In academic human rights research, especially legal human rights research, little attention tends to be devoted to questions of methodology. One reason for this may be that human rights scholars often are former human rights activists. Dispensing with methodological niceties enables them to engage in wishful thinking and to come up with the conclusions they were hoping to find in the first place. Furthermore, although much emphasis continues to be put on the need to carry out human rights research from a multidisciplinary perspective, the methods to be applied in such research remain far from clear. Which criteria can be identified to qualify a piece of human rights research as a methodologically sound piece of work? Are there aspects and considerations that are typical for human rights research? What are good practices in human rights research? This book addresses these questions from the perspective of different scholarly fields relevant for human rights research, including international law, criminal law, criminology, political science, comparative politics, international relations, anthropology; philosophy, and history. This book is essential reading for any PhD candidate embarking on a dissertation in the field of human rights and any human rights scholar wishing to critically reflect on the quality of her/his own methods of work.

Providing a much-needed antidote to recent revisionist attempts to 'rehabilitate' apartheid, this major new text by a leading authority offers a considered and substantive reassessment of the nature, endurance and significance of apartheid in South Africa as well as the reasons for its dramatic collapse. Paying particular attention to the international dimension as well as the domestic, the author assesses the impact of anti-apartheid protest, of changing attitudes of Western governments to the apartheid regime and the evolution of South African government policies to the outside world.

This is an exploration of the moral and pragmatic dilemmas involved in the relationships between states in an era of change, derived from a workshop held by the Centre for International Policy Studies attended by scholars, lawyers, human rights activists, public servants from Britain and Europe, and the United States and Asia. The particular concern of those present was to examine the moral underpinnings of human rights in the contemporary world and to evaluate how, if at all, these effect the relations between states. The first part of the book covers both the theoretical foundations of human rights and contemporary state practice. The second part explicates these concerns from a number of perspectives.

This book will be an important resource for scholars and practitioners alike in the emerging field of business and human rights. Simon Baughen's careful and comprehensive analysis of the US and UK case law on corporate responsibility for human rights abuses is invaluable.' - Claire Methven O'Brien, The Danish Institute for Human RightsThe effects of globalisation, together with the increase in foreign investment and resource development within the developing world, have created a context for human rights abuses by States in which transnational corporations are complicit. This timely book considers how these 'governance gaps', as identified by Professor John Ruggie, may be closed. Simon Baughen examines the status of corporations under international law, the civil liability of corporations for their participation in international crimes and self-regulation through voluntary codes of conduct, such as the 2011 UN Guiding Principles. The book includes in-depth analysis of the key legal issues and examines a variety of scenarios including: the Alien Tort Statute litigation against transnational corporations (TNCs) in the US; the use of customary international law as a cause of action in jurisdictions outside the US; and tort litigation against TNCs in the US and UK. The author evaluates how governance gaps may be closed, building on a critical analysis of the place of home States, host States and TNCs under international law and of the UN Guiding Principles and other 'soft law' initiatives. This book will be essential reading for postgraduate students and academics in human rights and corporate governance. It will also provide comprehensive insights for practitioners in NGO.

The overall theme of this volume is the understanding of human dignity, autonomy, and human rights in health care and social services in modern welfare states, with special reference to the Nordic countries. Focus is put on vulnerable groups such as children, individuals with cognitive impairment or mental illness, and persons with physical disabilities. Experts from different disciplines identify the ethical and legal dilemmas in modern welfare services and describe how basic values and/or rights come in conflict in concrete situations. Of particular interest is how the human rights perspective challenges the policies and regulations of modern welfare states while at the same time providing the overall normative direction for solving ethical, legal, and social conflicts or shortcomings. Although the human rights perspective is the most dominant, insights from philosophy and the social sciences provide both a necessary and fruitful supplement to the legal approach. The volume will be of interest for academics, researchers, and students in the field of health care ethics, human rights, and welfare state policies. It presents a challenging outlook on dilemmas that are characteristic for the modern welfare state in general, and for the Nordic countries in particular, and it will give the reader important insights and references for further studies.

