Human Rights

Now, for the first time, there is a single reference work that documents the history of human rights worldwide, clearly explains each article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and examines the major human rights issues facing the world today. Comprehensive in scope, Human Rights covers a broad range of human rights issues that are central to an understanding of world history and current affairs.

International efforts to construct a set of standardised human rights guidelines are based upon the identification of agreed key values regarding the relationships between individuals and the institutions governing them, which are viewed as critical to the well-being of humanity and the character of being human. This publication considers these issues of justice at the national, regional, and international levels by analysing civil, political, economic and social rights aspects.

"Human rights" as we know them did not exist (as a cultural and political force) before 1945. Author Jack Donnelly traces the rise of human rights issues coming out of World War II and shows their transformation in the intervening years, including the post-Cold War agendas that have emerged since 1989. Includes figures, tables, documents, suggested readings, photos, and more.

How do international human rights and humanitarian law protect vulnerable individuals during peace and war? Provost analyzes systemic similarities and differences between the two to examine how they are each designed to achieve their specific goals. He describes the dynamics of human rights and humanitarian law, revealing that each performs a task for which it is better suited than the other, and that the fundamentals of each field remain partly incompatible. He covers all relevant materials from the UN, ICTY, ICTR, and regional organizations in Europe, Africa and Latin America.

A small group founded Amnesty International in 1961 to translate human rights principles into action. "Diplomacy of Conscience provides a rich account of how the organization pioneered a combination of popular pressure and expert knowledge to advance global human rights. To an extent unmatched by predecessors and copied by successors, Amnesty International has employed worldwide publicity campaigns based on fact-finding and moral pressure to urge governments to improve human rights practices. Less well known is Amnesty International's significant impact on international law. It has helped forge the international community's repertoire of official responses to the most severe human rights violations, supplementing moral concern with expertise and conceptual vision.

"Diplomacy of Conscience traces Amnesty International's efforts to strengthen both popular human rights awareness and international law against torture, disappearances, and political killings. Drawing on primary interviews and archival research, Ann Marie Clark posits that Amnesty International's strenuously cultivated objectivity gave the group political independence and

This is a comprehensive study and reference book on equality and education. It addresses the issues of human rights and their relationship to education. Race, disability, gender, sexuality and social class are all covered.

Flood assesses the role of the United Nations in implementing international human rights standards, with a special focus on Charter-based institutions. After setting the historical, theoretical, and legal contexts, Flood examines in depth the two main types of Charter-based institutions through case studies of the thematic mechanisms on disappearances and religious discrimination and the country-specific mechanisms used with Chile and Iran.

Inspired by a 1988 trip to El Salvador, Michael J. Perry's new book is a personal and scholarly exploration of the idea of human rights. Perry is one of our nation's leading authorities on the relation of morality, including religious morality, to politics and law. He seeks, in this book, to disentangle the complex idea of human rights by way of four probing and interrelated essays. * The initial essay, which is animated by Perry's skepticism about the capacity of any secular morality to offer a coherent account of the idea of human rights, suggests that the first part of the idea of human rights--the premise that every human being is "sacred" or "inviolable"--is inescapably religious. * Responding to recent criticism of "rights talk", Perry explicates, in his second essay, the meaning and value of talk about human rights. * In his third essay, Perry asks a fundamental question about human rights: Are they universal? In addressing this question, he disaggregates and criticizes several different varieties of "moral relativism" and then considers the implications of these different relativist positions for claims about human rights. * Perry turns to another fundamental question about human rights in his final essay: Are they absolute? He concludes that even if no human rights, understood as moral rights, are absolute or unconditional, some human rights, understood as international legal rights, are--and indeed, should be--absolute. In the introduction, Perry writes: "Of all the influential--indeed, formative--moral ideas to take center stage in the twentieth century, like democracy and socialism, the idea of human rights (which, again, in one form or another, is an old idea) is, for many, the most difficult. It is the most difficult in the sense that it is, for many, the hardest of the great moral ideas to integrate, the hardest to square, with the reigning intellectual assumptions of the age, especially what Bernard Williams has called 'Nietzsche's thought': 'There is not only no God, but no metaphysical order of any kind....' For those who accept 'Nietzsche's thought', can the idea of human rights possibly be more than a kind of aesthetic preference? In a culture in which it was widely believed that there is no God or metaphysical order of any kind, on what basis, if any, could the idea of human rights long survive?" The Idea of Human Rights: Four Inquiries will appeal to students of many disciplines, including (but not limited to) law, philosophy, religion, and politics.

The first comprehensive statistical analysis of human rights attainments and improvements over time, this book seeks to answer the question, "Why do some countries better observe human rights than others, and what can be done to advance the cause of human rights around the world?" Haas's data support his argument that economic sanctions against countries that violate human rights are likely to be counterproductive. When information flows more freely and economies are more pluralistic, competing political parties emerge, and basic human rights are increasingly respected. When liberal democracies have sufficient prosperity to adopt welfare state policies, women's rights are most likely to advance.

"Professor Forsythe's attention to relations between peace and human rights opens new areas for analysis and synthesizes important information. This book confirms, once again, his eminent position as a scholar of human rights."-Claude E. Welch, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor, SUNY, Buffalo.As our world becomes a truly global village through instantaneous media transmission of events, the relationship between human rights and peaceful international relations receives more and more attention. David P. Forsythe's book analyzes and discusses the dimensions of cover and overt human rights violations and how they militate against the establishment of democracies in the Third World.Human Rights and Peace evaluates critically the argument that human rights in general and democracy in particular contribute to peaceful international relations.David P. Forsythe is a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His publications include The Internationalization of Human Rights, The Politics of International Law, Human Rights and World Politics, and U. S. Foreign Policy.