Dusk or Dawn for the Human Rights Movement?

The urgency of the study is stipulated by the necessity to cover the process of project preparation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which will allow a comprehensive study of the nature of human rights, to understand their universal nature. The choice of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an object of the study is determined by the special nature of this international soft law act. It is emphasized that the process of adopting this international act remains somewhat unclear among lawyers. The preparation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is hardly covered in the legal literature, which does not contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the Western human rights concept and relativism in the interpretation of human rights as a phenomenon within various legal cultures. Some aspects of project preparation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are described. The activities of the Human Rights Commission, which consisted of 18 members representing various political, cultural and religious groups, are noted. It is emphesized that starting with Art.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the words “All people are born free and equal…”, the developers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reproduced the idea of the universality of human rights, their global nature, that is not limited to a state or even a region. It is summed up that representatives of various groups of the population were involved in the work on the text of the document, creating an international act that was to consolidate human rights, to embody the ideas of equality of human rights, and their universal character. However, while adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not all states voted in its favor. Eight states have refrained from supporting it which is stipulated by a number of religious and political factors. At the same time, different interpretations of human rights by various states do not deny their universal nature. Covering the issue of human rights, it is advisable to disclose the process of preparation and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which will allow systematically and clearly understand the nature of human rights, differences in the activities of various states concerning human rights ensuring.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities: What Is at Stake for Physiatrists and the Patients We Serve

Religion and Global Affairs: Repression and Response Stephen Rickard (bio) The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented a fundamental challenge to the suppression of religious and other freedoms by sovereign states, but its application was frustrated during the Cold War. Today, the problem of religious persecution remains extremely widespread and serious, but a growing opposition to it has strengthened the human rights movement. This trend has been offset by, among other things, corporate opposition to strong human rights action, resulting in a continuing struggle to hold abusive governments responsible. On May 23, 1618, Bohemian Protestants seized two of the Holy Roman Emperor’s representatives and defenestrated them. That is, they pitched them out of a window in Prague’s Hradcany Castle. They landed, I seem to recall, safely, if unceremoniously, in a dung pile. This might be little more than an interesting anecdote for Czech tourist guides to recount if it had not precipitated the Thirty Years’ War - until our own century, something of a benchmark for savagery. Of course, “the Great Defenestration” no more caused the Thirty Years’ War than the Boston Tea Party “caused” the Revolutionary War. It arose out of the Protestant Reformation and the reaction to it, and was perpetuated by the territorial ambitions of various temporal and spiritual leaders. It was brought to a finish in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia, which guaranteed the sovereignty and independence of each state in the Holy Roman Empire and came to be seen as the birth of the modern European nation state. The Treaty of Westphalia closed the door on the legitimacy of invasions to suppress or defend religious groups abroad. No more Hapsburg invasions to suppress the Evangelical Union. No more Swedes coming to the aid of their fellow Lutherans in Germany. Roughly two centuries later Napoleon could mockingly ask, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” That had not always been a [End Page 52] rhetorical question. The Treaty of Westphalia is alive and well. However, if it had the positive effect of discouraging religious suppression from external sources, it paradoxically reinforced the notion that whatever a sovereign did within his or her own borders was of no one else’s concern. The Holy Roman Emperor was stripped of his “right” to suppress Protestants. But, as Cardinal Richlieu might have said on behalf of the nation states: that is our job if we think it is required. What has this got to do with the role of religion in the world today? Plenty. It goes to the heart of a complex set of issues that are still unresolved: religious freedom, the power of the state, and the role of the international community when religious adherents are repressed. As in the 17th century, new or growing religious movements often terrify temporal authorities and status quo religious leaders, leading to repression and resistance. The international community is still struggling for an appropriate response. In the meantime, however, the increasing awareness of religious persecution in the world is bringing new vitality to the human rights movement and growing opposition to the trend toward “see no evil” foreign policy that emphasizes commercial opportunities. It took 300 years, Hitler, and the Holocaust to bring about the most important and sustained challenge to the spirit of Westphalia and the ability of sovereign states to carry out gross persecution within their borders. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted without dissent by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, was a fundamental challenge to the doctrine of unfettered sovereign power. Among other things, it states that: Every one has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. (Article 18) But, what if state authorities deny, or even ruthlessly suppress these rights? As important as the Declaration was and is, neither it nor the Charter of the United Nations resolved the problem of effectively confronting a sovereign willing to flagrantly disregard these rights. [End Page 53] Moreover, the application of the Universal Declaration...

