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Amid Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, the human rights community has understandably focused its attention on human rights violations committed by the Russian state, leaving the human rights implications of Ukraine's martial law on civilians largely unexamined. This article highlights the ways Ukraine's travel restriction on "battle-aged" civilian men has harmed three overlapping groups: civilian men, families (including women and children), and trans and nonbinary individuals. It then demonstrates that wartime policies such as this one are at odds with several areas of international human rights and humanitarian law: the right to freedom of movement, the right to conscientious objection, and the principle of respect for family life—all of which are meant to be implemented without discrimination on basis of gender. We conclude this type of gender-based law is not justified according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights' rules on derogation in time of national emergencies and emerging customary law and should receive greater attention by the human rights community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Legislative Council of the Australian island state of Tasmania rejected gay law reform in July 1991, a group of enterprising activists took their case to the United Nations. In April 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled in their favor. The case, Toonen v Australia , is a landmark human rights judgement that has proved highly influential in the years that have followed. Using interviews with the principal participants, this article provides a historical narrative of their activist journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations in 2007, the implementation of these indigenous rights has presented a persistent challenge for indigenous communities. Throughout the past three decades, Taiwan's indigenous peoples have undertaken diverse endeavors aimed at realizing their self-determination and cultural rights. Through an examination of a Constitutional Court case issued in 2021 (Constitutional Court Interpretation No. 803), this article reveals several factors which contribute to bridging the implementation gap of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CIRIGHTS Data Project scores a representative sample of all internationally recognized human rights. In this article, we use CIRIGHTS scores to discover global patterns in government respect for human rights. The findings show that worker rights, including the right to form a trade union and bargain collectively, are among the least protected human rights. The right to be protected from torture is also among the least protected rights, but, on average, other physical integrity rights—protection from extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearance—are among the most protected rights. We introduce an Overall Human Rights Protection Index for all countries, which shows that nearly two-thirds of the world's countries score less than 65 on the 100-point scale. A heat map shows that countries tend to have similar index scores if they share an international border. We discuss the implications of these patterns for future research and policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daily decisions taken by public service professionals such as social workers may directly impact their client's rights, especially if they are working in a law and policy context that is questionable in human rights terms. This article takes a novel approach by exploring what human rights roles are attributed to public service professionals by United Nations (UN) Treaty Bodies and UN Special Rapporteurs. The analysis reveals that the narrow conceptualization of human rights roles offered by (interpretations of) international human rights law may in fact diminish the potential of public service professionals to make a real contribution to human rights realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article discusses the extent to which the Sharia and human rights are intermingled in the constitutional architecture of Gulf countries, focusing on two main questions: first, the extent to which the constitutional references to the Sharia in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Constitutions coexist—or can coexist—harmoniously with constitutional liberties. Secondly, the extent to which the Sharia plays a role in the interpretation of human rights by judicial entities, and whether such interpretation is in line with international human rights standards. Drawing primarily on the jurisprudence of the Kuwaiti Constitutional Court (including the female Members of Parliament hijab case, the passport retention case, the Ramadan eating ban, and the more recent case on the prohibition of "imitating the opposite sex," the article suggests that judicial entities in GCC states should strive to align themselves better with their obligations stemming from human rights treaties, especially in relation to the principle of non-discrimination. It further argues that the richness and flexibility of Islamic law can effectively advance the argument of universality and cultural legitimacy of human rights in a spirit of reconciliation, arguably paving the way for a functioning regional human rights body in the Arab region. [End Page 1] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces several experts in international law and human rights, which include Payam Akhavan; Alexandra Byrne, an editorial intern at the Pulitzer Center, and David Cingranelli is a Professor at Binghamton University, focusing on human rights and governance.

