Suchergebnisse

Abstract Human rights NGOs contribute to the formation of norms and policies around penality, and inform social understandings of what constitutes acceptable punishment. This article turns to the symbolic group-making work of human rights workers as agents who work with prisoners, and who also construct the image of the prisoner for the rest of society. I zoom in on the case of prison NGO work in Russia, a non-democratic country, and answer two questions: first, how do prison NGOs construct the image of the prisoner, and articulate their relationship with their social base and their networks of civic engagement? Second, what organizational behaviors do these articulations encourage? Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews and observation at prison NGOs based in Moscow, the study shows that Russian NGO workers often view themselves and act as members of a middle class social movement in Russia. While NGOs tend to focus on the most economically disadvantaged and socially isolated groups in their work, the prisoners they depict when addressing the public and the press tend to represent more educated groups with higher levels of symbolic capital (political prisoners, those convicted of economic crimes, and former state employees), reflecting a desire to put prison on the middle class agenda. At the same time, prison NGO employees employ a class lens in their work with prisoners, and determine how to help prisoners based on their assessment of how the socio-economic background of the prisoner intersects with ethnicity, religion, ability/disability, region where they are serving their sentence, and region where they are from. In other words, prison NGO workers view prisoners through the resources they can accumulate using the simultaneous, intersecting dimensions of their status and their relation to other groups both in prison and outside.

AbstractHuman rights NGOs contribute to the formation of norms and policies around penality, and inform social understandings of what constitutes acceptable punishment. This article turns to the symbolic group-making work of human rights workers as agents who work with prisoners, and who also construct the image of the prisoner for the rest of society. I zoom in on the case of prison NGO work in Russia, a non-democratic country, and answer two questions: first, how do prison NGOs construct the image of the prisoner, and articulate their relationship with their social base and their networks of civic engagement? Second, what organizational behaviors do these articulations encourage? Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews and observation at prison NGOs based in Moscow, the study shows that Russian NGO workers often view themselves and act as members of a middle class social movement in Russia. While NGOs tend to focus on the most economically disadvantaged and socially isolated groups in their work, the prisoners they depict when addressing the public and the press tend to represent more educated groups with higher levels of symbolic capital (political prisoners, those convicted of economic crimes, and former state employees), reflecting a desire to put prison on the middle class agenda. At the same time, prison NGO employees employ a class lens in their work with prisoners, and determine how to help prisoners based on their assessment of how the socio-economic background of the prisoner intersects with ethnicity, religion, ability/disability, region where they are serving their sentence, and region where they are from. In other words, prison NGO workers view prisoners through the resources they can accumulate using the simultaneous, intersecting dimensions of their status and their relation to other groups both in prison and outside.

"Many young people are standing up for their rights against injustice. They experience, witness, or learn about something they think is not right in real life or in the media, and they are compelled to act. Teens and children have made a difference campaigning for human rights by starting movements, raising awareness, protesting, writing to politicians, and even testifying in front of national parliaments"--

"As human rights discourse increasingly focuses on analysing states and the institutions that promote and support the human rights machinery that states have created, this volume serves to recall that despite the growing size of the machinery and unwieldy nature of states, human rights began with real people. It samples a broad range of actors and localities where everyday people fought to ensure that the basic principles of human rights became a reality for all. This volume will give a face to the everyday people to whom credit is due for shaping human rights. It is designed to provide a point of reference for students of human rights, particularly those interested in pursuing a career in the field. It responds to the constant question about how to begin a career in human rights by highlighting that there is no single path into this dynamic field that was built on the back of small initiatives by people across a broad spectrum of career paths"--

Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction -- The Man in White: Henri Dunant -- Europe's Conscience: Fridtjof Nansen -- The White Flame: Eglantyne Jebb -- The Towering Intellect: Peng Chun (P. C.) Chang -- Equality, Not Special Status: Hansa Mehta -- Masters of Their Fate: Carlos Peña Rómulo -- The Incurable Optimist: Ralph J. Bunche -- A Case for Humanity: Benjamin B. Ferencz -- Imp, Crusader, Dude: Pauli Murray -- Art as Protest: Víctor Jara -- Determination, Patience, Insistence: Juan E. Méndez -- The Tightrope Walker: Shirin Ebadi -- Refusing to Be Silent: Judith Heumann -- Humans Are Animals Are Humans: Ingrid Newkirk -- Reclaiming the Meaning of Peace: Jody Williams -- The Long Road: S. James Anaya -- The Reporter: Anna Politkovskaya -- The Accidental Environmentalist: Catherine Coleman Flowers -- Sacred Rivers: Berta Cáceres -- The Tigress: Fannyann Eddy -- Acknowledgments -- What Can I Do? -- Sites to Visit -- Glossary -- Selected Bibliography.

"China's human rights lawyers are important: as legal advocates for victims of injustice; as proponents of legal and political change in China; as part of the global and international struggle for human rights; and as persecuted individuals. Based on years of fieldwork research and hundreds of anonymised conversations with several dozen human rights or, for short, 'rights lawyers' (weiquan lushi), this book provides a portrait of this extraordinary group of people. This book offers a unique and invaluable insight into contemporary Chinese law and politics, reflecting on the significance of the idea of rights in Chinese society and understanding how and why rights lawyers play the role they do. It answers questions such as: how do rights lawyers operate? What, if any, is rights lawyers' impact on legal practice? How do they interact with their bureaucratic, professional, and social environments? How and why do they resist repression? What is their significance for political developments in China in the longer term? Its chapters discuss how some Chinese lawyers become 'rights lawyers', and examines how bureaucratic systems of control operate to subdue and marginalise human rights lawyers as well as how such lawyers challenge the system. The lawyers' experiences of repression at the hands of the police and state security apparatus are analysed in detail along with the intellectual, political and moral resources they draw on. The book thus sets out what human rights lawyers in China are and what they stand for; an account that captures their experience at the hands of the legal-political system and by doing so, reflects on what that system is like. The audience for this book includes students and scholars of law, Chinese studies, political studies, international relations, and sociology and it is also addressed to people working in the fields of human rights advocacy, law, politics, international relations, and journalism"--

We live in an increasingly polarized world: one summed up by President Clinton, "we're all in this together;" the other summed up by then-presidential candidate Trump, "I alone can fix it." These world views have implications for workers and how the future workplace is ordered. In this Article, I explore the idea that a natural human rights approach to workplace regulations will tend to favor the we're-all-in-this-together view, whereas the Lochnerian or neo-liberal view tends to favor an individualistic world view. The Article's six-step analytical approach starts with a historical analysis of labor law jurisprudence, concluding that U.S. labor laws must be filtered through a law-and-economic lens of U.S.-styled capitalism to predict the outcomes of legal disputes and to expose human rights infirmities inherent to that approach. In step two, I explore T.H. Marshall's account of citizenship, concluding that Marshall's rights-based rubric is too limited to fully explain workers' rights, which tend to cut across the full gamut of human rights. In step three, I expand upon Marshall's work to build a framework for evaluating workplace laws based on the worker as a citizen of the labor force who has human rights. I do this using two methodologies: (1) comparative legal analysis between U.S. law and international human rights standards; and (2) jurisprudential analysis of fundamental values within a rights-based framework. In step four, I modify John Rawls's famous thought experiment to include a veil of empathy. In that modified experiment, I conclude that participants in the original position behind a veil of empathy would generate values underlying human rights, namely autonomy (to become part author of one's work life) and dignity (to be treated as a person always as an end and never merely as a means). In step five, I apply this human rights approach to show that workers' and employers' interests conflict at the interests-level and, more fundamentally, at the values-level. I conclude that these conflicts are primarily over the distribution of that which labor and capital create. This distributional question is fundamental a question of moral and political justice, which will and does have real political consequences. In step six, I set forth a path along which this research project should explore.