This chapter reviews the cultural traditions on which contemporary human rights work relies, with a special focus on three defining documents. Two of these—the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the U.S. Bill of Rights—date from the age of democratic revolutions. These documents, along with thinkers such as Locke and Voltaire, helped construct the tradition of human rights. The third document is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations shortly after World War II. The UDHR has become the sacred text of the contemporary human rights movement. The discussion of these documents is intended as a sketch of the most important elements of the historical deposit contemporary human rights work draws upon, not an intellectual history of this tradition. The second half of the chapter takes a quick look at the organizational structure and history of Amnesty International and then examines Amnesty's appropriation of the human rights tradition, focusing on the rules it has adopted to govern its work and how it defines its organizational "mandate."

South Africa’s democracy turned 30 years old in 2024. At the same time, its constitutional order and jurisprudence marked three decades since the Interim Constitution and its successor, the 1996 Constitution, came into operation. Coincidentally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) turned 75 years old in the previous year, 2023. The confluence of these facts is quite poignant in the context of a constitutional text that is often lauded for its commitment to the protection of human rights and the eradication of the injustices of the past, which were firmly entrenched by the segregationist policies of the apartheid regime. At the centre of this hype about South African constitutional jurisprudence is the centrality of international law to the interpretation of the Bill of Rights as well as the development of the common law, customary law, and statutory law. With the UDHR being such a central pillar in the human rights sector, this study set out to determine the extent to which the Constitutional Court of South Africa relied on the UDHR and other international instruments in carrying out the mandate set out above. The study analysed cases delivered by the Court in two separate years, spaced ten years apart. The study did not necessarily attempt to determine a correlation, but simply to use descriptive statistics to determine how often, in those two years, the Court relied on international law in general, and on the UDHR in particular, in its interpretive and legal development mandate.

Interrogational Torture as a Human Rights Issue: A Brief Further Reflection on the Morality of Human Rights

Human Rights and Reform: Changing the Face of North African Politics, by Susan E. Waltz. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. xiv + 237 pages. Notes to p. 269. Index to p. 281. $45 cloth; $16 paper. Reviewed by Maryam Elahi The human rights movement in the Maghrib has had significant impact in influencing public debate and bringing discussions on democratization and political reform to the forefront of Maghribi political society. With this book, Susan Waltz has succeeded in examining the role played by the Maghribi human rights movement in integrating the notion of civil and political rights in modem Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan political culture. I highly recommend Human Rights and Reform to anyone interested in North African contemporary history and politics. It examines the struggle of human rights activists and the cultural and political impediments that challenge them. This book discusses the development of modern state structures in Maghribi societies. One cannot get a sense of contemporary North African politics without understanding the role of the human rights movement-of whom it consists, what it strives for, and its undeniable influence over the substance of political discourse in the region. The author also discusses the impact that the international community has had in influencing the public debates and political measures, in some cases merely cosmetic, on human rights. In addition, these external forces, be they human rights organizations or the US Congress, have bestowed credibility and thereby protection to the domestic human rights organizations. Unlike other regions in the world where the human rights activists come from labor, indigenous movements, or political parties, the movement in the Maghrib was dominated initially by professionals: academics, doctors, and lawyers. Thus, being part of the professional elite, they had easier access to the political apparatus and developed a somewhat confusing rapport with the government, which at times they respectfully challenged and at other times they threatened. The birth of human rights organizations in each of the three countries has its own specific stories. In Tunisia, the Tunisian League for Human Rights was formally recognized by the government in 1977. Its original leadership chose individuals who had a reputation for being politically independent to head the organization and its executive committee. The League immediately proved itself to be a serious human rights group by organizing a commission of inquiry to look into detainees' situations and by sending observers to attend political trials. …

Amidst bleak prognostications about the future, the human rights movement offers a beacon of hope for securing a livable world. The movement’s universality, supranationalism, and expanding emancipatory potential serve as inspiration and guide for the larger project of global transformation. The sweeping vision embodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has experienced constant renewal and steadfast legitimacy in the tumultuous postwar world. It has been a foundation for the pursuit of supranational governance and an antidote to the notion that the ends justify the means. The human rights movement, despite its imperfections, has a key role to play in the transformational change in human values crucial to building a just, flourishing future.

