Governments use human rights both as a tool and as an objective of foreign policy. "The Role of Human Rights in Foreign Policy" analyzes conflicting policy goals such as peace and security, economic relations and development cooperation. The use of diplomatic, economic and military means is discussed, together with the role of state actors, intergovernmental organizations and non-state actors.

Reports of sexual violence in armed conflict frequently appear in political discussions and news media, presenting a stark contrast to a long history of silence and nonrecognition. Conflict-related sexual violence has transitioned rapidly from a neglected human rights issue to an unambiguous security concern on the agendas of powerful states and the United Nations Security Council. Through interviews and primary-source evidence, Kerry F. Crawford investigates the reasons for this dramatic change and the implications of the securitization of sexual violence. Views about wartime sexual violence began changing in the 1990s as a result of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and then accelerated in the 2000s. Three case studies-the United States' response to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1820 in 2008, and the development of the United Kingdom's Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative-illustrate that use of the weapon of war frame does not represent pure co-optation by the security sector. Rather, well-placed advocates have used this frame to advance the antisexual violence agenda while simultaneously working to move beyond the frame's constraints. This book is a groundbreaking account of the transformation of international efforts to end wartime sexual violence.

In entries such as Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement, Booker T. Washington and Black Self-Help, and Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women, this dictionary provides in-depth examination of major American reformers and the movements they defined. With coverage extending from the early republic to today, the book considers abolitionism, women's rights, temperance, the social gospel, birth control, pacifism, civil rights, environmentalism, consumerism, and other controversial movements. Each entry combines biography with historical analysis to show the historical context and character of the movement and person. Individually, the entries provide modern, interpretive treatments of their subjects. Collectively, they reveal the direction and dynamics of American reform over two centuries. Emphasizing social reform over civic reform, the book gives special attention to reformers and reforms that have significantly altered the social order. Written by prominent scholars, the entries show the importance of personality and historical context in reform movements and the relationship between particular reforms and the temperament of an age. With full-bodied biographies of the reformers and their movements, a time-line on American reform, up-to-date interpretations and bibliographies, and a wide range of subjects, this book provides the most comprehensive and cogent view of American reform and reformers anywhere. It also provides the fullest treatment to date of post-World War II reform activity and personalities.

This compilation of interdisciplinary and community voices addresses issues of globalization, democracy, human rights, and how universities can act to promote steps towards greater social justice. As a relational concept, definitions of social justice reflect beliefs, values and priorities - which are neither consensually shared in modern societies, nor among social scientists who study it.

Converging revolutionary changes in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and in southern Africa radically transformed the international political environment in which Third World countries had formulated and implemented their policies toward South Africa. These changes also focused attention on the need for democratic reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the Third World. By removing apartheid's legal underpinning, the South African government made a major and largely unanticipated step toward creating a relatively egalitarian and nonracial society. Dismantling the more intractable social and economic components of a legal system of racial domination, into which South Africans have been socialized, is clearly a more herculean endeavor. Payne analyzes Third World relations with South Africa: the common and divergent interests among the countries that opposed apartheid, conflict and cooperation between the Third World and South Africa, and the implications of changes in South Africa for the Third World in general and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular. He brings into sharper focus contradictions between the declaratory policies against apartheid expressed by Third World states and their actual practices. Payne examines how national interests, leaders' personalities, policymaking processes, and problems within specific countries influence Third World foreign policies in general and toward South Africa specifically. As such, the work will be invaluable to students and scholars involved with African studies, Third World politics, and international relations.

The book assesses the adoption of counterterrorism measures in the Netherlands and the United States, which facilitate criminal investigations with a preventive focus (anticipative criminal investigations), from the perspective of rule of law principles. Anticipative criminal investigation has emerged in the legal systems of the Netherlands and the United States as a consequence of counterterrorism approaches where the objective of realizing terrorism prevention is combined with the objective to eventually prosecute and punish terrorists. This book has addressed this new preventive function of criminal justice and identified the rule of law principles limiting the role of criminal investigation in terrorism prevention. The possibilities and limits of criminal investigation in general and of cooperation and the division of responsibilities between law enforcement and intelligence have been addressed in a manner transcending differences between national legal systems. Valuable for academics and practitioners interested in criminal investigation, rule of law and counterterrorism.

