Human Rights Reporting: Rights,Responsibilities, and Challenges

This essay critically examines the intersections between news media and human rights in the context of the existing human rights framework. A survey of the fundamental provisions of international human rights law and of the evolving case law of human rights organs relating to media freedom and responsibilities reveals that existing gaps and underspecified obligations render problematic the normative guidance offered by the framework in addressing the pertinent human rights issues. However, this is part of the story. The problems associated with normative guidance are compounded by media practitioners’ contending approaches on the role of the media as “promoters of human rights.” The interplay between these factors is then examined through the prism of the two communities’ converging commitment to “truth-seeking.” This commitment can provide entry points to a more constructive engagement between the news media and the human rights community.     

Philosophers,Activists, and Radicals: A Story of Human Rights and Other Scandals

Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy.     

Civil Rights and Political Human Rights: Contesting Human Rights Failures within the Minimally Democratic State

Allen Buchanan argues that democracy ought to be added to the list of basic human rights, but he limits the conception of democracy to a minimum of electoral representation within the nation state, effectively collapsing human rights into civil rights. This, however, leaves him unable to address the problem of human rights failures occurring within established states that meet his standard of minimal democratic representation. In order to address this problem, I appeal to James Bohman's conception of the political human rights of all members of humanity, as opposed to the civil rights of the citizens of particular states. I argue that while this provides the basis on which to address the problem of human rights failures within minimally democratic states, Bohman's conception also entails the potential for deep tensions to arise between the different claims of civil and human rights.     

The Globalization of Rights: From Citizenship to Human Rights

Globalization is shifting the balance away from membership-based citizenship towards universal human rights, thus we ask: how are new human rights generated? We argue that the movement for human rights follows on the heels of the much older and richer tradition of citizenship, as can be seen from the fact that many of the new claims put forward by human rights activists seek to define traditional citizenship rights as universal human rights. Most recently, we witness attempts by NGOs and CSOs to bring health, rights-based development, and identity rights under the umbrella of human rights. We examine the changing but continuous relationship of these two rights traditions, the gains made by human rights activists and the global solidarity and national enforcement capacity needed to underwrite their further progress.     

Equality and Human Rights Commission: A Decade in the Making

This article traces the origins of the Commission over the decade before it opened its doors in October 2007, and the contentious debates and political trade-offs which led to its emergence in its current form; a history which throws light on the challenges it now faces. Inclusion of human rights in a 'single equality body', concessions on disability, the promise of a single Equality Act and the Commission's third arm, community relations, were major fault lines in debates complicated by devolution and fragmentation of responsibility in Whitehall but strengthened by an unusual degree of engagement with external stakeholders and by the scrutiny of the Joint Committee on Human Rights in Parliament. The outcome extends beyond establishment of a Commission with a powerful mandate. A process that began with separate equality interests competing to ensure their constituency did not lose out, fostered enthusiasm for collaboration to achieve the vision of society the Commission is tasked, by S3 Equality Act 2006, to deliver.'     

Human Rights,Public Budgets,and Epistemic Challenges

Ideally, governing institutions would be designed so that they would produce and implement with certainty ‘human rights-compatible budgets’, i.e. budgets that adequately reflect the obligations enshrined in human rights. However, there are various reasons why a government may ultimately fail to produce such budgets. This article focuses on under-examined challenges for budgeting for human rights: epistemically oriented challenges. More specifically, the article engages in ‘horizon scanning’, and it maps key underlying factors that can be conducive to epistemically oriented challenges to produce and implement human rights-compatible budgets. In addition, the article considers the road ahead from the perspective of institutional design.     

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 Contention in Latin America: A Comparative Study

This paper reports original data on contentious challenges, especially protests, focused on human rights in seven Latin American countries from 1981 to 1995. An analysis reveals that human rights contentious challenges are most prevalent where human rights abuses are worse and authoritarianism is present and in countries that are more urbanized. However, the incidence of such human rights contentious challenges is not related to the number of human rights organizations (HROs) in the country. Results also suggest two different types of human rights contention. National human rights movements, present in Argentina and Guatemala, involved HROs and demanded improvements in the national human rights situation. The other form is ancillary human rights protest, in which human rights challenges are led by a variety of groups, focus on repression particular to the groups involved and are either short-lived or part of a more general wave of opposition. This form of contention was more prevalent in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.