This article argues that adopting the lens of disability may provide a way forward for the revival of human rights. It shows how it is disability that draws attention to resource deprivation that hampers the enjoyment of human rights. It does so by focusing on two novel aspects of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD): the general principle of participation and the adoption of a rights-based approach to dealing with disability. To illustrate this view, it uses as example the impact the restrictions have had on disabled people during the Covid-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the merit of UN treaty bodies' accumulated case law as a resource for domestic adjudicators, i.e. courts and quasi-judicial bodies (such as national human rights institutions) addressing human rights complaints at the national level. It has the objective of assessing the extent to which treaty bodies are "talking to" an audience beyond the parties in the case. Starting from a view that sees impact on national adjudicators as the key issue for treaty bodies' rulings on individual complaints, the article assesses to what extent the way that treaty bodies are exercising this role fits in this view. The study's focus is on two UN treaty bodies with a broadly similar output in quantitative terms, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CmERD) and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CmEDAW). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to literature on economic and social rights by examining how everyday places and spaces translate structural inequalities into individualized violations of international norms. Drawing on data from a participatory action research project in New York called The Legal Disruption Project (LDP), it argues for new models of knowledge production that bridge gaps between the experiences of marginalized populations and human rights practitioners. The LDP demonstrates how centering the voices of affected communities can contribute substantive insights to effective remedies for human rights violations. In particular, the article suggests potential for explicitly spatial remedies defined through participatory processes of community engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda by the UN Security Council constituted a forum-shift by women's rights advocates away from the human rights system. As queer critique of the WPS agenda gathers pace, this article reflects on the antecedents of the queer exclusions of the WPS agenda in international human rights law. The article thereby reveals the consequences in other international law regimes of human rights law's queer exclusions. The article concludes with some tentative proposals to utilise the pluralism of international human rights law to expand queer possibilities for both human rights and WPS. [End Page 406] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the time of Augustine, and continuing today, it is common for religious believers to say that humans are created in the "image of God." This imago dei idea was also commonly invoked, beginning in the seventeenth century, by Liberal theorists like Locke and Jefferson, as the foundation for natural or human rights. In this article, I will argue that for centuries, the dominant interpretations of imago dei were used by religious philosophical and political leaders to deny rights to both women and non-white men. More centrally to my thesis, this theological idea is still invoked today to deny human rights to children. However, taking children's human rights seriously offers both a new foundation for human rights generally, and a different interpretation of what it means for humans to reflect the divine image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), we posit that behavioral expectations in the form of norms and laws have a visible impact on government militaries. Using data from over 2,000 actor-incidents between 1989 and 2015, we find a robust negative relationship between physical integrity norms and CRSV. CRSV is often a gendered act, but its prevention is not. Our analysis suggests that CRSV prevention rests with the imperative to respect physical integrity rights. This inherent respect restrains government actors even when elements of formal military control are absent or only inconsistently enforced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite enduring prolonged skepticism, Africa's regional human rights has a complex architecture of institutions, norms, procedures, and jurisprudence. A major entity among these institutions is the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. In existence for over one and a half decades, the Court remains an institution in transition. With an identity defined mostly by its contentious jurisdiction, the significance of its advisory jurisdiction has been neglected. Three hundred eight cases (95.36 percent) of the 323 [End Page 365] cases received by the court in its first fifteen years were contentious. The remaining fifteen (less than 5 percent) were advisory. Notwithstanding its relative rarity, the initial evidence suggests that advisory jurisdiction of the African Court could potentially play a significant role in shaping the trajectory of human rights norms in Africa. This article explores the mechanics and potential impact of the advisory jurisdiction of the African Court for the future of human rights in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to property is part of International Human Rights Law (IHRL). However, the right is conspicuously missing from some fundamental treaties, and there are important inconsistencies in its interpretation by regional and global human rights bodies. In light of the indeterminacy and polysemy of IHRL in relation to property, this paper articulates a proposal to rethink this right taking Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) seriously. The proposal contains four propositions. Firstly, property is a human right. Secondly, it includes private property as one of its forms, but this is not the only one. Thirdly, property has a social function. And fourthly, as a matter of proportionality, fulfilling