"The Challenge of Human Rights" traces the history of human rights theory from classical antiquity through the enlightenment to the modern human rights movement, and analyses the significance of human rights in today's increasingly globalized world.
Provides an engaging study of the origin and the philosophical and political development of human rights discourse.
Offers an original defence of human rights.
Explores the significance of human rights in the context of increasing globalisation.
Confronts the major objections to human rights, including the charge of western ethical imperialism and cultural relativism.

Argues that human rights logically culminate in an ethical cosmopolitanism to reflect the moral unity of the human race.

This book provides a comprehensive coverage of crucial issues concerning EU co-operation and European security. At present, Europe is confronted with a number of serious common and global challenges, the most important being the economic crisis, migration issues, geopolitical tensions at its external borders, terrorism, climate change and environmental challenges. These developments have a huge impact on the stability and security of the continent as a whole and on each individual European country. Europe, more particularly the European Union, has to organize its governance and security infrastructure in such a way that it can cope with these global threats. This edited volume collects a number of topics and themes connected to the governance and/or security dimensions of EU co-operation. The book is divided into several parts, which deal respectively with the values and general principles of EU co-operation; institutional aspects of EU co-operation; a number of individual policy domains; areas of European criminal law; the external relations of the EU; and the future functioning of EU co-operation as a whole. The eighteen chapters, written by a team of experts with extensive practical and academic experience, contain insights and information valuable to researchers, students, practitioners and policy makers concerned with EU law and international law.About the editors Jaap de Zwaan is Lector European Integration at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, and Emeritus Professor of the European Union Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He served for nearly twenty years as a member of the Diplomatic Service of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he worked notably in the domain of European integration. He was also the Director of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael in The Hague for almost six years. Martijn Lak is a historian and a Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of European Studies of The Hague University of Applied Sciences. He studied Journalism and History at the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, and obtained his Ph.D. in 2011. Martijn Lak specializes in post-war Dutch-German economic and political relations and contemporary German history. Abiola Makinwa is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer in commercial Law with a special focus on Anti-Corruption Law and Policy at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Abiola Makinwa holds a Ph.D. from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. She is a frequent speaker on anti-corruption law and policy and has introduced Anti-Corruption Compliance as an undergraduate course at The Hague University. Piet Willems is a Lecturer in International and European Law at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, where he focuses on project-based learning, moot court coaching and competition law. His research activities focus on regulation in the European Union. He obtained both his Master's degree and his LL.M. in European Law from Ghent University. -based learning, moot court coaching and competition law. His research activities focus on regulation in the European Union. He obtained both his Master's degree and his LL.M. in European Law from Ghent University.

This book documents and analyzes the experiences of the United Nation's first Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. It highlights the conceptual advances in the legal understanding of the right to food in international human rights law, and analyzes key practical challenges through experiences in 11 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Courts regularly rely on process-based fundamental rights review. This means that they examine the diligence, fairness, and quality of legislative, administrative, and judicial procedures to determine whether fundamental rights have been violated. However, despite the frequent application of such review in practice, important questions about the meaning and value of procedural reasoning arise. Do courts provide sufficient protection of substantive rights when taking a procedural approach? Can they safeguard values of deliberative democracy and the rule of law through procedural reasoning? And can they rely on process-based review to avoid morally sensitive issues and cases concerning hard policy choices? This book engages with such questions with the aim of uncovering the potential and limitations of procedural reasoning in fundamental rights cases. To this end, it first discusses a number of concrete examples of application of this review by various courts. It then develops a context-independent definition of process-based fundamental rights review, which acknowledges the various uses of this type of review. On this basis, the book finally discusses the wide-ranging theoretical debates concerning procedural reasoning and identifies underlying explanations for the different views on the topic. The resulting in-depth and nuanced understanding of process-based fundamental rights review will support courts in developing well-balanced procedural approaches, and will assist scholars in studying procedural reasoning more systematically.

Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging pushes debates about citizenship and feminist politics in new directions, challenging us to think 'beyond citizenship', and to engage in feminist re-theorizations of the experience and politics of belonging. Citizenship is a troubling proposition for feminism - promising inclusion yet always enacting exclusions. This book asks whether citizenship is a worthwhile object for feminist politics and scholarship, or whether we should find a different language to express our desires to belong, and alternative means to enact our yearnings for equality, justice and reciprocity. Grounded in feminist perspectives that emphasize the importance of affect, subjectivity, embodiment and the collective, it offers important new analyses of the state of citizenship and meanings of belonging in the contemporary globalizing world. This book is key reading for scholars and students of citizenship, social movements, and feminist and gender theory from a wide range of disciplines, including art practice, comparative literature, gender studies, philosophy, political theory, psychosocial studies, social policy, socio-legal studies, and sociology.

This volume of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law explores the many faces of populism, and the different manifestations of the relationship between populism and international law. Rather than taking the so-called populist backlash against globalisation, international law and governance at face value, this volume aims to dig deeper and wonders 'What backlash are we talking about, really?'. While populism is contextual and contingent on the society in which it arises and its relationship with international law and institutions thus has differed likewise, this volume assists in our examination of what we find so dangerous about populism and problematic in its relationship with international law. The Netherlands Yearbook of International Law was first published in 1970. It offers a forum for the publication of scholarly articles in a varying thematic area of public international law.

Is public transportation a right? Should it be? For those reliant on public transit, the answer is invariably "yes" to both. Indeed, when city officials propose slashing service or raising fares, it is these riders who are often the first to appear at that officials' door demanding their "right" to more service. Rights in Transit starts from the presumption that such riders are justified. For those who lack other means of mobility, transit is a lifeline. It offers access to many of the entitlements we take as essential: food, employment, and democratic public life itself. While accepting transit as a right, this book also suggests that there remains a desperate need to think critically, both about what is meant by a right and about the types of rights at issue when public transportation is threatened. Drawing on a detailed case study of the various struggles that have come to define public transportation in California's East Bay, Rights in Transit offers a direct challenge to contemporary scholarship on transportation equity. Rather than focusing on civil rights alone, Rights in Transit argues for engaging the more radical notion of the right to the city.

From the squares of Spain to indigenous land in Canada, protest camps are a tactic used around the world. Since 2011 they have gained prominence in recent waves of contentious politics, deployed by movements with wide-ranging demands for social change. Through a series of international and interdisciplinary case studies from five continents, this topical collection is the first to focus on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements' contexts. Whether erected in a park in Istanbul or a street in Mexico City, the significance of political encampments rests in their position as distinctive spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. Written by a wide range of experts in the field the book offers a critical understanding of current protest events and will help better understanding of new global forms of democracy in action.

Many years before the U.S. military had to deal with the repercussions of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the U.S. armed forces were vigorously engaged in helping their Latin American counterparts to recognize the strategic imperatives of respecting human rights on the battlefield. Before Iraqi accusations of massacre at Haditha forced the U.S. military to again scramble to defend its honor and reputation, U.S. forces in Latin America were more than a decade into repairing their image after taking the blame for numerous human rights crises. Indeed, U.S. military relations with Latin America are at the center of numerous academic and policy debates, particularly regarding U.S. military assistance and its impact on human rights and broader democratic development. Until now, however, no book has focused on determining whether the U.S. military could serve as a primary source of human rights promotion. Meanwhile, U.S. military human rights promotion efforts in Latin America have become central to the Department of Defense Strategic Engagement Plan since the end of the Cold War. The significant role of the U.S. military in promoting human rights around Latin America is unmatched by U.S. military efforts anywhere in the world. This book documents an approach to human rights that could become a model for Department of Defense strategy and behavior around the world. Perhaps the most important finding of this book is that the true heroes on the human rights front are not civilians, but U.S. military officials, a conclusion that is too often ignored by activists, missed by scholars, and would have been unthinkable only a decade ago.

Rejecting the extreme arguments of today's debates, the author examines what the framers of the Constitution actually said about religious freedom The debate over the framers' concept of freedom of religion has become heated and divisive. This scrupulously researched book sets aside the half-truths, omissions, and partisan arguments, and instead focuses on the actual writings and actions of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others. Legal scholar Michael I. Meyerson investigates how the framers of the Constitution envisioned religious freedom and how they intended it to operate in the new republic. Endowed by Our Creator shows that the framers understood that the American government should not acknowledge religion in a way that favors any particular creed or denomination. Nevertheless, the framers believed that religion could instill virtue and help to unify a diverse nation. They created a spiritual public vocabulary, one that could communicate to all-including agnostics and atheists-that they were valued members of the political community. Through their writings and their decisions, the framers affirmed that respect for religious differences is a fundamental American value. Now it is for us, Meyerson concludes, to determine whether religion will be used to alienate and divide or to inspire and unify our religiously diverse nation.

Human Rights in the International Public Sphere has an interdisciplinary focus and can be used as a text in communication studies, cultural studies, political science, current events, discourse analysis, area and international studies, and other courses in the social sciences and humanities.

This book examines the challenges posed to contemporary international law by the shifting role of the border, which has recently re-emerged as a central issue in international relations. It posits that borders do not merely correspond to States' boundaries: indeed, while remaining a fundamental tool for asserting States' power, they are in fact a collection of constantly changing spatial limits. Consequently, the book approaches borders as context-specific limits and revisits notions traditionally linked to them (jurisdiction, sovereignty, responsibility, individual rights), while also adopting the innovative approach of viewing borders as phenomena of both closedness and openness. Accordingly, the first part of the book addresses what happens "within" borders, investigating the root causes of the emergence of spatial limits and re-assessing apparent extra-territorial assertions of State power. In turn, the second part not only explores typical borderless spaces, but also more generally considers the exercise of States' and international organisations' powers and prerogatives across or "beyond" borders.

This book examines contemporary relations between ethnic majority and ethnic minority women's movements in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, and women's movements' participation in and influence on public policy that focuses on violence against women.

The tremendous cultural diversity and distinct ways of life of many Southeast and East Asian peoples are in serious jeopardy today because of varying combinations of economic, political, and environmental threats, often linked to severe human rights violations. "Endangered Peoples of Southeast and East Asia" introduces 14 endangered cultures, from the Kubu of Central Sumatra in Indonesia, to the Ainu of Japan. The most pressing issues of these marginalized groups--such as the impact of tourism, prohibition against whaling, or dislocation due to nuclear testing--are brought to light by anthropologists based on their own extensive field work. The cultural and historical information provided here is not available in any other printed source.

Endangered peoples of Southeast and East Asia struggle with inadequate understanding, protection, and enforcement of human rights by state governments and the international community. The volume introduction discusses the diversity, identity, ecology, spirituality, colonial status, conflicts and wars, and finally, hope for the future of people in this region. Subsequent chapters are devoted to fourteen specific cultures, including an overview of their history, housing, subsistence strategies, social and political organization, religion and world view, threats to their survival, and their response to these threats. A section entitled Food for Thought poses questions that encourage a personal engagement with the experience of these peoples, and a resource guide suggests further reading and lists pertinent organizations and web sites. As the curriculum expands to include Asian history, this unique volume will be valuable to students and teachers alike.

"This book proposes a fresh perspective on the emergence of public Muslim identities, traversing issues of Muslim-state engagement across government initiatives and church-state relations, across equalities agendas and the education system, the courts and the media"--Provided by publisher.

Millions of people around the Asia-Pacific region are suffering from the twin effects of globalization and exclusionary nationality laws. Some are migrant workers without rights in host countries; some are indigenous peoples who are not accorded their full rights in their own countries. Yet others are refugees escaping from regimes that have no respect for human rights. This collection of essays discusses the ways in which citizenship laws in the region might be made consistent with human dignity. It considers the connectedness of national belonging and citizenship in East and Southeast Asian and Pacific states including Australia; the impact of mass migration, cultural homogenization and other effects of globalization on notions of citizenship; and possibilities of commitment to a transnational democratic citizenship that respects cultural difference.

A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else. As a Deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness-much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they're whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she's also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

Water, Power and Citizenship investigates the interrelationship between water politics and institutions and the development of citizenship rights from a historical-sociological perspective. The evolution of water's manifold social character and values, as a source of power, as a public good, as a commodity, or as a universal right is examined in the light of ever changing and mutually binding social and ecological processes. The Basin of Mexico's rich water history becomes the vantage point to cast light on one of the most crucial challenges facing the international community - that of eliminating water inequality and injustice.

In a time when American politics has become a spectator sport often viewed with a cynical eye by the people, it is needful to be reminded that our freedom entails a civic responsibility to preserve the legal document that gives us that freedom, the United States Constitution. The Constitution is a contract to which all citizens are parties and upon which they have a right to rely. The people have as well the right to protect themselves from interpretations that go unreasonably beyond the original intent of the Framers. It is clear that in the past the Constitution has been abused to justify decisions made by the legislative and judicial branches of government (as in the Dred Scott case) that have since been overturned. Decisions that extend the powers of the federal government beyond the expressly stated limits declared in the Constitution continue to occur today and remain subjects of intensely debated contention. This book gives detailed examples of where Congress and the Supreme Court have gone outside the peoples mutual contract and have, in effect, amended the Constitution. The last chapter outlines a procedure by which citizens, voting directly, can overrule or repeal amendments made by elements of their government.

This examination of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) traces the American origins of the belief that the citizens of a democracy have a natural right to know about the workings of their government. The issue began in the colonies and came to a head in the 1950s when escalating government secrecy led the press to demand open government. Declaring that the public business is the public's business, a series of crusading newspaper editors aroused public support for the Freedom of Information Act which was passed in 1966.

The book features in-depth interviews with the architects of the FOIA, the FOIA staff in the major federal agencies, and the most prominent FOIA users throughout the country. The concluding chapter examines current impediments to the full realization of the people's right to know.

In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, leading planers and social scientists examine public space today and freedom of assembly. The Occupy Wall Street movement has challenged the physical manifestation of the First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly. Where and how can people congregate today? Forty social scientists, planners, architects, and civil liberties experts explore the definition, use, role, and importance of public space for the exercise of our democratic rights to free expression. The book also discusses whose voice is heard and what factors limit the participation of minorities in Occupy activities. This foundational work puts issues of democracy and civic engagement back into the center of dialogue about the built environment. Beyond Zuccotti Park is a collaborative effort of Pratt Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, City College of New York School of Architecture, New Village Press and its parent organization, Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. The book is part of an open civic inquiry on the part of these organizations. The project was seeded by a series of free public forums, Freedom of Assembly: Public Space Today, held at the Center for Architecture in response to the forced clearance of Occupy activities from Zuccotti Park and public plazas throughout the country. The first two recorded programs took place on December 17, 2011 and February 4, 2012.