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Human rights globalization is, counterintuitively, largely a process of localization. We focus on the role of universities in their localities as a way of gaining insight into the complex ways in which they shape human rights outcomes both on and beyond campus. This topic has, to our knowledge, received no explicit scrutiny in the human rights literature, where the presumption of academic workers producing and disseminating knowledge in pursuit of justice—and often on behalf of the downtrodden—prevails. We have no wish to deny or dismiss the importance of that work; our purpose is to paint a broader and more detailed picture that comprises not only this work but also the role of universities as institutions in the political economy of human rights of their communities and the institutional and political dynamics that shape and constrain human rights scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the expansion of traditional concepts of transitional justice in Colombia to include an emphasis on human rights and the empowerment of marginalized communities. It describes how grassroots truth processes, collective art projects, and memory work have been essential to a transitional justice experiment that challenges dominant national narratives and power structures. It argues that Colombia's experience may provide lessons for other political communities across the globe that are struggling to address legacies of past injustice, ongoing structural violence, and a rise in xenophobic nationalism. More broadly, it examines how this experiment might inform a model for political imaginaries based on social connections across differences—one that can compete with the power of nationalist myths of singular community. Importantly, it suggests the opportunity for horizontal borrowings via translocal networks of innovative human rights practices worldwide, not necessarily mediated by Global North institutions. This illustrates the contention that human rights globalization can operate through local advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have achieved widespread influence among various state and nonstate actors globally. Although the UN General Assembly intended the SDGs for national governments, local-level actors have emerged as key stakeholders in defining and implementing the goals. Human rights movements have long advocated for the inclusion of local voices in international law. I bridge these discourses to investigate how the SDGs framework can socialize government actors to incorporate human rights principles in local governance. Specifically, I explore how local-level actors have advanced human rights through the localization—local adoption and adaptation—of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the case of Los Angeles. The iterative process of localization in Los Angeles illustrates the dialectical process of human rights globalization and emerging institutions that can enable rights realization locally. The case highlights the (1) global and local factors that shape localization, (2) how partnerships lead to more explicit attention to human rights over time, and (3) the ways in which Los Angeles is now shaping localization transnationally. I discuss the critical role of local government actors as agents of norm diffusion, and the need to expand community engagement mechanisms in pursuit of SDG localization and human rights globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) have been part of the infrastructure of international law since 1946, two years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was completed. Globally, more than 120 nations have established independent NHRIs. Two-thirds of these have been accredited by the Global Association of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) after passing a rigorous review to assess their compliance with the Paris Principles, a set of minimum standards for NHRIs. The United States does not have an NHRI and the federal government has resisted calls from both domestic NGOs and the international community to establish such an institution. Domestic advocates nevertheless continue to pursue creative approaches to promote human rights monitoring and implementation in the United States. U.S. civil society submissions to treaty bodies regularly draw attention to the need for a U.S. NHRI. On the domestic stage, advocates likewise urge the federal government to take a greater role in human rights monitoring, implementation, and coordination. However, as a global power and a key actor in the UN system, the U.S. government experiences few consequences for failing to establish an NHRI. In sum, the absence of a U.S. NHRI is a challenge not only for domestic advocates, but for the international system as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid a growing white backlash against racial progress that is rolling back voting rights and restraining public discourse and education about the history and legacies of slavery and colonialism, a global "George Floyd effect" has amplified efforts outside the United States to address systemic racism and engage growing numbers of US activists in the UN human rights system. Global institutions provide opportunities for US activists to expose US human rights violations linked to systemic racism, expand support and legitimacy for their claims, and attract influential global allies. Today's activism builds on the earlier internationalism of US advocates, which helped build international legal and institutional foundations for combating systemic racism. Within this globalized context of antiracism activism, local human rights city advocates in the United States have leveraged treaty reviews and mobilized around the newly created Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to heighten attention to systemic racism and broaden their analyses and alliances. These new global modes of engagement can help neutralize and roll back some of the threats to human rights that proliferate today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce this special issue with an elaboration of the concept of human rights globalization as a dynamic process that involves local and global action by civil society and other actors to strengthen governments' accountability to global human rights norms and standards. This process challenges economic globalization that prioritizes international trade and financialization over human rights. Recent decades have seen growing movements of activists appealing to global human rights norms as they mobilize popular pressure on local and national authorities. We provide a brief overview of contributions to this special issue, which describe these movements and their impacts on the long-term