The communitarian challenge to liberal rights

The communitarian challenge to liberal rights     

Making the grade: the UK,citizenship and human rights education

This article focuses on the new ‘Citizenship’ component of the National Curriculum in England and the National Priorities for Education in Scotland. It argues that the principal elements in these initiatives should have been incorporated into the education system some time ago in order to conform to the UK's international obligations. The international requirements will be examined with the citizenship elements being measured against these requirements. It will be concluded that even should the UK succeed in implementing the full citizenship agenda, compliance with the full range of international requirements is not guaranteed.     

The structure of basic human rights

This paper offers a theory of the structure of basic human rights which is both compatible with and clarificatory of the traditional conception of such rights. A central contention of the theory is that basic rights are structurally different from other kinds of moral rights, such as special rights, because of differences both in the way in which basic rights have content and the model on which basic rights are correlative with duties. This contention is exploited to develop and defend the central thesis of the theory, namely that basic human rights are bundles of mutually held active rights enjoyed by persons in virtue of the specifiable moral relationships they bear to each other.     

The safeguarding and foundation of human rights

Human rights, as legally understood, must be safeguarded. This presupposes a state of law. The safeguarding of human rights further presupposes an independent judiciary applying the law in a community with common values and aspirations. The foundation of human rights is an individualistic philosophy dependent on the respect for truth and the possibility for the individual to attain it. The respect for the dignity of the human person is the result of a long historical development from this starting point.Dedicated to Helmut CoingTranslated by E. F. Kaelin.     

The health and human rights movement: progress and obstacles

There is a new maturity about the health and human rights movement as it endeavours to integrate human rights into health policies at the national and international levels. In addition to the traditional human rights techniques, such as "naming and shaming", the movement is also using new approaches such as indicators, benchmarks and impact assessments. However, it is confronted with a range of major obstacles and this article focuses on two of them: the inadequate engagement within the health and human rights movement of (i) established human rights non-governmental organisations and (ii) health professionals. This article argues that established human rights non-governmental organisations should work on health and human rights issues, such as maternal mortality, just as vigorously as they already campaign on disappearances, torture and prisoners of conscience. Also, it emphasises that health and human rights complement and reinforce each other. Nevertheless, many health professionals have never heard of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The article argues that there is no chance of operationalising the right to health without the active engagement of many more health professionals, and it makes some preliminary observations about steps that might be taken to deepen health professionals' engagement in the health and human rights movement.     

The prohibition to abuse one's human rights: A theory

Supporters of communism, national socialism and radical Islamism, but also people who incite racial hatred or deny the Holocaust, see their rights severely curtailed by the abuse clause of Article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights. To make sense of this provision, this paper first introduces the distinction between abusable and non‐abusable rights in order to delimit the scope of Article 17. Then, this paper suggests a “test” to spot instances of abuse of human rights by borrowing the concept of performative self‐contradiction from speech act theory. Article 17 is reconceptualised as dealing with conduct that self‐contradictorily uses rights but simultaneously denies their very idea. In this way, it becomes possible to make sense of and to unify the disparate case law that Article 17 has generated so far: it equally targets political human rights abuse, attacking liberal democracy in general; and exclusionary human rights abuse, attacking the rights of other people.