ESCR is one of the most important objectives that may justify the limitation of private property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyzes the human rights perspective upon what has emerged as one of the most significant socioeconomic and political challenges confronting many millions of people residing within high-income, liberal-democratic societies: rising poverty and socioeconomic inequality. This article argues that international and domestic human rights law and the social and political imaginaries of the wider human rights community largely fail to adequately diagnose and effectively respond to poverty and inequality within high-income, liberal-democratic societies. As a political and ethical doctrine founded upon a normative commitment to social justice, human rights should be taking the lead in efforts to condemn, understand, and develop responses to the poverty and inequality which blight the lives of many millions of people within many of the world's most affluent and, allegedly, most "liberal" societies. Human rights law has historically not done so. We, as a community, have not done so. This article offers a specific explanation for this continuing failure, by focusing upon the absence of any concerted recognition of or engagement with social class as it contributes to and compounds our exposure to poverty and inequality. Human rights remain largely blind to the many ways in which social class is intricately connected to poverty and inequality. The human rights community within high-income, liberal-democratic societies characteristically fails to take class seriously. Building upon previous writing in this area, this article explains why class is rarely recognized or engaged with by the human rights community. This article also sets out the basis for how we might begin the task of overcoming this highly damaging class blindness, to set the stage for what the author asserts as an urgent need if human rights is to provide the kind of political and ethical leadership required to effectively engage with poverty and inequality in affluent societies: the degentrification of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the decades human rights advocates have increasingly engaged with economic policy with a growing focus on what economies would look like if they were based on human rights. This article reports on an inquiry that asked whether it is possible to articulate a concept of human rights economics and if so, what its main features would be. This article notes the elements that ecological, feminist, and other branches of economics brought to light and succeeded in integrating into economic thought and policy. Drawing on this logic, this article analyzes key human rights principles to discern whether these can be articulated in economics. Concluding that they can, this article finds that it is possible to speak of human rights economics as a separate and complementary branch of economics, even if further work is required to finesse how this can be done. Finally, this article suggests some steps that can be taken to bring about more human rights-consistent economic thought and practice, and notes ways that human rights-based questioning of the assumptions that underlie mainstream economics could have a potentially transformative effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Fall 2014, frontline activists from Ferguson, Missouri traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to testify in front of the UN Committee Against Torture while the US government appeared before the body. The Ferguson to Geneva delegation participated in "shadow reporting," which describes opportunities for impacted people to confront the state in a multilateral forum and challenge the state's official account. Through this practice, ordinary people have an opportunity to shape international law based on their experience to suit their interests. Shadow reporting is a key platform for a critical form of transnational politics and contributes to an evolving view on the political nature of international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project develops theoretical intersections between theatre and human rights and provides methodologies to investigate human rights questions from within the perspective of theatre as a complex set of disciplines. While human rights research and programming often employ the arts as representations of political, social, and economic abuses, this study focuses on the intricacies of dramatic form and structure as uniquely positioned to interrogate important questions in human rights theory and practice. This project positions theatre as a method of examination, or as Alexander Baumgarten discussed, art as a way of knowing, rather than emphasizing more limited however important purposes the arts serve to raise consciousness that accompany other, often considered more primary modes of analysis. A main feature of this approach includes emphasis on dialectical structures in drama and human rights, and integration of applied theatre and critical ethnography with more traditional theatre research. This integration will demonstrate how theatre and human rights operates beyond the arts as representation model, offering a primary means of analysis, activism, and political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Targeted attacks on journalists are internationally condemned crimes, which not only undermine freedom of expression, but also symbolize an utter disregard for basic human rights. Yet, murders of journalists occur in all types of regimes, whether autocratic or democratic. This article explores the conditions that enable journalists to be subject to deadly attacks by state officials and unknown perpetrators. The typology of monitoring coercive agents is useful for the distinction between private and public information. External monitors, which share the information they gather with the