Interpretation of the Prohibition of Torture: Making Sense of ‘Dignity’ Talk

The right not to be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is invariably associated with ‘human dignity’. The idea of dignity plays some role in this right’s interpretation, although the content of the idea in this context, as in others, is unclear. Making sense of the dignity idea involves a number of challenges. These challenges give rise to the methodological-type question at the heart of this article: how should human rights lawyers go about articulating the content of ‘dignity’? The article proposes, and models, a methodological approach in response. Its core argument is that human rights law needs the vocabulary provided by theorizations of dignity but that these theorizations should be anchored in authoritative human rights jurisprudence. It argues that this approach can help make sense of the dignity idea in a way that facilitates a richer understanding of its influence on interpretation.     

Towards cultural citizenship? Cultural rights and cultural policy in Taiwan

This article reviews existing literature on the construction of cultural citizenship, and argues that cultural citizenship expands the concept of ‘citizenship’, promotes citizens' consciousness and ensures the protection of minority rights. Since the 1990s, three cultural policies have arisen related to cultural citizenship in Taiwan: ‘Community Renaissance’, ‘Multicultural Policy’ and the ‘Announcement of Cultural Citizenship’. ‘Cultural citizenship’ has expanded the concept of citizenship in two ways. First, it has led to the consideration of the minority rights of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, the Hakkas, foreign brides and migrant workers in ‘citizenship’; and second, it has placed emphasis on ‘cultural rights’ in addition to civil rights, political rights and social rights. This article begins by exploring what approach to cultural citizenship is used in cultural policy, and what approach is suitable for practising cultural citizenship in Taiwan. I argue that minority groups practise their cultural rights with the public participation of Community Renaissance. Taiwan's case bears out Stevenson's view: a society of actively engaged citizens requires both the protection offered by rights and opportunities to participate. Finally, this article shows the challenges and contradictions of cultural citizenship in Taiwan: the loss of autonomy and the continuation of cultural inequality.     

Conceptualizing lived religious citizenship: a case-study of Christian and Muslim women in Norway and the United Kingdom

The concept of ‘religious citizenship’ is increasingly being used by scholars, but there are few attempts at defining it. This article argues that rights-based definitions giving primacy to status and rights are too narrow, and that feminist approaches to citizenship foregrounding identity, belonging and participation, as well as an ethic of care, provide a more comprehensive understanding of how religious women understand and experience their own ‘religious citizenship’. Findings from interviews with Christian and Muslim women in Oslo and Leicester suggest a close relationship between religious women's faith and practice (‘lived religion’) and their ‘lived citizenship’. However, gender inequalities and status differences between majority and minority religions produce challenges to rights-based approaches to religious citizenship.     

A Critique of the Universalisability of Critical Human Rights Theory: The Displacement of Immanuel Kant

While the critically oriented writings of Immanuel Kant remain the key theoretical grounds from which universalists challenge reduction of international rights law and protection to the practical particularities of sovereign states, Kant’s theory can be read as also a crucial argument for a human rights regime ordered around sovereign states and citizens. Consequently, universalists may be tempted to push Kant’s thinking to greater critical examination of ‘the human’ and its properties. However, such a move to more theoretical rigour in critique only solidifies the subversive statism of Kant’s apparent universalism, as long as it remains embedded in his prior theory of critical philosophy that privileges a singular form of reason. Universalist theories of human rights can break with this contradiction only insofar as they also displace the right to philosophy from the subject and site of ‘civil’ man to a politics of theory where no such subject or site is guaranteed.     

Human rights and future people — Possibilities of argumentation

Questions of sustainability will be of crucial importance for the twenty-first century. But do we have to think about questions of responsibilities regarding future people in terms of human rights? And if duties regarding sustainability fall outside the scope of human rights, what would this imply for the moral and political importance of human rights in general? This article investigates conceptually how we should see the relationship between human rights and long-term global ecological challenges. We will discuss how a human rights approach to questions of sustainability would be different from other approaches and what would be required to see those ecological challenges as human rights questions. We will discuss the possibilities for conceptualizing the relationship between human rights and sustainability. And we will briefly draw some conclusions in terms of topics for further debate.     