strengthening of global human rights governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the widely accepted belief that the institutionalization of human rights norms automatically results in their advancement and safeguarding. Instead, it proposes an alternative view, suggesting that the international human rights framework is intricately entangled with politicization. Focusing on the case of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency in Brazil, we argue that human rights bodies may serve antihuman-rights policies and propaganda. The article is divided into three sections, analyzing Bolsonaro's and Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo's rhetoric on human rights, its direct echo in Brazil's votes in the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the resistance to Bolsonaro's policies by various actors in the international arena of human rights. We draw on existing scholarship, extensive corpus of speeches, reports, and media coverage to examine the Bolsonaro phenomenon and the limits and fragility of the international human rights regime and diplomacy in responding to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the norms that underpin longstanding human rights change, international organizations (IOs) based on rules that enshrine older norms face a challenge: The abrogation of older rules can restrict their remit, but the maintenance of outdated norms can hamper their legitimacy. I explore the role of IOs in terminating existing rules through 42 interviews with current and former International Labor Organization (ILO) staff and delegates centered on a new standards abrogation process. The standards that were considered for abrogation govern worker's and women's rights, especially those regulating penal labor in former colonies and those that prohibited women from certain types of employment under the grounds of special protection. I find that this abrogation process was driven by concerns about organizational legitimacy in the face of evolving interpretations of human rights rather than budget pressure and the ILO exercised agenda-setting autonomy in determining which standards were outdated and should be up for an abrogation vote. Other IOs have also rejected some of their own past rules or decisions to enhance their legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholarship assumes that states weigh the costs and benefits of treaty ratification. In human rights, the worse a particular state's record, the higher the presumptive costs of ratification and the lower the likelihood of ratification. But prior work neglects variation in the extent of obligation that different treaties create. In this article, we argue and demonstrate that (1) human rights treaties differ substantially in the scope and scale of the obligations they contain, (2) this variation can be measured, and (3) it matters for ratification. Treaties that create a larger number of demanding obligations imply greater potential costs of compliance for states. The larger the number of demanding obligations, the more grounds various actors will have to challenge a state's practices. We analyze innovative data on treaty obligations and commitments for the 10 core global human rights treaties to test our propositions, and we find strong support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have used pandemic measures to silence opposition voices and curb human rights. This article delvers deeper into this dynamic in Algeria and Tunisia by systematically analyzing regime use of preexisting authoritarian legal frameworks to target perceived regime opponents. Notably, unlike other regimes in the MENA, COVID-19 pandemic-specific laws (such as curfew violations) were not heavily relied on to arrest and prosecute prominent opponents. Instead, foundational laws that restrict free speech and assembly with intentionally vague language, which often date back decades, were reused. Several of these laws were enhanced during the pandemic to grant the executive more leeway in their use and expanded fines and prison sentences. Interestingly, despite the very public use of these laws, regimes in both countries have maintained relatively high public approval ratings. This is remarkable, given that past autocrats were overthrown for similar abuses. This demonstrates that pandemics grant aspiring authoritarian regimes greater leeway in the use of general legal mechanisms to restrict free speech and assembly. These kinds of crises can help maintain approval ratings despite extensive oppressive action by the state. This was especially true for Tunisia, where it appears that the pandemic created a rally-'round-the-flag effect that allowed the executive to consolidate his power in a dramatic democratic backslide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores human rights activism in an authoritarian context of the Global South in the 1970s through the case of Tunisia, a decade considered by scholarship as the starting point for international human rights norm diffusion, including in the Arab region. It describes how two Tunisian solidarity groups and the Tunisian Human Rights League—considered the first independent human rights organization in the Arab World—used the concept. These organizations are considered catalyzers of the spread of human rights culture in Tunisia. The article argues that the use of human rights and references to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not entail that international human rights norms were a core concern. Other justice principles and ideologies prevailed in the 1970s. The article further showcases the complexity of human rights processes in the Global South. Understanding the 1970s necessitates exploring the groups that made use of the concept, the political spaces in which they operated, and the idea environments in which human rights became a part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article develops and applies a typology of marginalized non-Western populations' experiences of and engagements with human rights, drawing from Egyptian and broader Middle Eastern experiences of human rights over the last three decades. The experiences laid out are of human rights as (1) mockery of morality encompassing practice flying in the face of human rights' emancipatory promise, (2) manifesting morality encompassing practice embodying human rights' emancipatory promise, and (3) moral maze, the morally fractured space in between where human rights politics increasingly play out. Through the typology and its application, I argue that popular dispositions toward, and meanings accorded to human rights in marginalized contexts are varied, complex, and stem not just from popular evaluations of the human right framework's content (the values, moral