Paradoxical bedfellows: Nihilism and human rights

This article identifies and considers the existence of a manifest, though often overlooked, paradox contained within the doctrine of human rights. The principal justifications for human rights are based upon the identification of variously conceived human characteristics, or attributes of human agency. Nevertheless, human rights have all too often been required to protect some human beings from being seriously harmed by other human beings. The justification for human rights envisages a single, universal community of human beings, whereas the actual application of human rights typically testifies to the existence of two, very distinct communities: victims and perpetrators. The single greatest impetus for the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the desire to prevent the re-occurrence of genocide. The modern human rights regime emerged out of mountains of human corpses. One would like to claim that the impetus for human rights became less urgent after the horrors of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, genocide has persisted and gross violations of human rights remain a feature of the geo-political landscape. Our need for protective human rights remains as urgent today as it did fifty years ago. This article accounts for this paradox and answers the question: Why is it that the ultimate justification and application of the doctrine of human rights is frustrated by members of the very species upon which the doctrine is based?     

浅析人权、主权和球权的关系

人权、主权、球权是当今人类社会最为重要的三项权利。三者中,人权是核心;主权是人权的延伸,目的是为了保护人权;而球权则是人权和主权的让渡,根本目的是为了在全球化时代维护国家主权和保护基本的人权。因此,可以认为人权是目标,主权和球权则是达成这一目标的手段。     

Administration of human rights

It is puzzling that although human rights pervade nearly all actions that affect the public, so little attention is devoted to their administration. The absence of books, chapters or even courses describing human rights administration is a silent reproach to our profession. To suggest how such a study might proceed, this article considers three questions: (1) how rights like those outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are converted to policies; (2) how human experiences can suggest priorities in their administration; and (3) how to improve the performance of the ‘virtual bureaucracy’ that is carrying the related administrative responsibilities. Serious studies of human rights administration must deal with three critical problems: their complexity as they infuse other public policy issues; their universality as they interact at all levels of public and private society; and their ubiquity, which renders coherent bureaucratic structures and reforms difficult. Such studies are justified because large‐scale efforts to provide education in rights administration can make important contributions to the realization of human dignity. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Revealing and concealing: Islamist discourse on human rights

Historically as well as contemporarily, the relationship between religion and democratic pluralism in the Muslim world has been problematic. In the Muslim world, both governments and popular movements are using religious documents (the Qur'an and the hadith) to inspire political and social change. In the process, the fusion of religion and politics that characterizes revivalist Islam has impeded the development of both democracy and religious pluralism. An area of particular concern has been the reluctance of Muslim countries to implement international standards of human rights as defined in the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Since the adoption of the UDHR in 1948, there has been disagreement in the Muslim world about the relevance of this document for Islamic countries. The reactions have ranged from an angry rejection of human rights as destructive to Islam to claims that Islamic law guarantees the same rights as those embodied in the United Nation's documents. The two most influential international Islamic statements on Human Rights (the Universal Islamic Declaration on Human Rights and the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights) attempt to reconcile Islamic law and modern norms of human rights. These documents claim that human rights are an inherent part of Islam. Such arguments are cause for concern because since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, documents proposing regional alternatives to international law almost always entail the weakening of international standards. The incorporation of the Cairo Declaration into the UN corpus means that what were once informal, regional obstacles to implementing the protections guaranteed by the UDHR have become formal, regional norms that legitimate Islamist restrictions on rights.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Explaining the Vientiane Action Programme: ASEAN and the institutionalisation of human rights

Abstract

Existing explanations for the emergence of human rights on the political agenda in ASEAN focus either on the role of external pressure on ASEAN member states to ‘do something’, or on the way those states copied the form, but not the function, of other regional organisations such as the EU. Both approaches tacitly acknowledge that given the strong preference for intergovernmental governance displayed by ASEAN, regardless of interpretations, that it was states that drove the institutionalisation of rights forwards. Through examining in detail the causes and consequences of the Vientiane Action Programme this article disagrees with that assertion. At crucial moments before and after 2004 it was the Working Group for the Establishment of an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism, a track III actor, which both inserted human rights into ASEAN discussions and forged the link between protecting those rights and the continuing success of ASEAN's security goals. Through understanding the role of the Working Group as a norm entrepreneur, assisting in the localisation of human rights standards, this article suggests that existing explanations of ASEAN institutionalisation need to be revised to include a wider range of political dynamics than previously were acknowledged.     

From citizenship to human rights: the stakes for democracy

A review of the literature on citizenship shows a trend away from anchoring citizenship practices to the nation-state and a move towards recasting the concept in universal terms. The paper examines this trend by focusing on the writings of Held, Bohman, and Benhabib. It distinguishes their ‘deliberative’ approach to citizenship, and suggests that this leads them to reformulate citizenship in a way which differs little from human rights. Although the paper shares in the view that a move to a human rights politics would pave the way for a more equitable order, it argues that there is also a risk. By drawing on the agonistic perspective on democratic politics, the paper shows that the risk is that we might undermine democratic politics by reducing it to a single principle.     

Environmental human rights and intergenerational justice

What do the living owe those who come after them? It is a question nonsensical to some and unanswerable to others, yet tantalizing in its persistence especially among environmentalists. This article makes a new start on the topic of intergenerational justice by bringing together human rights and environmental justice arguments in a novel way that lays the groundwork for a theory of intergenerational environmental justice based in the human rights to clean air, water, and soil. Three issues foundational to such a theory are explored here. First is the broad question of whether justice is applicable to future (or past) generations in any real sense, or do such issues fall under the rubric of superogation. Second, can environmental goods properly be contained in a theory of distributive justice at all, since, superficially at least, they seem different in kind than the usual objects of justice? I will discuss them as “emergent” goods in fact central to contemporary justice distributions. Third, what is the relationship of justice to rights, and how can environmental human rights be included in justice distributions?