How to Advance Social Rights without Jeopardising the Human Rights Act 1998

When the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted, governments grasped that human rights are needed as safeguards, not only against authoritarianism but also against the causes of authoritarianism. For this reason, the UDHR encompasses civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. This holistic vision of human rights was obscured during the Cold War and more recently by economic neo‐liberalism. The UK government neglects social rights, which have a very low public profile, although there is evidence that the profile of these human rights is increasing. UK domestic law and practice is inconsistent with the holistic vision of human rights and the government's binding international social rights obligations. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recommends that the UK provides for ‘the legislative recognition of social rights’ which can be approached in various ways. One way is to proceed social right by social right (for example, the rights to housing, health and education), and sector by sector (for example, the sectors of housing, health and education). This administrative law approach advances explicit social rights without implicating or jeopardising the Human Rights Act 1998.     

Human Rights in the Public Sector

This article examines how universal human rights have been given practical effect in the UK through the Human Rights Act. It focusses on the role of human rights in public services and using the duty placed on public officials as a lever to bring about positive change.     

Enacting multi-layered citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ struggle for justice and equality

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Building on a notion of citizenship as multi-layered and constituted through collective practice, this article investigates the implications of the political acts of Turkey’s Armenian minority on sub-national and national citizenship in Turkey. We show that Turkey’s Armenians are coupling rights demands, identification, normative references, and mobilization at the sub-national, national, and transnational levels in innovative ways, and are thereby negotiating different layers of citizenship in Turkey in a way that strengthens equal national citizenship.     

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’.     

Human Rights Culture: Solidarity,Diversity and the Right to be Different

The concept of a human rights culture has been crucial to the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law. In this paper media and activist representations of human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender human rights are considered as indicative of an emerging human rights culture, especially around the Civil Partnerships Act 2004. A typology of representations of rights is developed and discussed. It is concluded that insofar as there is an emerging human rights culture, it is one that is concerned above all with creating and maintaining civic relationships rather than with the assertion of individual liberty, and as inviting political compromise rather than a principled stance on universal human rights.     

Why Human Rights Matter for Our Future: The Views of Three Young People

This article consists of statements by three young people with a passion for human rights. Two of the young people, Jude Smith (aged thirteen) and Khalil Richard (aged twenty) are members of the Sheffield Youth Cabinet. The third young person, Natasha Siguake (aged twenty), is a Young Advisor for Sheffield Futures. The three contributors talk about the human rights that are most important to them and why human rights are important for the future.     

The Conservative Case for Human Rights

This article explores how conservative values and Conservative Party politicians helped to shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 1948 and the European Convention on Human rights (ECHR) 1950. It provides an overview of the history of conservatism in the UK with a focus on the way that Conservative Party administrations promoted the protection of human rights, including social and economic rights. The author argues that the Conservative Party should continue to play a key role in protecting human rights legislation rather than regarding human rights as a ‘foreign’ imposition from Europe.     

National Security, Terrorism and Constitutional Balance

The 'war on terrorism' engages all the institutions of the state. A constitutional structure devoted to protection of liberty must place a paramount value on separation of powers, and a parliamentary democratic constitution should ensure that the ultimate locus of responsibility rests in the legislature, the only branch which has a direct connection to the citizens. However, in an ironic reversal of practice that prevailed before the coming of mass democracy, Parliament in the UK since the early twentieth century has largely accepted a supine role compared to the executive in matters of 'national security'. The judiciary, despite the enactment of legally enforceable human rights, has also manifestly failed to exercise its proper function of curbing abuses of state power. The result is an over-mighty executive, able to draw upon the deference of other branches of government in prosecuting the 'war on terrorism' on the battlefield and in the statute book, which has trampled on individual rights with virtually no check or counte-balance. Some principles by which the balance might be restored are suggested.     

Human rights for women: an argument for 'deconstructive equality'

The status of universalism has been much debated by feminists at the end of the twentieth century. Poststructuralist feminism is readily positioned in these debates as antagonistic to normative universalism. It is criticized as such: how is injustice to be judged and condemned if contestation and the openness of ungrounded universalism are the only ideals? This paper is a 'sub-philosophical' enquiry into the normative commitments to equality implicit in poststructuralist feminism and its relationship to 'actually existing' human rights for women as they have been re-worked by the international feminist movement. It argues that poststructuralist feminism can be used to provide support for one possible understanding of equality encoded in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It addresses feminist concerns over universal rights as androcentric and ethnocentric, arguing that extending human rights to women is compatible with poststructuralist commitments to anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism and required by the model of 'deconstructive equality' implicitly shared by CEDAW and poststructuralist feminism.     

Aspirational Legalism and the Role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Equality Policy

This paper looks at the role of the EHRC in the wider context of measures to promote equality in the welfare state, and highlights two major problems. First, social policy uses categories which are derived from empirical social analysis and processes of policy design, while anti‐discrimination and equality ‘grounds’ (such as gender and ethnic origin) are drawn from the mutual recognition and political mobilisation of groups. The intersection of these two epistemologies can produce progressive social reforms, but it can also result in sterile political competition between groups. Second, equality law makes rights‐based claims which are deliberately abstracted from the problem of aggregating rights into a manageable set of claims on scarce resources. This may be a strength in pursuing remedies for individual injustice, but it is a weakness in advancing wider ambitions to combat disadvantage affecting large social groups.     

政策否决的社会建构——以我国几次立法禁止“人肉搜索”的失败为例

针对传统的政策否决理论无法对我国立法禁止"人肉搜索"失败的现象做出完满解释的问题,本文通过引入建构主义社会学中边界物的概念认为:作为边界物的"人肉搜索"由于其解释的灵活性,存在着技术、权利和适用三个层面的划界。如果说从依靠人的"人机互动"中衍生出针对人的"人际互动"具有偶然性的因素,在其立法禁止的多方尝试中却是隐私权和"监督权-批评权"相对于另外一种隐私权和言论自由权划界方式的胜利。虽然中央和地方都试图在"监督权-批评权"的指涉对象上做出社会一般失范和官员腐败的划分,结果也只是带来规制性政策的流产或是象征性通过,即便趋利避害地利用"人肉搜索"已经得到了社会各界的广泛认同。文章还进一步指出,"人肉搜索"现象的出现和政策应对上的两难源于国家和公民社会之间的张力,只有对其进行有效分流才能真正阻止"网络暴力"的产生。而且在信息社会等生成性的制度语境下,打开政策问题内容的黑箱也是十分必要的。     

联合国国际人权两公约之背景,内容与意义

联合国国际人权两以约是国际社会在人权保护方面最重要的两个公约。两公约诉产生过程,内容和执行体系,都表明国际社会在人权保护领域既普遍的共识,也有尖锐的分歧。两公约本身即是求同存异的产物,它是尽可能地融合了东西方国家对人权的不同理解,充实和发展了《联合国宪章》中关于基本人权的内容和为人权领域的国际合作提供了国际法依据。但是,人权进行国际法领域,并不意味着可以把人权作为攻击或干涉他国内政的工具,借口不人