This interdisciplinary study applies human rights theory to the problems of rural poverty in the Third World. Considering the interdependence of minimal food and health security with minimal assurance of basic freedoms, political scientist Alan G. Smith traces the linkage to the need of the food-insecure to seek "clientelistic dependencies" on better-off neighbors--relationships that often operate to restrict freedom of choice. In contrast to conventional rural development aid, which can introduce new client dependency if pursued alone, Smith stresses the need to find other forms of aid that would provide the option of assured minimal survival while avoiding the constraints imposed by dependency. Arguing for bolstering bottom-up human rights momentum, he suggests the transfer of appropriate tools into the hands of the target group. Recipients would make use of them to enhance autonomous food-crop production, thereby making client dependency a matter of choice rather than necessity. Smith illustrates the Third World predicament of food insecurity leading to infringement of rights by drawing together empirical evidence from Bangladesh, Botswana, and Tanzania. He further argues that respect for human rights involves a duty on the part of advantaged nations to address the Third World predicament with practical measures fully consistent with human rights, and for each of these three country cases, Smith recommends direct locally specific minimalist aid. His model, its practical illustration, and recommendations should be valuable to academics and students in the fields of rural sociology, anthropology, and political science--especially those focusing on human rights, poverty, and Third Worlddevelopment--as well as bureaucrats and consultants in the development aid field.

This volume discusses the impact of human rights law on other fields of international law. Does international human rights law modify other fields of international law? Contributions focus on possible spillover effects of human rights on international economic or international criminal law. Does international human rights law have a streamlining effect on international law as a whole? This might be identified as a process of constitutionalisation. In this book, human rights can be understood as one of the core principles of international legal order and thus have an effect on the general law of treaties or on the settlement of disputes. Although human rights law is a relatively young field of international law, its content and core values today are of major importance for the interpretation of international law as a whole. As we witness a redefinition of sovereignty as a responsibility of states towards the people and a shift to greater relevance of the individual in international law in general, it is a logical consequence that human rights have an impact on other areas of international law.

This volume explores the breadth and depth of provision on minority issues within the European Union. The reluctance of the European Union, and separately some of its member states, to address new and existing dynamics of minority issues and the relative inattention to these matters raises new questions for both the EU and other actors in the field of minority rights. Specifically, the evolution of minority rights policies and institutions within the EU and the broader European context, models of governance pertaining to minorities, and the potential for conflict between governing authorities of member states and groups with whom they interact form the core of the debates presented.

This thought-provoking book critically analyses how the implementation of the EU-Turkey Statement on Refugees affects the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Bringing together an in-depth examination of both EU and Turkish law and fieldwork data within a theoretical human rights framework, Hulya Kaya discusses the operational realities and failures of the agreement between Turkey and the EU from a socio-legal perspective. This timely book provides important evidence that refugee protection in the region of origin is not an effective solution to the refugee protection crisis, and casts doubt on the capacity of the agreement to contribute to fair burden sharing between states. Kaya illuminates the practical and legal difficulties that refugees experience, and draws upon the political theory of Hannah Arendt to argue that the situation constitutes a further form of violence against refugees by hindering their ability to claim and exercise their fundamental human rights. Scholars and doctoral students specialising in refugee law and migration studies, as well as human rights lawyers, will find this book to be crucial reading. It will also be of interest to human rights advocates and those working in international organisations and NGOs in this area, alongside policy makers in the EU and Turkey.

This book provides an analysis of whether the International Criminal Court can be regarded as an International Criminal World Court, capable of exercising its jurisdiction upon every individual despite the fact that not every State is a Party to the Rome Statute. The analysis is based on a twin-pillar system, which consists of a judicial and an enforcement pillar. The judicial pillar is based on the most disputed articles of the Rome Statute; its goal is to determine the potential scope of the Court's strength through the application of its jurisdiction regime. The enforcement pillar provides an analysis of the cooperation and judicial assistance mechanism pursuant to the Rome Statute's provisions and its practical implementation through States' practices. The results of the analysis, and the lack of an effective enforcement mechanism, demonstrate that the ICC cannot in fact be considered a criminal world court. In conclusion, possible solutions are presented in order to improve the enforcement pillar of the Court so that the tremendous strength of the ICC's judicial pillar, and with it, the exercise of worldwide jurisdiction, can be effectively implemented.

A collection of United Nations documents associated with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these volumes facilitate research into the scope of, meaning of and intent behind the instrument's provisions. It permits an examination of the various drafts of what became the thirty articles of the Declaration, including one of the earliest documents - a compilation of human rights provisions from national constitutions, organised thematically. The documents are organised chronologically and thorough thematic indexing facilitates research into the origins of specific rights and norms. It is also annotated in order to provide information relating to names, places, events and concepts that might have been familiar in the late 1940s but are today more obscure.