public and hold the coercive agents accountable, are crucial for a safe working environment for journalists. The results of the multivariate regressions demonstrate that three main indicators of external monitoring, (1) robustness of civil society, (2) independence of media, and (3) strength of the judiciary are all associated with the occurrence of murders of journalists in a country. While a robust civil society and a strong judiciary decreases the probability of journalists being murdered by state officials and unknown perpetrators, a more critical and independent media structure appears to be associated with a higher probability of murders of journalists. The risks of such murders are especially higher for scenarios where the critical media outlets are abundant, but civil society and the judiciary are particularly weak and ineffective. [End Page 32] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Henri Bergson's idea of "open love" (a love that cares for all without preference, exclusion, or attachment), its relationship to religion, and its relevance for human rights. Open love is Bergson's solution to the problem of "closed morality" (our tendency to care for our own kind over others). Reading Dave Eggers' novel, What Is the What , alongside Bergson's work reveals that religion (Catholicism and human rights) is indispensable to the "open morality" demanded by human rights. Although religion and love are not often part of human rights discourse, both are fundamental for human rights to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Milestone anniversaries noting the creation of treaties, documents and bodies have become a common part of international human rights law. While much scholarship has been stimulated by such anniversaries, little has considered anniversary noting as an activity in its own right. The present article addresses this. Examining United Nations and scholarly materials on selected anniversaries from the mid-twentieth century to the present, it does so by thinking about time. Analysis of these materials reveals that international human rights anniversary work is characterized by an active relationship to time, rather than marking calendar time alone. This analysis stimulates a more reflective apprehension of anniversary noting as an important yet under-considered activity in this area of law and, in turn, enhances understandings of international human rights law and its operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Trump administration puzzlingly made human rights instrumental to US policy toward China even though human rights were not promoted across the board and many in the government exhibited strong authoritarian tendencies. Normalizing much of Trump's China policy, President Biden has framed contest with China as a defining fight between authoritarianism and democracy. Current high tensions between the two nations cannot be understood without a nuanced understanding of the human rights dimension. US-China relations are constituted socially, and human rights are a big part of that process although its relative importance varies over time and issues. The Trump administration's success shows that cynical policy entrepreneurs may counterintuitively contribute to social construction of human rights norms by joining hands with norm believers to form a movement to redirect a bilateral relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even before the enactment of the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Law Enforcement and Administration Act in 2003 (the first legal regime in Nigeria to prohibit and punish all forms of human trafficking), and its subsequent amendment in 2015, the number of women and children being trafficked from Nigeria had steadily been on the upswing. Strikingly, although civil society organizations continue to sprout across the length and breadth of the country, many of them dedicated to partnering with the government on its war against the menace posed by trafficking, the situation on the ground remains grimly unchanged. More women wind up being trafficked each year than the previous one, even as the brazenness and callousness of the traffickers assume a new, more intensely ferocious dimension. This is an unwholesome situation, considering that Nigeria is the "trafficking capital" of Africa, and raises several questions, three of which are profoundly critical. Why have strategies adopted to combat women trafficking failed? What can be done to reverse the situation? Is there any specific role for human rights in the process? Responding to these questions is the burden of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has implied a deep reconfiguration of national economies and a significant increase in inequalities. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which considers itself above human rights, has been a central institutional vehicle in this change through its credits and conditionalities that regularly translate into violations of the human rights of debtor states' populations. Neoliberalism entertains a hegemonic notion of human rights that proposes a vision of them based on the—alleged—defense of civil and political rights—that focuses on the individuals and distrust of the state—to the detriment of economic and social rights—where the relational aspect is essential, and the state assumes positive obligations. This has led to strong criticism of the ineffectiveness of human rights in producing real change in the world. This article discusses this minimalist and defeatist interpretation of human rights, highlighting their transformative potential in the fields of finance and economics. Human rights can function as a method to achieve, in fields of high complexity and abstraction, objectives that today enjoy broad consensus: reducing poverty, inequality, and climate change. This study shows that the marginalization of human rights that characterizes the IMF