The Quest for Information Privacy in Africa: A Review Essay

Reviewed by: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Commentary Johannes Morsink The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Commentary, Asbjørn Eide, Gudmundur Alfredsson, Goran Melander, Lars Adam Rehof and Allan Rosas, eds. with collaboration of Theresa Swinehart, Scandinavian University Press and Oxford University Press. This volume is a collection of thirty-one essays by almost as many different authors, roughly one for each of the thirty-one articles of the Declaration. All the contributors are from Scandinavia and all are involved in human rights work in their own countries either as law professors, members of research institutes, advisors to their governments or they work on the European and United Nations level of the movement. The editors asked their contributors to include at least three things in their commentaries: (1) to bring in the historical background of “their” article and describe the contexts in which the right might previously have been promulgated; (2) to discuss the drafting history of the article within the UN hierarchy, commonly referred as the travaux preparatoires; and (3) to relate subsequent normative developments having to do with standard setting and implementation activities that have grown out of the Declaration. As is to be expected, different commentators had different strengths in each of these three areas and their commentaries reflect this fact. Similarly, this reviewer’s expertise in just one of these areas (the drafting history) has shaped this review. The uniqueness of this commentary lies in the fact that it is the first book in English that seeks to bring together these three aspects of the Declaration which are often treated separately in the human rights literature. Robinson 1 and Verdoodt 2 have mostly reported on how the various articles of the Declaration moved through the drafting stages within the United Nations and on which delegates said what, and when. In the second half of his 1976 study, Philippe De La Chapelle 3 gave the same kinds of summaries of the minutes as did Robinson and Verdoodt, except that in the first half of his study he focused on Western intellectual history, often through Catholic pieces, but with plenty of information for anyone interested in the intellectual roots of the Declaration. A much narrower focus can be found in a 1966 Muslim commentary on the Declaration. 4 All four of these books are commentaries on the text of the Declaration, with the De La Chapelle giving us the most by way of historical precedents. [End Page 398] However, to really understand the Declaration, the reader needs to go to books or essays in international law that treat the subject of the particular right or rights in question. No one volume for this sort of thing exists. The editors sought to fill this gap, but unfortunately their contributors on the whole ignored this part of their assignment and De La Chappelle’s pioneering work is nowhere mentioned or used, let alone improved upon. However, the reader will find helpful historical comments on the abolition of slavery (Article 3) and on the development of the right to work (Article 23). We can evaluate the contributors’ acquittal of their second task in terms of how deeply each of them researched the UN archives. From conception to proclamation the Declaration passed through at least eight stages within the UN hierarchy. The commentators on Articles 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, and 27 made almost no reference to any aspects of the drafting history of their article. Others relied on Robinson and Verdoodt to give the reader a sense of why and how the article was written. Verdoodt’s book, for instance, is the main source for the comments on the drafting history of articles 8, 10, 16 (Robinson too), 23, 24, and 29. Because Verdoodt was an accurate commentator and because his study was done in French and is out of print now, the present volume serves the useful function of making Verdoodt’s results available again and in English. The drawback is that we do not gain in depth of understanding and in at least one instance are set on a wrong path. After correctly reporting on what Verdoodt said on the drafting history of Article 29 (which...

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted on December 10, 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations is the major reference document for international human rights. The UDHR and the subsequent International Covenants on Human Rights of 1966 (on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and on Civil and Political Rights) represent the International Bill of Human Rights. In these documents, two generations or dimensions of human rights have been distinguished. The first dimension consists of civil and political human rights, for example the prohibition of discrimination, the right to life, the prohibition of torture or inhuman treatment, the right to freedom of thought, of opinion and expression, the right to seek asylum. The second dimension is made up of economic, social, and cultural human rights, for example the right to work, protection against unemployment, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to remuneration ensuring an existence worthy of human dignity, the right to a standard of living adequate for one's health and well‐being, including food, housing, and medical care, and the right to education. In addition, a third generation of human rights has been discussed in the United Nations but not yet adopted. It includes mainly the right of peoples to peace, the right to development, and the right to a healthy environment.

