people trafficking, their limitations become apparent. The final part considers the concept of exploitation as an alternative basis for grounding a human rights claim. It cautions that invoking this concept without further elaboration (particularly in relation to the relevance of harm and consent) may be counter-productive, both in terms of theoretical clarity and practical implementation. [source] GENETIC ENHANCEMENT , A THREAT TO HUMAN RIGHTS?BIOETHICS, Issue 1 2008ELIZABETH FENTON ABSTRACT Genetic enhancement is the modification of the human genome for the purpose of improving capacities or ,adding in' desired characteristics. Although this technology is still largely futuristic, debate over the moral issues it raises has been significant. George Annas has recently leveled a new attack against genetic enhancement, drawing on human rights as his primary weapon. I argue that Annas' appeal to human rights ultimately falls flat, and so provides no good reason to object to genetic technology. Moreover, this argument is an example of the broader problem of appealing to human rights as a panacea for ethical problems. Human rights, it is often claimed, are ,trumps': if it can be shown that a proposed technology violates human rights, then it must be cast aside. But human rights are neither a panacea for ethical problems nor a trump card. If they are drafted into the service of an argument, it must be shown that an actual human rights violation will occur. Annas' argument against genetic technology fails to do just this. I shall conclude that his appeal to human rights adds little to the debate over the ethical questions raised by genetic technology. [source] Widowhood practices in West Africa: the silent victimsINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 3 2002Antoinette Sossou, Marie This article discusses the plight and suffering of widows in terms of their social, economic, psychological and human rights violations in three West African societies. The article describes the situation of the widows as silent victims who suffer cruel and dehumanising cultural and ritual practices as a mourning process for their dead spouses. The article also examines the gender inequalities suffered by the widows and makes some recommendations as to how these practices could be minimised or eliminated from those societies. [source] Developing an International System for Internally Displaced PersonsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 2 2006ROBERTA COHEN A pressing new problem came onto the international agenda at the end of the cold war, persons forced from their homes by conflict and human rights violations who remain uprooted and at risk within the borders of their own countries. The international system created after the Second World War to protect and assist refugees, people who flee across borders, did not extend to internally displaced persons (IDPs). Over the past fifteen years, substantial efforts have been made to create an international system to respond to the needs of the world's 20 to 25 million IDPs, but a long way remains to go in resolving issues of sovereignty, legal frameworks, institutional arrangements and strategies to protect people under assault in their own countries. [source] Democracy and Human Rights in the Mexican States: Elections or Social Capital?INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2004Caroline Beer Why does the relationship between a government and its citizens deteriorate to violence? Large-N cross-national quantitative analyses of human rights violations have found an inverse relationship between democracy and violations. These analyses, however, have not been able to address the central finding of an influential subnational analysis of democracy that stresses the importance of a single dimension of democracy, social capital. In this article we combine these two streams of research with fresh data from the Mexican states to investigate how and why democracy inhibits violations. Theoretically, we connect a policy interest in protecting human rights to politicians' office-seeking goals and to the level of social capital. Empirically, our data allow us to disentangle two principal components of democracy, elections and social capital, and include important control variables, notably ethnic diversity, which have been largely left out of the cross-national analyses. Our central finding is that the electoral components rather than social capital produce important consequences for the protection of citizens' human rights. [source] Norm Collision: Explaining the Effects of International Human Rights Pressure on State BehaviorINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2004Sonia Cardenas Scholars have offered several types of explanations regarding how international human rights pressure can shape state behavior. Some of these explanations are rationalist-materialist in orientation, emphasizing realist notions of power or neoinstitutionalist concerns with self-interest. Others have drawn on ideational-constructivist accounts to emphasize the role of norms, identity, and social actors. Additionally, scholars have paid attention to how international and domestic factors, sometimes in interaction, mediate human rights change. This essay surveys this literature, noting a trend toward theoretical synthesis; it also draws on insights from quantitative research and comparative politics to account for persistence in human