Rethinking the epistemic case against epistocracy

ABSTRACT

In this article, I focus on arguments which suggest that disenfranchising persons on the grounds of incompetence is likely to produce epistemically sub-optimal decisions. I suggest three ways in which such arguments can be strengthened. First, I argue that they can be untethered from the controversial ‘best judge’ principle, according to which each person is the best judge of his or her own interests. Second, I suggest that epistemic arguments against epistocracy are currently insensitive to the nature of the groups that would be excluded on the grounds of incompetence. Such arguments would remain unchanged were epistocracy to disenfranchise privileged persons rather than already disadvantaged persons. I argue that a stronger critique of epistocracy ought to focus on distinctive epistemic obstacles faced by socially privileged persons. Third, I argue that current epistemic critics of epistocracy ignore how its basis for exclusion entails consequences that are relevant to our assessment of its justifiability. Their criticisms would, for instance, remain the same had this exclusion been brought about in a random manner. Instead, I emphasise the deliberative costs that follow from the exclusion of disadvantaged groups qua incompetent.     

Rethinking Human Rights in York as a Human Rights City

Human rights is in crisis in the UK. It lacks significant political backing and public support. This ‘insider account’ of York becoming a human rights city suggests that there is a need to rethink approaches to human rights. The article looks at the strategies adopted in the city; the annual city‐based indicator report which provides the key reference point for all local activities; and the declaration of York as a ‘human rights city’ in 2017 alongside its subsequent impact. The discussion is linked to two debates within human rights: how to define and build a culture of human rights, and what it means for human rights to be truly relevant at a local level. The new approach advocated can be summarised as participatory, locally informed, and related to everyday concerns.     

Human rights and the city: Including marginalized communities in urban development and smart cities

The idea that the city belongs to all individuals inhabiting the urban space is grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the New Urban Agenda, and it is referred to as “right to the city” or “rights in the city.” This article discusses how human rights relate to the city and its inhabitants, examines the meaning of the right to the city and human rights in the city in today’s urban environment, and deliberates how to transform cities into spaces that reflect fundamental human rights principles. By looking at the situation of marginalized groups in cities, the article focuses on the questions of how to build inclusive, fair, and accessible cities and how to eliminate inequalities seen in urban communities. Because technology is often cited as one way to foster integration of marginalized communities, special attention will be given to the smart city and the opportunities and challenges presented by information and communication technologies (ICTs) for human rights, accessibility, and inclusion. Using the case of persons with disabilities as an illustration, the article argues that urban development needs to be fundamentally transformed to live up to human rights standards. Only a multi-stakeholder urban design process will produce truly inclusive urban spaces that fulfill the right to the city.     

(Dis)qualified bodies: securitization,citizenship and ‘identity management’

This article attempts to think citizenship politics in the international security context of a post‐September 11th world. Considering specifically the introduction of biometric technologies, the article reveals the extent to which contemporary citizenship is securitized as a part of the wider post‐September 11th ‘securitization of the inside’. This securitization contributes directly to the intensification of conventional citizenship practice, as biometric technologies are employed to conceal and advance the heightened exclusionary and restrictive practices of contemporary securitized citizenship. The intensified restriction and preservation of particular rights and entitlements, vis‐à‐vis the application of biometric technologies, serves both private and public concerns over ‘securing identity’. This overall move, and the subsequent challenges to conventional notions of citizenship politics and agency, is referred to here as ‘identity management’. To then ask ‘What's left of citizenship?’ sheds light on these highly political transformations, as the restricted aspects of citizenship—that is, its continued obsession with the preservation and regulation/restriction of specific rights and entitlements—are increased, and the instrument of this escalation, biometrics, dramatically alters existing notions of political agency and ‘citizenship/asylum politics’.     

ASEAN and human rights: resisting Western pressure or emulating the West?

Abstract

Observers of Southeast Asian affairs commonly assume that the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are reluctant to pursue liberal agendas, and that their main concern is to resist pressure from Western powers to improve their human rights practice. This article, however, argues that such a conventional view is too simplistic. The Southeast Asian countries have voluntarily been pursuing liberal agendas, and their main concern here is to be identified as ‘Western’ countries – advanced countries with legitimate international status. They have ‘mimetically’ been adopting the norm of human rights which is championed by the advanced industrialized democracies, with the intention of securing ASEAN's identity as a legitimate institution in the community of modern states. Ultimately, they have been pursuing liberal agendas, for the same reason as cash-strapped developing countries have luxurious national airlines and newly-independent countries institute national flags. Yet it should be noted that the progress of ASEAN's liberal reform has been modest. A conventional strategy for facilitating this reform would be to put more pressure on the members of ASEAN; however, the usefulness of such a strategy is diminishing. The development of an East Asian community, the core component of which is the ASEAN–China concord, makes it difficult for the Western powers to exercise influence over the Southeast Asian countries. Hence, as an alternative strategy, this article proposes that ASEAN's external partners should ‘globalize’ the issue of its liberal reform, by openly assessing its human rights record in global settings, with the aim of boosting the concern of its members for ASEAN's international standing.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Forum Internum</Emphasis> Revisited: Considering the Absolute Core of Freedom of Belief and Opinion in Terms of Negative Liberty,Authenticity, and Capability

