The European Union's original focus was on economic integration among the six founding Member States. The task of securing human rights at a supranational level had been entrusted to the Council of Europe, which oversees and operates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its associated Court, the European Court of Human Rights, situated in Strasbourg. The ECHR remains the key instrument in Europe for the protection of human rights. At the same time, the EU has, over time, developed a framework for the protection of human rights which, in part, overlaps with the ECHR but also differs in significant ways.E-Book can be accessed here- https://sulne.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/studying-eu-law-during-and-after-brexit-1st-edition.pdf
I. Human Rights and Democratic Movements in Armenia - Human Rights as an "Attractor" of Europeanization Processes of Transcaucasian "Neither War nor Peace Societies" (Artur Mkrtichyan) - Human Rights Defender's Office Armenia (Larisa Alaverdyan) - The Factor of Human Rights Protection as Criteria for the Development in the Social System (Hovhannes Hovhannisyan) - Two Priorities and Two Suggestions in Leading the Way to Human Rights Protection (Gevork Manoukian) - Intrastate Mechanisms of the Protection of Human Political Rights and Freedoms in Armenia (Ashot A. Alexanyan) - The Future of Democracy in Armenia: Institutional and Mass Beliefs Perspectives (Alexander Markarov) II. Human Rights and Education in Armenia - Human Rights in the System of Civic Education Values (Valery Poghosyan) - The Role of Academic Knowledge in Maintaining Tolerance (Ani Muradyan) - Rights of a Child or Duties of Adults.? (Mira Antonyan) - The Right to Education for Children with Special Needs: Inclusive Education in Armenia (Marina Hovhannissyan) - Human Rights Awareness and UNDP Evaluation in Armenia (Kristina Henschen) - Human Rights Education in Armenia – A Base Line Study (Litit Umroyan; Lucig Danielian) III. Human Rights and Minorities in Armenia - Human Rights, Minorities and Human Rights Education in Armenia: An External Perspective (Claudia Mahler; Anja Mihr; Reetta Toivanen) - Minorities and Identity in Armenia (Tatevik Margaryan) - Legal and Real Opportunities for the National Minorities Residing on the Territory of the Republic of Armenia (Hranush Kharatyan)
One of the most important issues facing the international human rights movement is the claim that human rights values are universal and not culturally specific, and thus can be used to understand, evaluate, and influence global actors. This claim has obvious political and philosophical dimensions. That the concept of international human rights is being taken seriously by both governmental and nongovernmental actors is a sign of the importance of human rights today. The number of countries ratifying the basic international human rights treaties has reached an all-time high. Nevertheless, current events are drawing into question the universality and efficacy of the human rights regime. These events include women's rights violations and genocide in Bosnia- Herzegovina, genocide in Rwanda, violation of the humanitarian laws of war in Chechnya, and the increased use of the death penalty in the United States. It is a tribute to the resiliency and appeal of the human rights idea that efforts to address these situations have begun to attract some of the most thoughtful advocates and philosophers of the twentieth century. On Human Rights is a collection of essays that addresses both the philosophical and political dimensions of the human rights debate, and provides useful guidelines for further advances in international human rights theory and practice. The seven essays in the collection range from philosophical inquiries concerning the source of international human rights norms to powerful critiques of our current understanding of the content of these norms and suggestions about how to create, support, and sustain an international human rights culture. The essays were presented over the course of a year at Oxford University, England, as part of an annual series of lectures sponsored by Amnesty International. It appears that the only thematic demand made of contributors was that they address a subject related to human rights.
The article analyzes the key historical stages of the formation of human rights. It is determined that each person has a certain spectrum of a priori rights. And today, most democratic countries in the world are striving to ensure that these rights are not only formal but also implemented in practical terms. That is why the last half of the XX century marked the emergence of international recognition of human rights. The author of the article also believes that the mechanisms of ensuring, guaranteeing or observing rights in society begin with its high moral standard, where the person does not infringe the rights of other individuals, or even in the event of such an attack, will consciously follow the punishment provided by the state. In this article, the term human rights was deliberately used, since the author considers it more justified in this context, given that it is a more general category that covers "human and civil rights and freedoms". In other cases, such phrases may be used as "human rights" or "fundamental, fundamental or fundamental rights." Both of these terms have the right to exist and each of them is found in separate European documents. Separately, the article explores the distinction between law and freedom, which is a separate argument to the emergence of a cumulative category, which may include rights and freedoms. Another argument in favor of this opinion, the author calls the possibility of the existence of not only human rights, but also non-human rights, in particular, it is about the rights of animals.