rights violations and, more specifically, the timing of policy successes and failures. [source] Women's human rights violations: Cameroonian students' perceptionsJOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2009Raul Kassea Abstract Cameroonian university students (N,=,666) assessed whether certain different societal positions that the law grants to women and men (the husband chooses the marital home, the husband wields parental power, a married woman cannot freely engage in trade, the husband administers his wife's personal property) and certain cultural practices (female genital mutilation, parents arranging their children's marriage) were seen as violations of women's human rights. Justifications for the choices were also analysed. Female genital mutilation was most often seen as a violation of women's human rights, and the husband selecting the marital home was least often seen as a violation. These differences were explained by cultural specificities. Women more often than men saw the cases as violations of rights. Respondents coming from the North saw the cases less often as violations of rights than respondents from other geocultural areas, which was in accordance with their previously observed higher collectivism. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Human rights and child healthJOURNAL OF PAEDIATRICS AND CHILD HEALTH, Issue 9 2007Shanti Raman Abstract: Human rights are those basic standards without which people cannot live in dignity. Children are at risk of human rights violations because of their vulnerability in society. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), a United Nations (UN) treaty acknowledges that addressing children's human rights requires special attention. In Australia groups such as children seeking asylum, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children with disabilities, children in care and children living in poverty are identified to be at particular risk. As individuals and collectively, we have had a long history of gathering information, advocacy and tailoring training to improve children's health and well-being. A human rights approach and the use of the CRC provide an additional framework to do this. [source] From Pariah State to Global Protagonist: Argentina and the Struggle for International Human RightsLATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2008Kathryn Sikkink ABSTRACT Democratizing states began in the 1980s to hold individuals, including past heads of state, accountable for human rights violations. The 1984 Argentine truth commission report (Nunca Más) and the 1985 trials of the juntas helped to initiate this trend. Argentina also developed other justice-seeking mechanisms, including the first groups of mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared, the first human rights forensic anthropology team, and the first truth trials. Argentines helped to define the very term forced disappearance and to develop regional and international instruments to end the practice. Argentina thus illustrates the potential for global human rights protagonism and diffusion of ideas from a country outside the wealthy North. This article surveys Argentina's innovations and proposes possible explanations, drawing on theoretical studies from transitional justice, social movements, and norms cascades in international relations. [source] TRUTH TELLING AS REPARATIONSMETAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 4 2010MARGARET URBAN WALKER Abstract: International instruments now defend a "right to the truth" for victims of political repression and violence and include truth telling about human rights violations as a kind of reparation as well as a form of redress. While truth telling about violations is obviously a condition of redress or repair for violations, it may not be clear how truth telling itself is a kind of reparations. By showing that concerted truth telling can satisfy four features of suitable reparations vehicles, I defend the idea that politically implemented modes of truth telling to, for, and by those who are victims of gross violation and injustice may with good reason be counted as a kind of reparations. Understanding the doubly symbolic character of reparations, however, makes clearer why truth telling is unlikely to be sufficient reparation for serious wrongs and is likely to be sensitive to the larger context of reparative activity and its social, political, and historical background. [source] The Dilemma of Double Standards in U.S. Human Rights PolicyPEACE & CHANGE, Issue 4 2003Scott Turner In May 2000 the United States was voted off of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. This reflected the frustration of much of the international community with the United States' increasingly obstructionist approach to international institutionalism. The United States' opposition to the proposed International Criminal Court (ICC) reflects its pursuit of double standards in human rights policy. Double standards are manifest in U.S. support for Israel and Turkey with their records of gross human rights violations. They likewise are discernable in the strategic motives behind the 1999 Kosovo intervention. The proposed ICC challenges the United States' use of human rights rhetoric to pursue unilateral objectives by forging a more neutral means of prosecuting international justice. If the United States is to recover its status as the world's human rights