Human rights theory generally conceptualizes freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief as well as freedom of opinion and expression, as offering absolute protection in what is called the forum internum. At a minimum, this is taken to mean the right to maintain thoughts in one’s own mind, whatever they may be and independently of how others may feel about them. However, if we adopt this stance, it seems to imply that there exists an absolute right to hold psychotic delusions. This article takes the position that this conclusion is ethically problematic from the perspective of psychiatric treatment and the rights of persons with psychosis. The article reflects on this particular challenge and sets forth an understanding of freedom in the forum internum that might apply to situations where for various reasons it is not, necessarily accurate to maintain that persons have an absolute right to their own thoughts. For the purpose of proposing such an understanding, the article engages with current debates within human rights theory and political philosophy and analyzes discussions about psychotic delusions and the way in which involuntary treatment is justified. Based on this analysis, this article in turn conceptualizes freedom in the forum internum as ‘negative liberty’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘capability’. This article suggests that when forum internum is redefined as encompassing a right to certain internal capabilities, the right remains meaningful for persons with psychotic delusions as well.     

Positive about Equality: The Public Sector Duty under Threat

This article seeks to demonstrate what is at stake in the Coalition Government's review of the public sector equality duty introduced by s. 149 Equality Act 2010. It does so by setting the duty in the context of other legal developments at home and abroad, especially the evolution of the role of ombudsmen in the UK in promoting equality and human rights, and the reform of court processes in India to decide social rights claims. It suggests that any attempt to dismantle the duty on ‘red tape’ grounds would be unfounded and retrograde step for the larger task of creating a more equal society.     

Human Rights in Policing: The Past,Present and Future

This article seeks to demonstrate, largely from practitioners’ perspectives, the growing evolution in understanding and implementation of meaningful human rights standards within the policing context. In the early 2000s, human rights were perceived and treated as a rather restrictive framework in UK policing. They are now more readily seen as a set of tools that guide and help the police to balance the views and interests of all parties to the criminal justice process. Human rights values enable police in the UK to better endeavour to do the right thing, ‘without fear or favour’.     

Smoke but No Fire? The Politics of a ‘British’ Bill of Rights

This article systematically explores the political context behind Labour and the Conservatives' new commitment to a British Bill of Rights. This is linked to conflicting incentives to resist the current trajectory towards rights constitutionalism (‘Constitutional Freeze’), to further encourage further rights constitutionalism (‘Constitutional Fire’) and to engage in largely cosmetic change (‘Constitutional Smoke’). Ultimately, the latter has proved dominant for both parties. This demonstrates the difficulty of building political momentum behind significant revision of institutional responsibility for protecting human rights in stable, democratic settings. It specifically illustrates the strong barriers which both a hegemonic policy preserving and an ‘aversive’ constitutionalising dynamic must overcome to succeed.     

Enter at your own risk: free movement of EU citizens in practice

The citizenship jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice has raised hopes for a more social Europe and triggered fierce debates about ‘social tourism’. The article analyses how this case law is applied by EU member state administrations and argues that they are actively containing the Court’s influence. As a result, rather than reconciling the logics of ‘opening’ and ‘closure’, they are heading towards an uneasy coexistence between free movement and exclusive welfare states. The argument here is illustrated with empirical evidence from Austria and Germany. Although both countries have taken different approaches to EU migrants’ residency and social rights, they produce similar effects in practice: increasingly, EU migrants are being tolerated as residents with precarious status without access to minimum subsistence benefits. Ironically, attempts to restrict residency rights have resulted in a temporary extension of EU migrants’ access to welfare in some instances.     

