The three issues of gender equality, human rights and cultural diversity have dominated my organizational commitments, research, and clinical practice in transcultural psychiatry. These issues are intertwined in many ways and have broad implications for transcultural psychiatry. With increasing globalization, psychiatrists in many countries are likely to be treating patients who have migrated from different cultures and who may have been exposed to a variety of traumatic experiences that have a profound impact on their mental health. Of particular concern is the group of torture survivors and the elucidation of their symptom manifestations, as well as effective therapeutic interventions, which clearly show how human rights issues are linked to research and clinical psychiatry. The analyses of how different ethnic groups use psychiatric services, epitomize how important it is to pay attention to gender aspects in the interpretation of the findings and their therapeutic, as well as policy, implications.
This study examined the representation of China's human rights and sustainability record in the mainstream South African media. It also explored the factors that influence both South African and Chinese journalists and its potential effects on their coverage of China's sustainable development and human rights impact. Through its "Going Out" policy, China has re-established a close affiliation with African countries. South Africa is significant to this growing China-Africa relationship, as a fellow member of the BRICS group of emerging nations. Through its soft power strategy, whether as a "charm offensive" (Kurlantzick, 2008), or "charm defensive" (Shi, 2013), China has expanded its media reach in Africa through platforms such as Xinhua, China Central Television (CCTV) and People's Daily to provide counter stereotypical images of being "a mysterious, exotic and unknowable force" (Wasserman, 2012). Dominant media discourses have represented China as lacking concern for good governance, transparency, freedom of the press, worker's rights, human rights, and environmental protection in its relationship with Africa (Sautman & Hairong, 2009; French, 2014). China has been criticised for exporting its environmental destruction and human rights violations to the African continent. These negative perceptions among global media and key roleplayers could harm China's strategies to harness its soft power on the African continent. This study explored to what extent these perceptions are manifested in media coverage, and what factors influenced this coverage. Through a qualitative framing analysis, this study examined how China's sustainable development and human rights record is depicted in South African media. The framing analysis explored three individually-owned South African media publications: the weekly investigative paper Mail & Guardian, the Cape Times daily and the online news site News 24, to determine South African media representation of China. The study found five dominant frames in South African media's coverage of China's sustainable development record. China as key perpetrator in poaching; China vs the USA as a superpower; China's role in the struggle against climate change; China as a source of green technologies, renewable energy and green investment; and China as a polluted country itself. Regarding South African media's coverage of China's human rights record, three dominant themes have emerged: Cheap Chinese products replacing job opportunities in Africa, China's general poor record of human rights and cheap Chinese labour in African countries. Additionally five dominant frames were found in Chinese media coverage of China's sustainable development: China's climate leadership, China-US collaboration, repercussion for environmental violations, China's green technology and innovation, pollution in China, and Chinese environmental aid. Regarding human rights, only three dominant frames were found: Chinese jobs empower African communities, improved labour conditions and official human rights engagements. The second part of this study examined how China's media image might influence Chinese and South African journalists' coverage of China's sustainable development and human rights impact. Apart from China's environmental and human rights reputation, which other influences on journalists have been significant to their coverage of China? Using Reese's (2001; 2016) hierarchy of influences model as a guideline, this study explored the individual, routine, organisational, extra-media and ideological influences on Chinese and South African journalists covering China's human rights and sustainable development reputation. Using semi-structured interviews, 20 journalists from Chinese and South African publications were interviewed. The interview questions built on Reese's (2001; 2016) sociology of the media approach. The aim was to compare the different layers of how journalists in China and South Africa are influenced when covering China's human rights and sustainable development record. Results show that South African journalists were strongly influenced by their perceptions of China's environmental and human rights impact, which are generally pessimistic. They find Chinese government and sources to be inaccessible and distrust them. South African journalists also believe that media diplomacy will not lead to soft power success in Africa, in particular compared to efforts such as health diplomacy. Chinese journalists were strongly influenced by the Chinese state's media ownership. Despite censorship, Chinese journalists find working for Chinese publications, Xinhua in particular, honourable. They find their role in improving China's soft power in Africa through media diplomacy to be crucial, and particularly through challenging current western representations of China.
El intento por desmitificar el fundamento de los derechos, la búsqueda de cierto grado de diferenciación sistémica, el énfasis en la efectividad y la legitimidad, así como la importancia de la convención y la participación política son elementos comunes a las distintas aproximaciones teóricas sobre los derechos humanos. A partir de su análisis, es posible construir un concepto del término "derechos humanos" susceptible de ser medido con mayor precisión en los estudios sobre la efectividad que tienen las normas jurídicas sobre este tema en un contexto concreto. ; This article seeks to demystify the foundations of rights. It looks at the search for some systemic differentiation. It emphasizes effectiveness, legitimacy, the importance of convention and of political participation as common elements of the different theoretical approaches to human rights. By analysing these elements it is possible to build the term "human rights" as a concept capable of being measured accurately by studying the effectiveness of legal rules as applied to human rights in specific contexts.