leader, it must renew its commitment to multilateral institutionalism and must avoid double standards that undermine the legitimacy of human rights discourse. [source] Human Rights Violations, Corruption, and the Policy of RepressionPOLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 1 2008Alok K. Bohara Quantitative cross-national research on human rights violations and repression has made considerable progress in identifying and eliminating economic and political factors that influence the use of torture and killing by governments. Warfare tends to increase violations, democracy,notably full democracy,and trade tends to inhibit violations. Where motives have been considered, this research has generally assumed a strategic motivation for government use of repression. Repression is employed to counter threats from the opposition as represented by the presence of warfare. Less attention has been given to the effect of implementation on levels of repression. Theory suggests that agents are likely to make a substantial independent contribution to the level of repression, if given the opportunity. In this article we develop this argument and present cross-country comparative evidence that suggests that agents' opportunities for hidden action measured by perceived levels of financial corruption substantially influences the incidence of torture in a political system, after controlling for the strategic motive of governments and the other factors found influential in earlier research. We show that the results are robust and not sensitive to alternative modeling, measurement, and research-design decisions. [source] Getting Even or Getting Equal?POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2009Retributive Desires, Transitional Justice This article examines the effect that different policy interventions of transitional justice have on the desires of the victims of human rights violations for retribution. The retributive desires assessed in this article are conceptualized as individual, collective, and abstract demands for the imposition of a commensurate degree of suffering upon the offender. We suggest a plausible way of reducing victims' retributive desires. Instead of "getting even" in relation to the suffering, victims and perpetrators may "get equal" in relation to their respective statuses, which were affected by political crimes. The article hypothesizes that the three classes of transitional justice: (1) reparation that empowers victims by financial compensation, truth telling, and social acknowledgment; (2) retribution that inflicts punishment upon perpetrators; and (3) reconciliation that renews civic relationship between victims and perpetrators through personal contact, apology, and forgiveness; each contributes to restoring equality between victims and perpetrators, and in so doing decreases the desires that victims have for retribution. In order to test our hypotheses, we conducted a survey of former political prisoners in the Czech Republic. Results from the regression analysis reveal that financial compensation, social acknowledgement, punishment, and forgiveness are likely to reduce victims' retributive desires. [source] Definition and Accountability: A Youth PerspectiveAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ORTHOPSYCHIATRY, Issue 3 2007Kathryn Whitehead BA This paper reviews the systemic flaws of residential treatment facilities from a youth perspective concerning the lack of transparency, definition and accountability, and the subsequent mistreatment and human rights violations of youth experiencing emotional, behavioral, and cognitive challenges. [source] END-OF-LIFE CARE IN THE 21st CENTURY: ADVANCE DIRECTIVES IN UNIVERSAL RIGHTS DISCOURSEBIOETHICS, Issue 3 2010IREVI, VIOLETA BE ABSTRACT This article explores universal normative bases that could help to shape a workable legal construct that would facilitate a global use of advance directives. Although I believe that advance directives are of universal character, my primary aim in approaching this issue is to remain realistic. I will make three claims. First, I will argue that the principles of autonomy, dignity and informed consent, embodied in the Oviedo Convention and the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, could arguably be regarded as universal bases for the global use of advance directives. Second, I will demonstrate that, despite the apparent consensus of ethical authorities in support of their global use, it is unlikely, for the time being, that such consensus could lead to unqualified legal recognition of advance directives, because of different understandings of the nature of the international rules, meanings of autonomy and dignity which are context-specific and culture-specific, and existing imperfections that make advance directives either unworkable or hardly applicable in practice. The third claim suggests that the fact that the concept of the advance directive is not universally shared does not mean that it should not become so, but never as the only option in managing incompetent patients. A way to proceed is to prioritize work on developing higher standards in managing incompetent patients and on progressing towards the realization of universal human rights in the sphere of bioethics, by advocating a universal, legally binding international convention that would outlaw human rights violations in end-of-life decision-making. [source] | ||||||||||||||||