The use of drugs in torture and human rights abuses

The forced administration of drugs, usually by injection, may accompany physical torture. In the extrajudicial environment in which torture occurs, documentation of the types of drugs used is difficult. In violation of all codes of professional ethics, physician participation appears to be ubiquitous. In the Soviet Union, human rights abuses have become institutionalized within the mental health care system. Therapeutic drugs are used, often at toxic levels, to punish political and/or religious dissidents.     

Survey reveals human rights abuses in Alberta

A survey of people with HIV/AIDS in Alberta suggests that there are serious deficiencies in the provision of pre- and post-test counselling to people undergoing HIV-antibody testing. Survey respondents also identified human rights abuses in employment, housing, and other areas.     

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.     

A hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses

Dehumanization is anecdotally and historically associated with reduced empathy for the pain of dehumanized individuals and groups and with psychological and legal denial of their human rights and extreme violence against them. We hypothesize that ‘empathy’ for the pain and suffering of dehumanized social groups is automatically reduced because, as the research we review suggests, an individual''s neural mechanisms of pain empathy best respond to (or produce empathy for) the pain of people whom the individual automatically or implicitly associates with her or his own species. This theory has implications for the philosophical conception of ‘human’ and of ‘legal personhood’ in human rights jurisprudence. It further has implications for First Amendment free speech jurisprudence, including the doctrine of ‘corporate personhood’ and consideration of the potential harm caused by dehumanizing hate speech. We suggest that the new, social neuroscience of empathy provides evidence that both the vagaries of the legal definition or legal fiction of ‘personhood’ and hate speech that explicitly and implicitly dehumanizes may (in their respective capacities to artificially humanize or dehumanize) manipulate the neural mechanisms of pain empathy in ways that could pose more of a true threat to human rights and rights-based democracy than previously appreciated.     

Report documents human rights abuses of drug users in Thailand

A violent, state-sponsored "war on drugs" is jeopardizing Thailand's long struggle to become one of Southeast Asia's leading rights-respected democracies. This is one of the findings of a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the eve of the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand in July 2004.     

Human rights abuses and the medical profession

Allegations of torture are on the increase and the medico-legal and ethical problems can no longer be ignored by the medical profession. While jurists fail to give effective legal guidelines as to what amounts to 'torture', reports indicate that doctors are often engaged in activities which are difficult to reconcile with any conception of medical ethics. There is a clear need for the medical profession to re-evaluate their involvement in circumstances that are a direct antithesis of their professional occupation. The skills of doctors with forensic expertise allow detection of human rights abuses and thereby its potential reduction. There is scope for the reduction torture or ill-treatment, if the profession maintain high standards of medical practice and ethics.     

Liberty: human rights and mental health

In this paper, Lord Phillips reflects on the present state of the law relating to mental health; he considers the place of the common law doctrine of necessity as the basis for the detention of patients; he reviews a number of issues arising from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and a number of recent decisions of the Court of Appeal. Finally, he considers the prospects for change in the law foreshadowed in the Government's White Paper on the Reform of Mental Health Law (2000).     

Seat belts and human rights: an appraisal

Mandatory seat belt legislation has been passed in 15 states. Accompanying this action has been a deluge of information concerning the lives saved and the injuries prevented by the wearing of seat belts by the front seat passengers in automobiles. This study presents data relating to the injuries and deaths attributable to their usage. There is virtually no major area of the adult body that has escaped such involvement. Mechanisms by which seat belt injury is effected are described in relation to the restraint systems currently available in the United States and abroad.