parallels the excessive exercise of its power in the world. Finally, some indications are provided regarding how these tensions were exacerbated in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the world, governments and state-aligned actors increasingly target human rights defenders online using techniques such as surveillance, censorship, harassment, and incitement, which together have been termed "digital authoritarianism." We currently know little about the concrete effects on human rights defenders of digital authoritarianism as researchers have focused primarily on hate speech targeting religious, national, and ethnic minority groups. This article analyzes the effects of digital authoritarianism in two countries with among the highest rates of killings of human rights defenders in the world; Colombia and Guatemala. Anti-human rights speech in these countries portrays defenders as Marxist terrorists who are anti-patriotic and corrupt criminals. Evidence for a direct causal link to offline violence and killing is limited, however, and this empirical study documents the non-lethal and conditioning effects of speech. Human rights defenders who are targeted online report negative psychological and health outcomes and identify a nexus between online harassment and the criminalization of human rights work. Many take protective measures, engage in self-censorship, abandon human rights work, and leave the country. To prevent these harms, social media companies must implement stronger human rights-protective measures in at-risk countries, including expediting urgent requests for physical protection, adopting context-specific content moderation policies, and publicly documenting state abuses. The article concludes by advocating for a new United Nations-sponsored Digital Code of Conduct that would require states to adopt transparent digital policies, refrain from inciting attacks, and cease illegally surveilling human rights defenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploration of cultural codes of humanitarianism and human rights in feature-length films. The aim of the article is to contribute to the study of mediated human rights, which has been very little developed [End Page 784] in comparison with work on humanitarian media and culture. The article draws on close readings of films and interviews with filmmakers and curators of human rights film festivals. The analysis is organized into themes that are prominent in critiques of humanitarianism and existing work on human rights films: victims, temporality, scale, and bearing witness. While there can be no definitive list of the essential differences between humanitarianism and human rights, there are differences as well as commonalities in the cultural codes of human rights films and humanitarian media. It is important to be aware of how mediated human rights represent alternatives to the humanitarian imaginary dominant in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article mentions contributors of the books including Professor of Political Science Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat, Lecturer in Law Koldo Casla, and Caroline Dommen who specializes in human rights.

Whether or not human rights are equipped to confront socioeconomic inequality, particularly its structural dimensions, has become the topic of much debate among scholars and activists in recent years. This article brings a sociological perspective to this debate. It offers an in-depth case study conducted in collaboration with social movement activists from mining affected communities in South Africa that explores the cognitive processes through which activists make sense of and give meaning to their reality. In so doing, it decenters dominant forms of human rights praxis, to instead learn from those engaged directly in redistributive struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses several neglected primary and secondary sources to present Chinese philosopher Chung-Shu Lo's life, education, and professional career as well as his related prior writings and contemporaneous thoughts in order to help readers gain a full, unbiased, and substantive understanding of Lo's claims and arguments in his reply to the UNESCO Survey concerning human rights in the Chinese tradition. It argues that it is crucial to draw on the above-mentioned sources to understand what Lo meant exactly when he proffered only three human rights were universal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International human rights law (IHRL) is often conceived of and taught as a system for enforcing specific, individual rights. In fact, IHRL's mandate extends far beyond individual rights to imposing broad structural constraints on states. The role of IHRL in national governance is a function of its relationship to the primary constitutive value of the modern world public order, human dignity. Through this relationship, IHRL exerts a centripetal doctrinal pull on all levels of public policy. This article explains the implications of IHRL's unique role in world public order for its interaction with the municipal laws and policies of states. It develops a theory of regime interaction between IHRL and municipal law, tracing the influence of IHRL on good governance to four of its features that constrain government decision making. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the theories developed in the article for domestic legislation and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The universally dire threat of climate change disproportionately affects marginalized populations, including the over one billion persons with disabilities worldwide. States that disregard the Paris Agreement, or exclude disabled persons from climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, are violating agreed-upon human rights obligations. Notably, the rights contained in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, are threatened by climate change. To date, however, disability has largely been excluded from international climate change negotiations as well as national-level discharge of climate-related measures. By contrast, a disability human rights approach views disabled persons as disproportionately experiencing environmental threats and unnatural disasters due to their exclusion from state laws, policies, and services available to their non-disabled peers. Additionally, a disability human rights approach mandates the removal of exclusionary barriers and the implementation of positive measures to ensure the equitable treatment of individuals with disabilities. Achieving disability-inclusive climate justice requires "participatory justice"—empowering persons with disabilities to ascertain climate mitigation and adaptation approaches that are efficacious for, successfully implementable by, and accountable to disabled people. Disability-inclusive climate justice solutions are in synergy with universal climate justice goals and benefit entire societies, not "only" those with disabilities. [End Page 81] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011, attention has shifted towards challenges of implementation. Through detailed analysis of the case of Indonesia, this article analyses the conditions under which implementation occurs and explores strategies for strengthened implementation. While UNGP implementation has often been argued to depend on strong collaborative learning networks, we demonstrate instead that power balances between rights coalitions and politico-business and technocratic elites have proved decisive—implementation varying across sectors and over time depending on configurations of market power, histories of rights struggles, and patterns of high-level political support. [End Page 56] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, businesses owe remediation when they "cause" or "contribute to" a human rights impact, but not when they are only "directly linked to" it. These terms determine when a victim is entitled to seek remediation from a business, but they have largely been ignored in existing scholarship. This article investigates the meaning of "cause, contribute, and directly linked to", revealing confusion and uncertainty before proposing a new system, built on existing authoritative guidance, for interpreting the terms and determining when businesses owe remediation for their human rights impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together the heretofore separate theorizations of Deafnicity and the hearing line, this article shows how reading the hearing line in literature becomes crucial to understanding Deafnicity and promoting Deaf rights. This article presents Angeline Fuller-Fischer's Scenes in the History of the Deaf and Dumb and Annie C. Dalton's To Viola Meynell as resistance literature that countered Viola Meynell's advancement of the international doctrine of eugenics in We Were Just Saying. Speaking to Sign Language Peoples' contemporary arguments for human and group rights, Angeline Fuller-Fischer and Annie C. Dalton redefined what it means to be deaf, a hearing ally, and "human." [End Page 736] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency is central to the human rights enterprise. However, the conventional human rights account implies perpetrators of rights violations have agency while victims do not. This article instead argues agency within rights violations is more accurately conceptualized as a continuum containing both parties. This argument is illustrated through twenty-four matched-pair interviews with perpetrators and victims/survivors of bonded labor in India. Subsequent analysis finds support for a three-fold approach to agency: (1) the simple ability to cause effects (conditional agency), (2) biological needs, cultural needs, or economic needs (need-based agency), and (3) agency that fulfils other's objectives (delegated agency). [End Page 714] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes seriously the claims of many experts in artificial intelligence that AGI (artificial general intelligence) could emerge as early as 2040. Some of the questions raised by AGI include: Does human-like intelligence entail consciousness, and does consciousness entail rights? Will the rise of AGI enhance or endanger human life? If the former, are there certain perceived enhancements that run counter to notions of human rights? If the latter, what are our collective duties, right now, to future generations? How can a human rights framework help us to negotiate these questions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the case of Brazil, this article looks deep into the state apparatus and analyzes the organic relationship between state commitments to human rights and the work of bureaucrats who are motivated by human rights values and ideas. Brazil had a consolidated history of engagement with the international human rights regime until Jair Bolsonaro was elected President. That history was marked by a foreign policy that was active in international human rights norm-making, as well as by domestic institutions and policies that sought to promote rights at home. An engaged state made room for the work of human rights bureaucrats in the federal government, including diplomats, officials at the Ministry of Human Rights, and beyond. Since the election of Bolsonaro, however, the Brazilian state has reversed and revised its foreign and domestic policies. As a result, bureaucrats who were dedicated to human rights work are now faced with persecution, having to oblige to the new foreign policy in the case of diplomats, or having to find somewhere else to work or something else to do, in the case of non-diplomats. [End Page 646] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights embodies a particular morality: the morality of human rights. In this article, I address several