In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) declared a wide range of human rights including economic, social and cultural rights as a ‘common standard of achievement’ for all peoples and all nations. At an international level, these rights were reinforced by a legally binding international treaty, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966, and more recently by the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR as adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 2008, and opened for signature on 24 September 2009. Despite these positive developments, six decades after the UDHR, there are still questions regarding the status of economic, social and cultural rights as human rights in international law. In particular, four key questions regarding these rights, are addressed in this article: (1) what are the real human rights obligations of states parties to the ICESCR? (2) Are such obligations territorially limited or is there scope for extra-territorial obligations? (3) Are states permitted to derogate from (some) economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights during emergencies despite the fact that the ICESCR does not contain a derogation clause either permitting or prohibiting derogations? (4) Was it really necessary to adopt in 2008 an Optional Protocol to the ICESCR to provide for the competence of the committee monitoring the obligations of states parties under the ICESCR, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to receive and consider communications alleging violations of any of the rights protected by the ICESCR? And should states parties to the ICESCR sign and ratify this Optional Protocol without delay?

The treatment of irregular migrants in Malta is problematic from a human rights perspective, for it contravenes the principle of universalism that is intrinsic to human rights philosophy. Malta is unusual among states in that it imposes mandatory detention on such migrants, including asylum seekers. Based on a reading of foundational documents of the modern human rights movement, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the article argues that the principle of human dignity underlies the concept of human rights, but that the bypassing of this principle enables the Maltese government to continue its detention policies while claiming to uphold human rights. It is an approach contested by NGOs in this area, which point to the dehumanising effects of detention on migrants. It is not just the appalling conditions in which migrants are held that renders their lives miserable, but the dehumanisation produced by detention itself.

The cornerstone of contemporary human rights law is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948. The Universal Declaration was complemented, some eighteen years later, by three international treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. A Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Aiming at the Abolition of the Death Penalty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1989, and came into force on 11 July 1991. Collectively, the five instruments comprise what is termed the ‘International Bill of Rights’. Although the Universal Declaration is not a binding treaty, it has played a seminal role not only in the United Nations system but also in the regional systems for the protection of human rights. The Universal Declaration is often cited, at least in part, as a statement or codification of customary international law, or as an authoritative interpretation of the human rights clauses in the Charter of the United Nations. According to the International Court of Justice, ‘General Assembly resolutions, even if they are not binding, may sometimes have normative value. They can, in certain circumstances, provide evidence important for establishing the existence of a rule or the emergence of an opinio juris .

Acknowledgments Introduction: Visions and Visionaries 1. My Brother's and Sister's Keeper: Visions and the Origins of Human Rights Religious Visions Philosophical Visions Traditional Practices and Ideas of a Very Different Sort Visions-and Reality 2. To Protect Humanity and Defend Justice: Early International Efforts To Free the Enslaved To Assist the Exploited To Care for the Wounded To Protect the Persecuted 3. Entering the Twentieth Century: Visions, War, Revolutions, and Peacemaking Modernization, Internationalization, and Visions of Rights War, Revolutions, and Rights Peacemaking and Human Rights The Covenant: Rights Proclaimed and Rights Rejected 4. Opportunities and Challenges: Visions and Rights Between the Wars A Flourishing of Visions Opportunities for New Departures Persistent Problems and Challenges The Gathering Storm 5. A People's War: The Crusade of World War II War, Genocide, and Self-Reflections Crusaders, Visions, and Proposals Human Rights Versus National Sovereignty in Postwar Planning Opposition from the Great Powers 6. A People's Peace: Peace and a Charter with Human Rights Insisting on a Peace with Rights Politics and Diplomacy at the San Francisco Conference The Charter of the United Nations Differing Reactions and Assessments 7. Proclaiming a Vision: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Revolution Begins Challenging Questions of Philosophy Difficult Problems of Politics The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 8. Transforming Visions into Reality: The First Fifty Years of the Universal Declaration Extending Rights and Setting Standards Protecting Rights Through Implementation Promoting Rights Expanding Activities and Enhancing Rights 9. The Continuing Evolution International Law, the Responsibility to Protect, and Challenges to Sovereignty Globalization, Development, Terrorism-and Torture New Human Rights Institutions and Organizations Technology and Political Will 10. Toward the Future The Nature and Power of Visions People of Vision and Action Forces and Events of Consequence Process, Politics, and Perspective The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Notes Selected Bibliography Index About the Author