claims, or rhetorical promise), but also from these populations' experiences of, judgements on, and emotional reactions to the morality of the practice of human rights unfolding around them. The research presented demonstrates that contrary to assumptions underlying both mainstream and critical scholarship, the content of human rights can be highly resonant to marginalized non-Western populations, yet they may choose to keep a distance from the framework because in its practice, it is not persuasive to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2021, an estimated 3.95 million foreign nationals resided in South Africa, with no data available on numbers of displaced persons or undocumented migrants residing without legal or valid immigration status. Surveillance data on immigration detention are scant. We present a socio-legal account of the historical evolution of South African immigration detention regulation in post-apartheid timeframes, with a view to providing a legal realist assessment of the socio- and politico-legal dimensions pertinent to human rights assurances of immigration detainees in South Africa. The realist focus is on scrutinizing South Africa's progress in upholding the rights of immigration detainees and illustrating the contemporary complexities in ensuring due process in the (co)application of the Immigration Act (and Refugees Act) explicitly regarding immigration detention processes and practices. We present the applicable international and regional African human rights treaties, domestic regulations, and relevant jurisprudence to the rights of immigration detainees in South Africa. The generated realist narrative is cognizant of the contextual forces of migration into South Africa, securitization agendas, and violations of basic human rights and due process, and illustrates various gaps in the application of domestic laws, policies, and standards of care regarding immigration detention when evaluated against the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that conceptions of time are undertheorized in human rights studies and that such conceptions have a significant impact on how people participate in systems of justice. Within the context of the transitional justice process launched in Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring—a context deeply shaped by an Islamist/secular divide—I examine how competing notions of time led to opposing modes of participation in reparative justice. Specifically, I analyze the Islamic principle thawāb (reward in the afterlife for suffering experienced on earth) as a theological notion of time and show how it structured Islamist victims' participation in reparations measures. Observing that critiques of reparative justice have developed through a strictly secular notion of time, this article foregrounds Islamic concepts that are still underrepresented in such studies, particularly Islamic notions of time and the afterlife. I argue that thawāb contests the universalism of the secular, linear notion of past-present-future dominant in human rights and transitional justice studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there may be overlap between the principles of duty and benevolence enunciated by these belief systems and the international human rights regime, these principles do not entail human rights. The argument for indivisibility implies that freedom of speech cannot exist without all the human goods that the international human rights regime proposes as human rights. Decolonizing Human Rights Abdullahi An-Naim claims that the international human rights regime is colonial. Whereas An-Naim and Goodale criticize the international human rights regime for being colonial, Heinze criticizes it for substituting human rights for human goods. [Extracted from the article]

The first decade of the 21st century had annual United Nations (UN) resolutions on the defamation of religion, followed by a shorter period with resolutions on promoting human rights and fundamental freedom through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind. However, in 2011, the strongest promoter of the defamation of religion resolutions, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), chose to shift the focus in the UN on individual victims, not the religions as such, resulting in the Istanbul Process. Moreover, the exploration of links between Articles 18, 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights resulted in the Rabat Plan of Action. Other progress within freedom of religion or belief include the Faith4Rights resources, acknowledging the right to change one's religion and stopping violations in the name of "honour," as well as other approaches, that so far have inadequate impact on the domestic level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent does naming and shaming influence state respect for human rights? Although many countries and international human rights organizations strategically name and shame states with the hope of deterring human rights abuses, prior empirical work on these strategies has disagreed about their effectiveness. In this article, we reinvestigate this theoretically important question. We take a new approach to examining how naming and shaming influences state human rights practices. First, we apply automatic text analysis to a corpus of human rights reports and develop two new cross-national human rights naming and shaming measures. One measure focuses on Amnesty International's (AI's) naming and shaming efforts, and the other focuses on the US government. Second, we assess the construct validity of these measures, finding evidence that they capture the relevant latent dimension. Third, we examine the extent to which these measures are correlated with human rights practices. Our results show that whereas AI's naming and shaming activities do not seem to influence regime practices, the US State Department's are associated with improved rights performance. Our measures and results contribute to the growing literature on human rights, international organizations, and foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Use of a human rights (HR) framework in direct social work practice is gaining traction in social work education. A gap remains, however, regarding its application within field education. This study seeks to fill the gap in knowledge regarding field educators' understanding of and training in use of a human rights lens. Using a qualitative-dominant, mixed-method, quasi-experimental design, the study explores the extent to which the introduction of a human rights-based approach to social work impacts both the attitudinal positioning of field educators (preceptors) in a small clinically based MSW program toward HR based clinical practice, and the