Research, policy analysis, and conditional aid policy among some donor countries rely on standards-based measures of country human rights performance. These measures code annual performance based on narrative reports published by the US State Department and Amnesty International. The coding yields a performance ranking for countries that in our view is ?absolute? or reflects that current state of human rights performance without taking into account the relative social, political, or economic conditions within countries. While this absolute ranking is useful for empirical analyses of some human rights questions and policy applications, it can lead to perverse outcomes in other areas of work. This article provides an alternative method for ranking country human rights performance that takes into account an array of additional variables that are related to the protection of civil and political rights. The method involves three stages. Stage one applies principal component factor analysis to five different standards-based measures of civil and political rights to extract a single human rights ?factor score.? Stage two regresses the factor score on a series of explanatory variables for the protection of civil and political rights for which there is widespread consensus and then saves the residual as an indicator of the ?over? or ?under? performance of countries with respect to the protection of those rights. Stage three plots the ?factor score? alongside the relative score to compare these different measures of human rights performance over time and across different regions. Our results lead to a new depiction of human rights progress in the world that we believe will be of interest to human rights scholars and practitioners.
Over the past few years, two main approaches have been suggested for analyzing human rights: the natural rights model and the political approach. This essay argues that neither of these accounts offers an accurate understanding of contemporary human rights and introduces an alternative model to think about them that combines elements of both views: the two-tier model. The first layer of the model reconstructs the concept of human rights as a moral category. This moral category articulates conditions that any agent wielding sovereign political authority must fulfill in order to treat human beings with the respect and concern they deserve, and postulates five abstract rights that may lead to alternative lists of concrete human rights in different social and historical settings. In contrast, the second layer of the two-tier model aims to illuminate the practice of international human rights. Although, upon this view, international human rights are grounded on the notion depicted by the first layer of the model, they constitute a historical practice that cannot be completely reduced to any prior idea. As a result of this, current human rights practice may include elements that were not already present in the concept of human rights. Thus, human rights turn out to be at the same time natural and political, conceptual and historical, moral and positive, domestic and global. ; Fil: Montero, Julio César. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina
The origin and justification of human rights, whether anchored in biological theory, natural law theory, or interests theory, as well as their cultural specificity and actual value as international legal instruments are subject to ongoing lively debates. As theoretical and rhetorical discourses challenge and enrich current understanding of the value of human rights and their relevance to democratic governance, they have found their way into public health in recent decades and play today an increasing role in the shaping of health policies, programs and practice. Human rights define the obligations of states to their people and towards each other, create grounds for governmental accountability and inspire recognition of, and action on, factors influencing people's attainment of the highest possible standard of health. This article highlights the evolution that has brought health and human rights together in mutually reinforcing ways. It draws from the experience gained in the global response to HIV/AIDS, summarizes key dimensions of public health and of human rights and suggests a manner in which these dimensions intersect in a framework for analysis and action.
The origin and justification of human rights, whether anchored in biological theory, natural law theory, or interests theory, as well as their cultural specificity and actual value as international legal instruments are subject to ongoing lively debates. As theoretical and rhetorical discourses challenge and enrich current understanding of the value of human rights and their relevance to democratic governance, they have found their way into public health in recent decades and play today an increasing role in the shaping of health policies, programs and practice. Human rights define the obligations of states to their people and towards each other, create grounds for governmental accountability and inspire recognition of, and action on, factors influencing people's attainment of the highest possible standard of health. This article highlights the evolution that has brought health and human rights together in mutually reinforcing ways. It draws from the experience gained in the global response to HIV/AIDS, summarizes key dimensions of public health and of human rights and suggests a manner in which these dimensions intersect in a framework for analysis and action.