Uneven inclusion: consequences of universal healthcare in Thailand

‘Post-national’ scholars have taken the extension of social rights to migrants that are normally accorded to citizens as evidence of the growing importance of norms of ‘universal personhood’ and the declining importance of the nation-state. However, the distinct approach taken by the state toward another understudied category of non-citizen – stateless people – complicates these theories by demonstrating that the state makes decisions about groups on different bases than theory would suggest. These findings suggest the need to pay more attention to how the state treats other categories of ‘semi-citizens’. This article examines the differential effects of universal healthcare reforms in Thailand on citizens, migrants, and stateless people and explores their ramifications on theories of citizenship and social rights. While the state has expanded its healthcare obligations toward people living within its borders, it has taken a variegated approach toward different groups. Citizens have been extended ‘differentiated but unambiguous rights’. Migrants have been granted ‘conditional rights’ to healthcare coverage, dependent on their status as registered workers who pay mandatory contributions. Large numbers of stateless people, however, saw their right to state welfare programs disenfranchised following passage of the new universal healthcare law before later being granted ‘contingent rights’ through a new program.     

‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices,global feminism,and human rights regimes in transnationality 1

This paper argues that the recent calls for articulating women's rights as human rights can be successful only by misrecognition of the geopolitical context of human rights internationalism and the nationalisms that are sustained by it. Arguing that it is only on the level of universalized constructions of ‘women’ as a category and the generalized invocations of oppression by ‘global feminism's’ ‘American’ practitioners that such discourses of rights become powerful, this paper argues that policy and action require addressing localized and transnational specificities that created gendered inequalities. Even in national contexts such as in India, generalized invocations of women's human rights have not been useful since hegemonic forms of religion and culture have also been oppressive to women in minority communities. Concepts of economic and social justice rather than rights may work better in many such cases.     

Politicisation of Senior Appointments in the Australian Public Service

The vexed question of politicisation and patronage in the Australian Public Service is explored in this article. Recent dismissals and appointments of department secretaries have raised concerns about political convenience, trends towards partisanship and the erosion of ‘frank and fearless’ advice. Alternatively, governments have come to insist on ‘partnership’ arrangements between ministers and secretaries, to enhance ‘political accountability’ and install new management teams to better implement government policy. But do such forms of politicisation risk drifting toward a new ‘spoils system’ most would want to avoid?     

Do we need special,collective rights for immigrants and refugees in Western Europe?

Ethicists and political philosophers like Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor have sensitized us to the need for recognizing the specific identity of minority groups. Once we stress the importance of group identities, the question arises how to protect those identities. Taylor and Kymlicka seek the answer to this question in granting special, collective rights to minority groups. In their analysis, Taylor and Kymlicka seem to have some specific, ‘historically settled’ minority groups in mind: the native Indian peoples of North America, and the French‐speaking community in Quebec, respectively. In my article, I want to examine whether this plea for special rights can be transferred to the Western European and, more specific, Dutch context. In this context, ‘minorities’ are not historically settled communities, but rather ethnic minorities, migrant workers and refugees, who have settled here only recently. Is it possible to maintain here, too, that special, collective rights are the best way to protect their identity? I shall answer this question in the negative. In the Western European setting, cultural pluralism may be best guaranteed by sticking to quite ordinary individual human rights. If these rights are implemented fully and effectively, we do not need special rights.     

An Exploratory Study of Human Rights Knowledge: a Sample of Kindergarten and Elementary School Pre-service Teachers in Spain

This study aims to explore the level of information and knowledge 150 Spanish kindergarten and elementary school teachers in pre-service training have about human rights. We compared two groups of students: students with no specific training and students with specific training (the students with specific training study with the new training teaching programme that includes a compulsory subject related to citizenship education). The contents are organized around three thematic areas. Human rights are included in the first area ‘Basic concepts to promote equality and participation in Elementary Education’; the other two areas are: ‘Learning to participate at Elementary School’ and ‘Building a civil school that promotes equality and participation at Elementary School’. It is a one semester subject with 3 h of teaching per week. The main hypothesis is that a specific training on human rights will lead to an important improvement not only in student’s level of knowledge but also in the way they categorize this specific content. We have administered a questionnaire designed for the study. In general, our results show that students of both groups have a basic and limited knowledge about human rights. The group with specific training shows a higher level of knowledge than the other group and a different way of organizing it. This would go in the direction of other studies of supporting and reinforcing the inclusion of specific training on human rights during the initial teacher training programmes at the university.