The concept of positive obligations is familiar to various legal systems which seek to protect fundamental rights. This concept means that states are required to take active measures to protect fundamental rights, such as, for example, adopting a general legal framework to regulate same-sex relationships in order to ensure protection of the right to private life. In Europe, positive obligations have, in particular, been developed in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from the 1970s onwards. The ECtHR has explained that positive obligations are necessary to ensure that fundamental rights are of practical value and effective for everyone.The ECtHR is not the only supranational court in Europe that protects fundamental rights. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) also protects fundamental rights within the scope of EU law. So far, no concept of positive obligations has been developed by this Court, and the question has been asked whether such a development can indeed occur under EU law. After all, the EU is a rather special international organisation which has specific, mainly economic, interests to protect. It is also unclear whether the EU has competence to undertake regulatory action to actively protect fundamental rights. Based on the insights obtained from the development of positive obligations by the ECtHR, this volume analyses whether and how positive obligations could be incorporated into EU law. The relevant provisions laid down in the EU Treaties and the EU Charter, the case-law of the ECJ and the specificities of the EU system are studied to find out where there is scope for recognition of the concept of positive obligations under EU law, and what limitations would apply to this.

Individual demands for equality and civil rights are central themes in U.S. history and American Indian people are no exception. They have had to deal with white racism and its expression in local and national political institutions while trying to define the rights of individual Indians vis-á-vis their own tribal governments. The struggle has made their civil rights movement unique. This encyclopedia, designed to meet the curriculum needs of high school and college students, provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of American Indian civil rights issues. More than 600 entries cover a variety of perspectives, issues, individuals, incidents, and court cases central to an understanding of the history of civil rights among American Indian peoples. The issue is a complicated one, expanding over a period of more than a century. The history of American Indian civil rights can be traced not only in the courts and the federal legislation, but on the battlefield where a number of civil rights protests have been fought. This encyclopedia clarifies the complicated history of individual rights, water rights, land rights, and other issues in American Indian civil rights. It is thoroughly cross-referenced for ease of use in tracing any particular issue or incident. Each entry is followed by a list of works for further reading on the topic. An appendix of entries on landmark court cases is organized by issue. A selection of photos complements the text. This work is a one-stop source for up-to-date information on all aspects of American Indian civil rights and is essential for high school, public, and university libraries.

In the past two decades, '"civil society" has become a central organizing concept in the social sciences. Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations. Interest in the topic exploded with the decline of statism in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of our current debates about politics and social policy are informed by the renewed focus on civil society. Michael Edwards, author of the most authoritative single-authored book on civil society, serves as the editor for The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society. Broadly speaking, the book views the topic through three prisms: as a part of society (voluntary associations), as a kind of society (marked out by certain social norms), and as a space for citizen action and engagement (the public square or sphere). It does not focus solely on the West (a failing of much of the literature to date), but looks at civil society in both the developed and developing worlds. Throughout, it merges theory, practice, and empirical research. In sum, The Oxford Handbook on Civil Society will be the definitive work on the topic.

This booklet contains the texts of the Theo van Boven Lectures held in 2014 and 2015. They deal with the subject of defending human dignity by looking at the different roles the human rights defender, the scholar and the human rights NGO can play in achieving this goal. Hina Jilani looks at the opportunities and limitations of human rights defenders in their fight to stand up for the protection of human dignity. Jean Allain discusses the role of the legal scholar in studying contemporary forms of slavery. Finally Aidan McQuade denounces practices of slavery from the perspective of a human rights NGO. The Theo van Boven Lecture Series are organised annually by the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights as a tribute to Theo van Boven, emeritus Professor of International Law at Maastricht University, and formerly Director of the UN Division of Human Rights, member of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. The themes covered by the lectures reflect the wide range of interests of Theo van Boven. This publication is interesting for human rights practitioners, scholars and students.