This book examines the complex relationships between trade, human rights and the environment within natural resources law. It discusses key theories and challenges whilst exploring the concepts and approaches available to manage crucial natural resources in both developed and developing countries. Primarily aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates, it includes exercises, questions and discussion topics for courses on globalisation and /or natural resources law as well as an ample bibliography for those interested in further research. The book will therefore serve as an invaluable reference tool for academics, researchers and activists alike.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights offers a comprehensive and contemporary survey of the key themes, approaches and debates in the field of media and human rights. The Companion is the first collection to bring together two distinct ways of thinking about human rights and media, including scholarship that examines media as a human right alongside that which looks at media coverage of human rights issues. This international collection of 49 newly written pieces thus provides a unique overview of current research in the field, while also providing historical context to help students and scholars appreciate how such developments depart from past practices. The volume examines the universal principals of freedom of expression, legal instruments, the right to know, media as a human right, and the role of media organisations and journalistic work. It is organised thematically in five parts: Communication, Expression and Human Rights Media Performance and Human Rights: Political Processes Media Performance and Human Rights: News and Journalism Digital Activism, Witnessing and Human Rights Media Representation of Human Rights: Cultural, Social and Political. Individual essays cover an array of topics, including mass-surveillance, LGBT advocacy, press law, freedom of information and children's rights in the digital age. With contributions from both leading scholars and emerging scholars, the Companion offers an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach to media and human rights allowing for international comparisons and varying perspectives. The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights provides a comprehensive introduction to the current field useful for both students and researchers, and defines the agenda for future research.

Human rights occupy a key place in international law and relations. Understanding their significance involves knowing what the current guarantees of human rights are, and how the arrangements for protecting them work. This text offers a broad survey outlining the main human rights instruments and describing how they are implemented in the United Nations, through regional institutions, in specialized agencies and elsewhere. It covers many recent developments and shows that, despite important limitations, human rights law has significant achievements and even greater potential. Substantially rewritten and updated to take into account the ending of the Cold War, this fourth edition includes such issues as the War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the convention on the Rights of the Child and the role of UN Commissioner for Human Rights. -- .

The African American struggle for advancement since the late 19th century has had an enormous impact on American society in general. This examination of African American development looks at group progress in four critical areas of national life: economic, political, educational, and social. Determined to forge a new identity based upon principles of equality, African American leadership and the liberal whites who supported them have achieved many goals in their attempts to forge a new role for African Americans in the political development of the nation. Mungazi includes discussion of important watershed events and key individuals who helped to redefine our nation's history.

A determined leadership contributed greatly to many victories. Such leaders sought assistance from the United States Supreme Court as one means to improve the plight of African Americans. Mungazi considers the Court's rulings on the question of race and the impact that these decisions have had on subsequent political and economic advancement. While African American advocates risked, in some cases, their very lives for their efforts, their commitment to the cause left them unwilling to compromise their basic operational principles and beliefs. Lingering racial prejudice and recent attacks on affirmative action have damaged interracial cooperation in many areas of the country; however, the struggle to reach the Promised Land continues.

Murkin was the code name chosen by the FBI for their investigation into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Today, 20 years after the fatal shooting of the civil rights leader, Philip H. Melanson, a renowned authority on American political assassinations, unveils his own investigation into the murder. Melanson . . . has done an exhaustively thorough job on the still-mysterious King assassination. After following Melanson's meticulous pursuit of seemingly every lead in the case--including interviews with the men whose names were used as aliases for alleged killer James Earl Ray--there can be little doubt in the reader's mind that neither of the two official versions of what happened could have been the whole truth. The first was the ever-popular notion of the lone killer: Ray. The second, propounded by a clearly inept congressional investigation a decade after the 1969 shooting, was that an ill-defined racist conspiracy was behind the assassination. What seems unarguable is that Ray, a petty criminal, could not have killed King unaided. There are too many improbabilities--the source of his carefully chosen Canadian aliases, the identity of the fat man' who brought him a letter' in Toronto during his escape, the odd setup at the rooming house from which the shot was fired. It is Melanson's thesis that there was high-level intelligence involvement, probably by the CIA, which was violently alarmed by King's anti-Vietnam stance. "Publisher's Weekly"

Murkin was the code name chosen by the FBI for the investigation into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Today, twenty years after the fatal shooting of the civil rights leader, Philip H. Melanson, a renowned authority on American political assassinations, unveils his own investigation into the murder. Through extensive interviews, research, and Freedom of Information Act requests, Melanson analyzes the official investigations, the evidence, the performance of law enforcement officials, the role of James Earl Ray, and the questions of conspiracy. Much of the data presented has never before been published. Based on his detailed investigation, Melanson offers a revisionist interpretation of the King case, demonstrating that it remains unsolved.