questions concerning that morality, beginning with this fundamental question: What reason do we have, if any, to accept, rather than reject, the morality of human rights? I also explicate two human rights—the human right to moral equality and the human right to moral freedom—and then pursue the implications of the two rights for two human rights controversies: the controversies concerning, respectively, abortion and same-sex marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ethical tensions inherent in international human rights field documentation and proposes intensive, simulation model, pre-fieldwork training as a means of reducing the risk of insensitive encounters. The article evaluates the social, educational, class, racial, and other power imbalances between parties in the ordinary fact-finding process. After mapping pitfalls and challenges, it assesses the simulation training method and its potential to respond to the volatile dynamics of fact-finding. We conclude that the rigorous, three-day or week-long exercise, carried out in a controlled, supervised setting, holds potential to train future advocates to navigate power dynamics, challenges in intercultural engagement, and other communications barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that many of the lessons learned and achievements made in the measurement of human rights over the past four decades are equally applicable to the measurement of modern slavery. It shows that modern slavery encompasses a significant subset of human rights found in international law, the parameters of which can be delineated and operationalized in ways that make the phenomenon amenable to measurement across a wide range of different data. These include events-based data, standards-based data, survey-based data, and new forms of data made possible through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The article shows that the measurement of modern slavery needs to overcome many of the same challenges that confront efforts at measuring human rights, including the fundamental problem of unobservability, inherent bias through the use of convenience reporting, and the specification of the concept of modern slavery itself. Overcoming these challenges opens up new possibilities to make what many claim to be an intractable problem of development tractable and helps contribute to the Sustainable Development Goal target to end modern slavery by 2030. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of compliance studies to evaluate the effectiveness of international human rights courts can produce misleading results because a focus on compliance considers the behavior of only one stakeholder in the dynamic that is human rights adjudication: the state. A survey of petitioners in cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ("the Inter-American Court"), together with a review of literature surrounding strategic litigation before the Inter-American System, demonstrate how civil society organizations value the declarative justice provided by the Court, how they mobilize around human rights litigation and how adept they are at deploying rulings in such a way as to produce impact beyond compliance and even in the absence of any compliance at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Special Procedures is a unique human rights monitoring mechanism of the UN Human Rights Council. China has a long history of interacting with Special Procedures, yet, little research has been done on how these interactions impact both entities. Compared to other UN human rights mechanisms, China seems to have a particularly challenging relationship with the Special Procedures. Both sides have publicly expressed complaints against each other. As such, this study intends to look into the details of the interaction between China and the Special Procedures through social and political contexts, with the purpose of finding if and how they can work better together. The article starts with a historic review of China's participation in the UN human rights system. Within this context, the article investigates whether China has been cooperative through examining its interactions with the Special Procedures in two major methods: the communications and country visits. The article, then, examines what [End Page 357] the Special Procedures and China expect from each other and ends with analysis on whether both sides can improve their cooperation with each other and how to achieve that goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the roots of the conception of human rights in Sub-Saharan Africa and highlights some aspects of African human rights policies, considering some strengths and weaknesses, whilst drawing a realistic portrayal about the situation of universal human rights implementation in the continent. The paper demonstrates how African human rights priorities are translated into practice within the UN system in general and the UN Human Rights Council in particular. Besides the strong regional characteristics of Sub-Saharan African human rights policy, there are significant differences among states in the region towards approaches for addressing contemporary human rights challenges. "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." Nelson Mandela 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of celebrities as endorsers of causes and even political candidates has become ubiquitous in modern culture. Aided by the rise of mass and social media the impact of celebrity on the organizations that use their power is seldom examined. This work critically reviews the role celebrity played in one of the first and largest events of its kind—Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! global tour of rock musicians in 1989. It analyzes both the short-term human rights goals of the tour and the long-term influence the tour had on organizational culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]