The history of deliverance politics in Anglo-American history contains remarkable moments of achievement, but this is not a story of triumphal progress. Exodus was hotly contested, used by the powerful as well as the weak, and mobilized to support a host of rival causes. By writing themselves into the Protestant history of liberty, African Americans undercut complacent narratives of progress, injecting a powerful sense of unease into the tradition. The argument over who owns the biblical narrative has continued into the twenty-first century. If Barack Obama saw himself as an inheritor of Exodus politics, so too did George W. Bush. Many Christians - and many non-Christians too - remain understandably suspicious of those who read Israel's history as political paradigm, especially when it underpins religious nationalism. This story is riddled with moral ironies. The Books of Moses could be used to justify anti-black racism and the dispossession of Native peoples as well as freedom from slavery. In the name of liberation, Protestants have justified war, revolt, and imperialism. High-minded missions have often had dismal consequences. In excavating the history of deliverance politics, Coffey relies on sources buried in many generic strata. As a study of political rhetoric, the core materials are sermons and speeches, the published versions of oral performances. Deliverance discourse found its way into almost every kind of genre, just as it left its mark on virtually every kind of Hebrew literature. It is present in an array of literary texts, including pamphlets, treatises, biblical commentaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers, periodicals, constitutional documents, and even children's literature. Most strikingly, the gospel of liberation was depicted in visual sources, such as paintings, illustrated Bibles, official seals, commemorative coins and medals, mastheads and banners. Finally, deliverance politics proved easy to sing. Its strains are heard in Puritan psalms, Evangelical hymns, African-American spirituals and the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement. These sources form a documentary record, testifying to the powerful political appeal of the Exodus, the Jubilee and the biblical language of liberty.

The right to land plays a key role in the realisation of a plethora of human rights, including the right to food, water, housing, employment, a clean and healthy environment, an adequate standard of living, social status and the power to make decisions. Property rights over land can take many forms, from mere access rights to ownership. Due to a growing world population and various global crises and developments such as agrarian reform, land is becoming scarce. The result is that land prices increase and the poorest sectors of society are deprived of access to land whilst State authorities and foreign investors practise land grabbing to make way for palm oil, animal feed and biofuel plantations, tourist resorts, or as speculative investment. In addition, arable land is not only claimed for residential purposes, but also by industries that in turn pollute the soil and water. Many groups in society, especially in developing States, need access to land for their subsistence. It is these smallholders, landless farmers, rural youths, indigenous peoples and women who often suffer the worst consequences of land reform schemes and land grabbing practices. They are not well protected by the existing forms of land tenure and State authorities often fail to live up to their human rights obligations to respect and protect the land rights of people in all sectors of their society.Legal Aspects of Land Rights is the result of the cooperation of scholars from five Indonesian faculties of law, the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights, and the Maastricht European Transnational Research Institute (METRO), together known as the Land Rights Consortium.

After having ignored victims, only recently both domestic and international law have begun to pay attention to them. As a consequence, different international norms related to victims have progressively been introduced. These are norms generally characterized by a certain concept from the perspective of victims, as well as by the enumeration of a list of rights to which they are entitle to; rights upon which the international statute of victims is built. In reverse, these catalogues of rights are the states' obligations. Most of these rights are already existent in the international law of human rights. Consequently, they are not new but consolidated rights. Others are strictly linked to victims, concerning the following categories: victims of crime, victims of abuse of power, victims of gross violations of international human rights law, victims of serious violations of international humanitarian law, victims of enforced disappearance, victims of violations of international criminal law and victims of terrorism.
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The prohibition of abuse of rights in Article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or Convention) embodies one of the Convention's main principles: its commitment to democracy and democratic values. The provision aims to prevent groups and individuals from successfully invoking fundamental rights and freedoms to justify anti-democratic activities. At the same time it is also one of the Convention's most controversial provisions. There exists a certain tension between human rights protection and the concept of abuse of rights. While human rights essentially aim to promote freedom by affirming the basic rights and freedoms citizens enjoy vis--vis state authorities, the abuse clause primarily aims to protect the democratic organisation of the state against groups and individuals invoking these rights with the aim of undermining it. Furthermore, an analysis of the growing body of case law on this topic shows that the interpretation and application of Article 17 ECHR are far from unequivocal. While according to Article 17 ECHR anti-democratic activities may be excluded from the protection of the Convention, clear criteria for determining which activities fit this description are lacking. In addition, the case law covers different methods of application of the abuse clause that seem to be used rather arbitrarily. This has resulted in a rather obscure and inconsistent case-by-case approach. This study seeks to shed light on the prohibition of abuse of rights in Article 17 ECHR in order to contribute to a more coherent interpretation of this provision. To that aim it studies the abuse clause from different perspectives. First, it looks at the historical background of the provision to examine what motivated the drafters to include this prohibition. Then it moves on to the case law of the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights and to legal doctrine, revealing the difficulties and inconsistencies in the current interpretation of the abuse clause. Next, it analyses the interpretation of prohibitions of abuse in other human rights documents to see whether parallels can be drawn with the interpretation of Article 17 ECHR. Subsequently, it addresses the concepts of 'abuse of rights' and 'militant democracy' and examines the extent to which they offer a framework for understanding the abuse clause. Based on the insights obtained from these different perspectives, this study puts forward a proposal as to how Article 17 ECHR can best be applied in the future.