integration of this approach to their pedagogical practice with MSW-level field students. Participants were administered the Human Rights Lens in Social Work (HRLSW) scale as both a pre- and posttest, provided a training on human rights concepts, and participated in a focus group discussion. Although there was only a small improvement in scores, participants reported qualitative evidence that the training started a shift in their thinking. Participants also indicated that more training would be well received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades of social science research on human rights has mapped the conditions under which states sign and ratify treaties, abide by their conditions, and promote or criticize human rights in other states. Some norms contained in the core human rights treaties, particularly civil and political rights, are seen by authoritarian states as politically threatening. Autocracies can reshape human rights through international institutions and seek to change their content over time. This article investigates China's engagement in the UN Human Rights Council, focusing on both the content and practices of the People's Republic of China's approach. In terms of content, it examines China's voting record to determine the issues it prioritizes. In terms of practices, it identifies four modes of pursuing normative change: mobilizing like-mindedness, implied coercion, tactical deception, and repression of critical voices. These modes capture a range of activity in and around multilateral institutions, some of which usually does not draw scholarly attention in studies of normative change. The findings provide insights into the future of human rights norms in the United Nations and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 50 years, regional international organizations have adopted several treaties on human rights. By ratifying them, member states can signal their commitment to the norms codified in the respective documents. Yet ratification patterns vary greatly across both states and treaties. Extant studies of commitment to human rights focus on the impacts of reputational benefits and sovereignty costs. These arguments, however, are largely based on studies of ratification behavior in Europe and the UN system. We extend this logic to treaties created in the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (OAU/AU). Between them, the two organizations have adopted 15 human rights agreements, giving their member states ample choices about (non)ratification. We apply event-history analysis to newly collected data on treaty commitment. This reveals variation in line with regional differences in how treaties are elaborated. Benefits from commitment expected by democratic and democratizing states play an important role in the member-state driven process in the OAS, but this is not the case in the OAU/AU. In the expert-driven context of the OAU/AU, in contrast, concerns about sovereignty costs related to treaty design and the relative power of member states are more pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights compliance research neglects recommendations from national human rights institutions and other domestic bodies. In particular, the implementation of recommendations issued by temporary truth commissions remains underexplored. We use data from Skaar et al. (2022a) to address this gap. Specifically, we apply multilevel ordered logistic regression to data on the implementation of recommendations made by 11 Latin American truth commissions to measure state compliance. We find that compliance is lower when truth commissions issue many recommendations. Backward-looking recommendations are more infrequently implemented. Conversely, legal reform recommendations are more likely to be implemented. Finally, variables commonly associated with truth commission success, such as the nature of the transition and civil society strength, are not significant. Thus, we advance understanding of human rights compliance and offer prescriptions for how truth commissions should craft their recommendations and, ultimately, maximize their impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite surging attention to child soldiers and modern slavery over the past decades, their links remain politicized and neglected. This study develops a human rights approach that deepens application of international slavery law; exposes child soldiering as a neglected slavery issue; and confronts underlying legal, political, and ethical challenges. It addresses challenges of using slavery law to identify contemporary cases, then analyzes global data on child soldiering specifically, revealing patterns and trends with robust equivalencies to slavery. Ethical challenges are addressed by confronting slavery myths that distort legal discussions and intersectional elements of child soldiering. These legal, empirical, and ethical arguments reveal international law on child soldiering as deeply insufficient and support a paradigmatic shift in thinking toward antislavery rights as appropriate legal, moral, and programmatic tools to end child soldiering. This, in turn, demonstrates how a rights-based approach helps fulfill the promise of anti-slavery law even in politicized cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the transnational promotion of human rights looks to the role of intermediaries who facilitate connections between global and local discourses. Local discourses, however, may host actors and dynamics with diverse perspectives not entirely receptive to international norms, and so call for attention as to how they impact the work of intermediaries. Myanmar university human rights teachers serve an intermediary role, receiving international human rights training from international aid programs and promoting such training within their professional work environments. The actors and dynamics of their work environments constitute local discourses affecting the conduct of university teachers, and thereby influence their efforts to promote international human rights norms. The analysis draws on empirical fieldwork involving the experiences of Myanmar university human rights teachers, using their concerns to demonstrate the ways their professional environments constrain their teaching of human rights. From such findings, the analysis raises implications for theories of intermediaries and international aid policies to promote human rights norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some 30 years after their dangerous human rights activism in Kenya that challenged an authoritarian regime and won multiparty democracy, more than half the leading survivors were still politically active. Three were governors, one was the Supreme Court Chief Justice, five were human rights