El intento por desmitificar el fundamento de los derechos, la búsqueda de cierto grado de diferenciación sistémica, el énfasis en la efectividad y la legitimidad, así como la importancia de la convención y la participación política son elementos comunes a las distintas aproximaciones teóricas sobre los derechos humanos. A partir de su análisis, es posible construir un concepto del término "derechos humanos" susceptible de ser medido con mayor precisión en los estudios sobre la efectividad que tienen las normas jurídicas sobre este tema en un contexto concreto. ; This article seeks to demystify the foundations of rights. It looks at the search for some systemic differentiation. It emphasizes effectiveness, legitimacy, the importance of convention and of political participation as common elements of the different theoretical approaches to human rights. By analysing these elements it is possible to build the term "human rights" as a concept capable of being measured accurately by studying the effectiveness of legal rules as applied to human rights in specific contexts.
This article argues that in order to understand how international human rights agreements (HRAs) work, scholars need to turn their attention to rights that are not definitional to democracy. When rights practices diverge from treaty rules, but the domestic enforcement mechanisms that give such agreements their bite are robust, how do governments behave? The study explores this question by examining a core treaty that prohibits child labor. When domestic enforcement is likely, states where many children work are often deterred from ratifying. Nevertheless, those that do ratify experience significant child labor improvements. By contrast, in non-democracies, ratification is a promise that is easily made but seldom kept.
The subject matter of this paper is the analysis of the ownership right and its limitations in neighbour-law relationships, including the restrictions on ownership and neighbours' rights due to the prohibition of abuse of rights. Neighbours' rights set boundaries to the content of the ownership right, whereas the prohibition of abuse of rights additionally restricts the freedom of exercising the recognised content of the ownership right. The paper aims to point out to the basic differences between neighbours' rights and the prohibition of abuse of rights, as well as to the occasional overlapping of their legal functions and effects.
A landmark in the realization of UNESCO's Sustainability Goals, Education for All (SDG4), was passed when the organization's Recommendation of Open Educational Resources (OER) was uniformly adopted in 2019. Now it is time to transfer from the consciousness of OER to their mainstream realization at all levels, micro, meso, and macro, including all stakeholders, such as governments, institutions, academics, teachers, administrators, librarians, students, learners, and the civil service. The OER Recommendation includes five areas: building capacity and utilizing OER; developing supportive policies; ensuring effectiveness; promoting the creation of sustainable OER models; promoting and facilitating international collaboration; monitoring and evaluation. OER are valued as a catalyst for innovation and the achievement of UNESCO's SDG 4, education for all, lifelong learning, social justice, and human rights. The OER Recommendation will be a catalyst for the realization of several other SDGs. Because access to quality OER concerns human rights and social justice, this Recommendation is vital. In 2020, the effects of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the importance of opening up education and the access to internationally recognized, qualified learning resources. This article describes and discusses how the promise of resilient, sustainable quality open education can be fulfilled in the new normal and the next normal.
The point of judicial review in Europe is to legally institutionalize a practice of Socratic contestation. Socratic contestation refers to the practice of critically engaging authorities, in order to assess whether the claims they make are based on good reasons. This practice, described most vividly in the early Platonic dialogues, shares many features with judicial review and raises some of the same questions. For one, neither is legalist. In constitutional rights law, the proportionality requirement, which is a defining feature of what I call the Rationalist Human Rights Paradigm (RHRP), requires open engagement with questions of policy and justice. Yet the reasoning courts engage, like Socratic elenctic reasoning, is relatively pedestrian and craftsmen-like and does not generally require the talents of philosopher kings or Herculean demi-gods. Socrates, who claimed to know nothing and Judges, who only claim to know the law, in practice turn out to be quite effective at uncovering basic mistakes in the justifications advanced by the party whose claim is at issue. Legally institutionalised Socratic contestation is well suited to address a wide range of pathologies that occasionally infest the political process, ranging from 1. complacent thoughtlessness brought about by habit, convention or tradition, 2. deciding on grounds that are inappropriate in a liberal democracy or 3. succumbing to ideology. Furthermore Socratic contestation is a practice that gives institutional expression to the idea that all legitimate authority depends on being grounded in public reasons, that is, justifiable to others on grounds they might reasonably accept. Judicial review as Socratic contestation is attractive both because it leads to better outcomes and because it reflects deep commitments of liberal democracy. Socrates claimed that a polity that takes pride in self-government, should accord him a place of honor , instead of trying to silence him. The same is true for legally institutionalised Socratic contestation.
The author presents an understanding of how human capital and human rights have influenced educational policies and the persistence of inequitable opportunities for students. As an alternative approach, human capabilities, an emerging concept of basic liberties, provides an alternative theory for building human capital that can inform academic and social advocacy for reducing gaps in fairness in opportunities to attain a higher education. The author introduces four frames for decoding assumptions used in political rationales for higher education policies, programs, and funding. These frames are used to examine how six states adapted to shifts in federal policy on educational standards and high loans. When policy assumptions are decoded, a human capabilities lens can help find remedies to inequalities in state system markets.
Surveying recent scholarship, this article argues that human rights have succeeded in their time, because powerful states have called them into being and endowed them with substantial force. Rather than seeing human rights as an epiphenomenon of the global politics of the 1970s, this article places human rights in a longer historical trajectory and gives special attention to the era of the 1940s. Now that human rights have become ensconced in the politics, the challenge has been to implement human rights protections. Some commentators worry that human rights interventions simply hide neo-imperial ambitions and agendas of regime change. This article argues by contrast that this responsibility to protect emerged directly from the historical evolution of the human rights idea since 1945. Adapted from the source document.
