Can We Still Afford Human Rights?

Can We Still Afford Human Rights? PDF

Author: Jan Wouters

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2020-10-30

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 183910032X

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This insightful book offers a critical reflection on the sustainability and effectiveness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its legacy over the last 70 years. Exploring the problems surrounding universality, proliferation and costs, it asks the provocative question, can we still afford human rights?

The Twilight of Human Rights Law

The Twilight of Human Rights Law PDF

Author: Eric Posner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0199313466

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Countries solemnly intone their commitment to human rights, and they ratify endless international treaties and conventions designed to signal that commitment. At the same time, there has been no marked decrease in human rights violations, even as the language of human rights has become the dominant mode of international moral criticism. Well-known violators like Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan have sat on the U.N. Council on Human Rights. But it's not just the usual suspects that flagrantly disregard the treaties. Brazil pursues extrajudicial killings. South Africa employs violence against protestors. India tolerate child labor and slavery. The United States tortures. In The Twilight of Human Rights Law--the newest addition to Oxford's highly acclaimed Inalienable Rights series edited by Geoffrey Stone--the eminent legal scholar Eric A. Posner argues that purposefully unenforceable human rights treaties are at the heart of the world's failure to address human rights violations. Because countries fundamentally disagree about what the public good requires and how governments should allocate limited resources in order to advance it, they have established a regime that gives them maximum flexibility--paradoxically characterized by a huge number of vague human rights that encompass nearly all human activity, along with weak enforcement machinery that churns out new rights but cannot enforce any of them. Posner looks to the foreign aid model instead, contending that we should judge compliance by comprehensive, concrete metrics like poverty reduction, instead of relying on ambiguous, weak, and easily manipulated checklists of specific rights. With a powerful thesis, a concise overview of the major developments in international human rights law, and discussions of recent international human rights-related controversies, The Twilight of Human Rights Law is an indispensable contribution to this important area of international law from a leading scholar in the field.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 21st Century PDF

Author: Gordon Brown

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2016-04-18

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 1783742216

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The Global Citizenship Commission was convened, under the leadership of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the auspices of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study, to re-examine the spirit and stirring words of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The result – this volume – offers a 21st-century commentary on the original document, furthering the work of human rights and illuminating the ideal of global citizenship. What does it mean for each of us to be members of a global community? Since 1948, the Declaration has stood as a beacon and a standard for a better world. Yet the work of making its ideals real is far from over. Hideous and systemic human rights abuses continue to be perpetrated at an alarming rate around the world. Too many people, particularly those in power, are hostile to human rights or indifferent to their claims. Meanwhile, our global interdependence deepens. Bringing together world leaders and thinkers in the fields of politics, ethics, and philosophy, the Commission set out to develop a common understanding of the meaning of global citizenship – one that arises from basic human rights and empowers every individual in the world. This landmark report affirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeks to renew the 1948 enterprise, and the very ideal of the human family, for our day and generation.

Human Rights

Human Rights PDF

Author: İoanna Kuçuradi

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 3643903081

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Philosophy in International Context Philosophie im internationalen Kontext, In this collection of papers on human rights, loanna Kuçuradi conceptualizes human rights as ethical principles, as well as premises for legislation and for legal reasoning. She attempts, by doing so, to show the significance of clear concepts for the protection of human rights in practice. Taking this conception of human rights as her point of departure, she also discusses the specificities of law, of the state and of politics that hold the most promise, under present-day conditions, for the protection of human rights and the prevention of their violation.

Human Rights in Times of Transition

Human Rights in Times of Transition PDF

Author: Kasey McCall-Smith

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2020-11-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1789909899

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This timely book explores the extent to which national security has affected the intersection between human rights and the exercise of state power. It examines how liberal democracies, long viewed as the proponents and protectors of human rights, have transformed their use of human rights on the global stage, externalizing their own internal agendas.

The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia PDF

Author: Samuel Moyn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0674256522

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Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Factfulness

Factfulness PDF

Author: Hans Rosling

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 125012381X

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.

Can Human Rights Survive?

Can Human Rights Survive? PDF

Author: Conor Gearty

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006-05-18

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 131645052X

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In this set of three essays, originally presented as the 2005 Hamlyn Lectures, Conor Gearty considers whether human rights can survive the challenges of the war on terror, the revival of political religion, and the steady erosion of the world's natural resources. He also looks deeper than this to consider the fundamental question: How can we tell what human rights are? In his first essay, Gearty asks how the idea of human rights needs to be made to work in our age of relativism, uncertainty and anxiety. In the second, he assesses how the idea of human rights has coped with its incorporation in legal form in the UK Human Rights Act, arguing that the record is much better and more democratic than many human rights enthusiasts allow. In his final essay, Gearty confronts the challenges that may destroy the language of human rights for the generations that follow us.

Corporate Responsibility for Wealth Creation and Human Rights

Corporate Responsibility for Wealth Creation and Human Rights PDF

Author: Georges Enderle

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-01-28

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1108830803

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Enderle illustrates the importance of corporate responsibility by integrating wealth creation and human rights. An invaluable reference for students, teachers and researchers in business and economic ethics, social sciences and human rights studies, as well as for leaders in business, civil society organizations and international institutions.