During times of grave injustice, some individuals, groups, and organizations courageously resist maltreatment of all people, regardless of their backgrounds. Courageous resisters have assisted others in such locales as Nazi-controlled Europe throughout the 1930s and 40s, Argentina during the "Dirty War" of the 1970s, Rwanda in the 1990s genocide and Iraqi prisons in recent years. Using these and other case studies, this book introduces readers to the broad spectrum of courageous resistance and provides a framework for analyzing the factors that motivate and sustain opposition to human rights violations.

This book provides a theoretical framework for explaining the choices made by international decision-makers in terms of what constitutes law. It comprehensively analyzes the practice of human rights courts in applying legal instruments outside their competence and proposes that this practice recognizes that different normative instruments coexist in an un-ordered space, and that meaning can be produced by the free interaction of those instruments around a problem. Based on this, the book advances its normative plurality hypothesis, which states that decision-makers must survey the acquis of international law in order to identify all the instruments containing relevant normative information for a particular situation. The set of rules of law applicable to the situation must then be complemented with other instruments containing specific normative information relevant to the situation, resulting in a complete system of norms advancing a common purpose.

An examination of the political and economic power of a large African American community in a segregated southern city; this study attacks the myth that blacks were passive victims of the southern Jim Crow system and reveals instead that in Jacksonville, Florida, blacks used political and economic pressure to improve their situation and force politicians to make moderate adjustments in the Jim Crow system. Bartley tells the compelling story of how African Americans first gained, then lost, then regained political representation in Jacksonville. Between the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of city and county government in 1967, the political struggle was buffeted by the ongoing effort to build an economically viable African American economy in the virulently racist South. It was the institutional complexity of the African American community that ultimately made the protest efforts viable. Black leaders relied on the institutions created during Reconstruction to buttress their social agitation. Black churches, schools, fraternal organizations, and businesses underpinned the civil rights activities of community leaders by supplying the people and the evidence of abuse that inflamed the passions of ordinary people. The sixty-year struggle to break down the door blocking political power serves as an intriguing backdrop to community development efforts. Jacksonville's African American community never accepted their second-class status. From the beginning of their subjugation, they fought to remedy the situation by continuing to vote and run for offices while they developed their economic and social institutions.

The Ambivalence of Good examines the genesis and evolution of international human rights politics since the 1940s. Focusing on key developments such as the shaping of the UN human rights system, decolonization, the rise of Amnesty International, the campaigns against the Pinochet dictatorship, the moral politics of Western governments, or dissidence in Eastern Europe, the book traces how human rights profoundly, if subtly, transformed global affairs. Moving beyond monocausal explanations and narratives prioritizing one particular decade, such as the 1940s or the 1970s, The Ambivalence of Good argues that we need a complex and nuanced interpretation if we want to understand the truly global reach of human rights, and account for the hopes, conflicts, and interventions to which this idea gave rise. Thus, it portrays the story of human rights as polycentric, demonstrating how actors in various locales imbued them with widely different meanings, arguing that the political field evolved in a fitful and discontinuous process. This process was shaped by consequential shifts that emerged from the search for a new world order during the Second World War, decolonization, the desire to introduce a new political morality into world affairs during the 1970s, and the visions of a peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War. Finally, the book stresses that the projects pursued in the name of human rights nonetheless proved highly ambivalent. Self-interest was as strong a driving force as was the desire to help people in need, and while international campaigns often improved the fate of the persecuted, they were equally likely to have counterproductive effects. The Ambivalence of Good provides the first research-based synopsis of the topic and one of the first synthetic studies of a transnational political field (such as population, health, or the environment) during the twentieth century. Based on archival research in six countries, it breaks new empirical ground concerning the history of human rights in the United Nations, of human rights NGOs, of far-flung mobilizations, and of the uses of human rights in state foreign policy.