We investigate voting behavior on human rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Our central question is whether countries with a low human rights record systematically oppose human rights resolutions. An instrumental account of voting would suggest that these countries aim to weaken UN human rights resolutions since they could be future targets of these policies. If reputation aspects and other non-instrumental motives dominate, the influence can go in either direction. We estimate determinants of voting on the basis of 13,000 individual voting decisions from 1980 to 2002. Our results from ordered probit estimation show that a country's human rights situation is irrelevant to voting behavior if regional dependence of voting is controlled for. This suggests that countries' voting decisions are not made independently from each other. The results also show that simple rulesfor aggregating voting choices can lead to misleading results.
This Article argues that international human rights law, and the human rights movement more generally, need more defenders than critics in the current international political environment. Groups ranging from academics to governments have taken stances critical of human rights, and this Article seeks to defend the rights framework from some of these while also arguing for the importance of human rights in today's world. Noting that the field of human rights is not beyond criticism, this Article embraces some of those criticisms. However, it suggests that human rights law specialists need to spend at least as much time defending human rights law, and the universality of human rights, as they do criticizing it. Moreover, their criticisms need to be grounded in the reality of the theory and practice of human rights law to be useful and advance human dignity. Decontextualized hypercriticism risks playing into the hands of antirights actors, including some contemporary governments, as well as diverse fundamentalists and extremists.
We investigate voting behavior on human rights in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Our central question is whether countries with a low human rights record systematically oppose human rights resolutions. An instrumental account of voting would suggest that these countries aim to weaken UN human rights resolutions since they could be future targets of these policies. If reputation aspects and other non-instrumental motives dominate, the influence can go in either direction. We estimate determinants of voting on the basis of 13,000 individual voting decisions from 1980 to 2002. Our results from ordered probit estimation show that a country's human rights situation is irrelevant to voting behavior if regional dependence of voting is controlled for. This suggests that countries' voting decisions are not made independently from each other. The results also show that simple rulesfor aggregating voting choices can lead to misleading results.
n the 1930s, activists fought for the protection of civil rights in the Republic of Finland, expanding the notion of rights to include also categories of people who had been previously excluded, such as political prisoners, the mentally ill, and foreign refugees. Two of these activists were the editor of the journal Tulenkantajat, Erkki Vala, and the chair of the League of Human Rights in Finland, Väinö Lassila. Their usage of the concept 'human rights', drawing from the traditions of liberal humanism, Christian anarchism and the socialist labour movement, is analysed in the national and international context of the interwar era. During the 1930s, Erkki Vala increasingly used the concept 'human rights' in ways that seem to predate the so-called starting point of modern human rights discourse in the 1940s. He met with compact resistance from the authorities, which contributed to his political marginalisation and radicalisation. This article shows that the notion of universal human rights was not unthinkable before the end of the Second World War, but it was heavily politicised and controversial even in a democratic country such as the Republic of Finland. ; Peer reviewed
Human rights in South Asia is a daıting topic to cover in the space of half an hour, given the flagrant violations of human rights in the teeming democracies of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, not to mention Afghanistan, Bhutan, and the Maldives. In the recent past, India alone has witnessed brutal suppression of people [secessionist movements] in the North and Northeast; illegal detention, and tortue; contempt for women's rights as reflected in escalating dowry deaths, honor killings; skewed sex-rations, and evidence of female infanticide; denial of Dalit-Bahujan rights; increasing state sanctioned violence against Muslims and Christians.i and illegal evition of tribal and rural people from their land in the name of development.
Human rights in South Asia is a dauting topic to cover in the space of half an hour, given the flagrant violations of human rights in the teeming democracies of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, not to mention Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives. In the recent past, India alone has witnessed brutal suppression of people [secessionist movements] in the North and Northeast; ,llegal detention, and tortue; concempt for women's rights as reflected in escalating dowry deaths, honor killingsi skewed sex-rations, and evidence of female infanticide; denial of Delit-Bahujan rights; increasing state sanctioned violence against Muslims and Christians; and illegal eviction of tribal and rural people from their land in the name of development.
International human rights offer a powerful set of norms that have helped domestic advocates to successfully secure additional civil, political, economic and social rights for those living in poverty in the U.S. Legal aid attorneys, public defenders, and other public interest advocates have recognized human rights as an additional advocacy tool and are increasingly using human rights arguments in U.S. courts. This article examines three cases in which legal aid attorneys and public defenders successfully used human rights arguments in U.S. courts, and discusses emerging best practices for using human rights in litigation in the U.S.