Melanson argues persuasively that both the FBI's conclusion that Ray acted alone and the later 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations decision that Ray was backed by a conspiracy of St. Louis-based white supremacists are not supported by the evidence. Although Melanson concludes that Ray did not, in fact, act alone, he contends that the official investigations were so flawed that the conspirators behind him are still unidentified. His own conclusions regarding the probable source of the conspiracy offer a sobering indictment of the ways in which powerful interests, left unchecked, can wreak havoc on American democratic processes.

Did the Bush administration fundamentally harm the international human rights system through its rejection of human rights norms? This is the central question explored within US Human Rights Conduct and International Legitimacy, which analyses the practices of legitimacy between the Bush administration, states, and international organizations in cases of torture, habeas corpus, and rendition. Vincent Keating argues that despite the material power of the United States, there is little evidence that the Bush administration gravely damaged international norms on torture and habeas corpus as few nations have followed in America's footsteps, and that the Bush administration's deviation from international norms has served to reaffirm worldwide commitment to human rights.

Informal Justice in Divided Societies examines the ways in which paramilitary and vigilante activity are linked with controlling community crime in both Northern Ireland and South Africa. Drawing upon original research, Colin Knox and Rachel Monaghan analyze the agents of informal justice, its victims, and why communities endorse this form of retribution. They conclude the book with a wider debate of the abuse of human rights suffered by many victims of community crime and tentatively highlight future policy implications.

The most dramatic change in American society in the last forty years has been the explosive growth of personal rights. This "Rights Revolution" is currently under attack by both mainstream conservatives and intellectual liberals as undermining traditional values of community. In replying to the critics, Samuel Walker details the history of the rise of rights in American society, from the birth of the civil rights movement to today, and provides a spirited defense of its success in actually enlarging and enriching our sense of community in the USA.

The debate about languages of instruction in Africa and Asia involves an analysis of both the historical thrust of national government and also development aid policies. Using case studies from Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, India, Bangladesh and Malaysia, Zehlia Babaci-Wilhite argues that the colonial legacy is perpetuated when global languages are promoted in education. The use of local languages in instruction not only offers an effective means to contextualize the curriculum and improve student comprehension, but also to achieve quality education and rights in education.

Those seeking social change confront the centrality of power on a daily basis. What precisely is power and how does it manifest itself? And how are radical and progressive strategies shaped by the ways in which we conceptualize it?

Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist, and Marxist theory, Davina Cooper develops an innovative framework for understanding power relations in forms as diverse as reproductive technology, queer activism, municipal politics, and the regulation of lesbian reproduction. "Power in Struggle" explores the relationship between power, sexuality, and the state and ultimately provides a radical re-thinking of these concepts and their interactions. Sexual politics, Cooper posits, must recognize the sexualization of everyday life and should not be exclusively the concern of a young, educated elite, nor should sex be shuttered as a private affair.

Concluding with an important and original discussion of how an ethics of empowerment can inform political strategy, Power in Struggle is a must-read for activists, scholars, and lawyers interested in understanding the role of power in the state.

Anna Baltzer, a young Jewish American, went to the West Bank to discover the realities of daily life for Palestinians under the occupation. What she found would change her outlook on the conflict forever. She wrote this book to give voice to the stories of the people who welcomed her with open arms as their lives crumbled around them. For five months, Baltzer lived and worked with farmers, Palestinian and Israeli activists, and the families of political prisoners, traveling with them across endless checkpoints and roadblocks to reach hospitals, universities, and olive groves. Baltzer witnessed firsthand the environmental devastation brought on by expanding settlements and outposts and the destruction wrought by Israel's "Security Fence," which separates many families from each other, their communities, their land, and basic human services. What emerges from Baltzer's journal is not a sensationalist tale of suicide bombers and conspiracies, but a compelling and inspiring description of the trials of daily life under the occupation.