This unique volume unpacks the concept and practice of naming and shaming by examining how governments, NGOs and international organisations attempt to change the behaviour of targeted actors through public exposure of violations of normative standards and legal commitments.

Kurt Mills investigates how the concept of sovereignty is changing as a result of normative, empirical, and institutional developments. From a normative political theory perspective he argues that respect for human rights, popular sovereignty, and self-determination are inherent in the social purpose of the state and thus must be considered when evaluating claims to sovereignty and non-intervention. Human Rights in the Emerging Global Order examines how recent international practice in the areas of human rights, self-determination, refugees and human migration and humanitarian intervention are challenging traditional conceptions of sovereignty in important, yet ambiguous, ways. Finally, it provides policy prescriptions to deal with these continuing humanitarian problems.

The safeguarding of human rights remains highly problematic, despite the proliferation of human rights instruments and the many actions taken by a variety of actors, such as governmental and non-governmental organisations, (individual) states and the international community over the past decades. Human rights violations do still occur on a large scale and injustice remains rampant. Central to this problem appears to be that social, economic, cultural and political structures in societies provide denialist defence mechanisms. Such deeply embedded denialism causes and/or facilitates human rights violations, because the true nature of the problems involved remains fully or partly unacknowledged and as a result appropriate action remains absent. In order to safeguard the effectuation of human rights it is thus pertinent to acknowledge and address this problem of denialism and develop strategies to move beyond it. To address the above-mentioned problem, an international conference was organised on the theme of Denialism and Human Rights by the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights in 2015, which brought together scholars, practitioners and students from various disciplines and fields to unearth and address denialism in the context of their own particular area of research.The present volume contains a unique collection of papers that were presented during the conference. The content of the papers ranges from more general reflections on the theme of denialism and human rights to more specific areas of research that are relevant in terms of denialism such as genocide, children's rights, the role of (inter)national organisations, penology, and social, economic and cultural rights.

Although the influence and opinions of political elites, civil society, and the general public vary widely, the death penalty is universally in decline throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, the death penalty is a site of accommodation and resistance to international human rights norms between African governments and the Global North. As in debates over membership in the International Criminal Court and legal protections for sexual minorities, some leaders resist death penalty abolition as "imposed" by the Global North, though the modern death penalty in Africa is a product of European colonialism. However, Sub-Saharan Africa is not a passive subject of global death penalty abolition driven by Europe. Courts around the continent have made important contributions to global death penalty jurisprudence and members of civil society have engaged in novel and successful strategies against the death penalty. In addition, precolonial notions of punishment and criminal responsibility in Africa have influenced debates over the death penalty, including whether to provide compensation to victims of crime.This book explores the African contribution to the global death penalty debate and lessons for the international death penalty abolition movement.

Migration crisis, food crisis, economic crisis the most alarming tendencies in our contemporary world are related to the transnational social question. But what role does transnational law play in this context: Does it exacerbate the asymmetries by shielding the rich and exploiting the poor? Or is the emerging regime of international social human rights a promising candidate for countering the crisis of world society?This book scrutinises both the potentials and the boundaries of de-coupling the notion of "social rights" from the nation-state and of transferring it to the transnational sphere. By drawing on a critical theory of transnational law, it provides in-depth analyses of the different sites where the struggle for social rights is at stake, such as the emerging transnational food regime, the ILO, international environmental law and the accountability of private actors. It reveals enforcement structures, discusses judicial doctrine and relates these aspects to the social and political struggles which surround the transnationalisation of social rights.

Beginning with the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" Supreme Court case, this book traces the lives of six American civil rights leaders as they willingly risk their lives for the civil rights cause: A. Philip Randolph, Frederick D. Patterson, Thurgood Marshall, Whitney M. Young, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer.