Human Rights Contention in Latin America: A Comparative Study

This paper reports original data on contentious challenges, especially protests, focused on human rights in seven Latin American countries from 1981 to 1995. An analysis reveals that human rights contentious challenges are most prevalent where human rights abuses are worse and authoritarianism is present and in countries that are more urbanized. However, the incidence of such human rights contentious challenges is not related to the number of human rights organizations (HROs) in the country. Results also suggest two different types of human rights contention. National human rights movements, present in Argentina and Guatemala, involved HROs and demanded improvements in the national human rights situation. The other form is ancillary human rights protest, in which human rights challenges are led by a variety of groups, focus on repression particular to the groups involved and are either short-lived or part of a more general wave of opposition. This form of contention was more prevalent in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.     

Violence,Nonviolence, and the Effects of International Human Rights Law

Under what conditions are individuals more likely to approve of human rights abuses by their governments? While various theoretical expectations have been offered about public approval of repression, many of them have not been directly tested. We analyze the effects of differing opposition tactics, differing government tactics, and legal constraints on approval of repression through a series of survey experiments in India, Israel, and Argentina. Our results indicate that violent action by opposition groups consistently increases support for government repression. In the context of contentious politics, we find that the effects of international law vary by national context. While our respondents in India were less likely to approve of their government when told the government violated international law, the same information likely increased approval of the government in our Israel experiment. The findings provide insights into the microfoundations of existing theories and suggest areas for theory refinement.     

Implementing International Human Rights Law at Home: Domestic Politics and the European Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) boasts one of the strongest oversight systems in international human rights law, but implementing the ECtHR??s rulings is an inherently domestic and political process. This article begins to bridge the gap between the Court in Strasbourg and the domestic process of implementing the Court??s rulings by looking at the domestic institutions and politics that surround the execution of the ECtHR??s judgments. Using case studies from the UK and Russia, this article identifies two factors that are critical for the domestic implementation of the Court??s rulings: strong domestic, democratic institutions dedicated to implementing the ECtHR??s judgments and an overarching sense of responsibility to set a good example at home and abroad for respecting human rights and the rule of law. This article concludes with a discussion of the steps necessary to facilitate better implementation of the ECtHR??s rulings.     

The Capability Approach and the Debate Between Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights. A Critical Survey

This paper provides a critical exploration of the capability approach to human rights (CAHR) with the specific aim of developing its potential for achieving a synthesis between “humanist” or “naturalistic” and “political” or “practical” perspectives in the philosophy of human rights. The “Polemical Context: the Debate Between Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights” section presents a general strategy for achieving such a synthesis. The “The Capability Approach to Human Rights” section provides an articulation of the key insights of CAHR (its focus on actual realizations given diverse circumstances, its pluralism of grounds, its emphasis on freedom of choice, its demand for public reasoning, its context-sensitive universalism, and its broad view of obligations). These insights go some way toward the achievement of the desired synthesis. But, as explained in the “Need for Further Development of the Approach” section, in its current form, CAHR faces two serious objections by the defenders of the political perspective: the gap between capabilities–interests and rights objection and the disconnect from practice objection. Answering these criticisms requires some amendments to CAHR. The “Recommending a Contractualist Framework of Normative Reasoning” section suggests a response to the first objection based on the introduction of a contractualist framework of justification. The “Recharacterizing the Cosmopolitanism Inherent in the Humanist Standpoint” and “Focusing on a Three-Dimensional Picture in the Search for Deliberative Reflective Equilibrium about Human Rights” sections tackle the second objection by introducing a recharacterization of the cosmopolitan standard underlying the humanist perspective and by identifying the differences and relations between various dimensions of a conception of human rights and their significance for actual political practice. The paper illustrates the practical implications of CAHR, in its modified form, for the pursuit of some important rights.