activists; others were attorneys or otherwise politically engaged. This study provides fresh insights on the theory of cycles of social movements and offers global implications for movements in other countries. The decline of social movements "remains relatively understudied from an empirical standpoint." The study builds on the cycle theories of Tarrow, considered the "leading theoretician of protest cycles." It finds that (1) long after a protest movement has ended, some activists may continue individual activism in line with the goals of the movement or a subset of goals; (2) partial victories or regime concessions tend to weaken cohesiveness of a movement and make subsequent victories harder; (3) regime change, although more dangerous, in some ways is easier than regime reform. The findings are based on interviews conducted by the author, mostly in Nairobi, with the leading veteran activists and others between 2019 and 2021, plus archival reviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article inquires about who is deemed a legitimate actor by international human rights law. It offers an analysis of the role of the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees (FEDEFAM) as a women-led leading organization in creating the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances (CED) in 2007. The article shows that the wives and daughters of the disappeared played a determinant role in their struggle against enforced disappearances, undermining the view of the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances (WGEID), which did not recognize their struggle in its early reports. The article also critiques how international human rights law uses colonial and patriarchal power to produce and exclude subjects. Finally, it concludes by offering an analysis of the affective dimensions of FEDEFAM's struggle as an opportunity to rethink human rights grassroots women-led mobilizations as a place for resistance against dominant narratives in international human rights law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between economic sanctions and the human rights conditions of target countries? We suggest a two-stage mechanism to explain how sanctions deteriorate the human rights condition in the target country. In the repressive capacity stage, sanctions increase the capacity the target government can use for political repression. We introduce the concepts of political corruption, judicial dependence, and the government's media censorship as political repression tools of target governments. In the violation stage, the increased capacity to repress leads to worsening the target's human rights condition. We also find that, while human rights sanctions are not likely to increase political repression in the target country, non-human rights sanctions are more likely to increase the political repression therein. Furthermore, such increased capacity for repression, specifically political corruption and judiciary dependence, in the target country adversely affected the human rights condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal waivers in the business and human rights context are an agreement corporations use to provide compensation to victims in exchange for waiving their right to file future claims in a court of law in corporate human rights abuses. Corporations use legal waivers to further secure legal immunity from potential future claims for adverse human rights impact. In contrast, right-holders accept legal waivers as they provide quick resolution of grievances, mainly in the form of monetary compensation. This article investigates the inequality of bargaining power under which legal waivers operate. It advances the central claim that the use of legal waivers in private remedial processes reflects corporate attempts to renegotiate human rights standards by exercising authority. I use the Porgera case study to shed light on how power inequalities between corporations and right-holders distort the nature of business actors' governance authority in business and human rights. I further argue that legal waivers strengthen the power of corporations while simultaneously not serving the public interest that corporations claim to uphold in facilitating a private remedial process for right-holders. I conclude that the power inequalities exacerbate the "power" element of authority without affecting the legitimacy of corporations but distorting the nature of their governance authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human (UNGPs) explicitly ask corporations to rely on "external expertise" for policy guidance, human rights due diligence (HRDD), and remedy. The broad conceptualization of expertise in the UNGPs signifies an amorphous, neutral, and largely unregulated community of consultants, human rights institutions, NGOs, impact assessors, and auditors (among other actors). I argue that external experts exert significant governance authority in the business and human rights space. Through empirical analysis of experts orbiting two multinational corporations, I identify experts as knowledge providers, diplomats, critics, and legitimizers in the corporate implementation of the UNGPs. In doing so, this work adds nuanced political dimensions to expert authority in business and human rights, offering evidence of its manifestations and limitations. Finally, I advance some considerations and suggestions for future research, particularly vital in the context of incoming mandatory HRDD legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people are often treated as a homogenous group, they are not treated equally by states and societies. The F&M Global Barometer of Transgender Rights (GBTR) represents the first multiyear attempt to assess cross-nationally the extent to which countries are human rights protective or persecuting specifically toward transgender individuals. Examining 204 countries from 2011 to 2019, the GBTR, which measures state and societal level human rights protection or persecution, shows that the majority of countries in the world are far from protective of transgender people's human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symposium "Governance Authority in Business and Human Rights" explores the authority of non-state actors in the global business and human rights (BHR) regime. Our point of departure is that the involvement of different public and private actors in the BHR regime rests on their authority as governance actors. This alludes most obviously to companies, but also includes other actors. In this framing paper, we investigate these actors' governance authority in three steps, which provides insights into the different ways in which their power in the BHR regime is (or is not) legitimated. First, we outline how the multiplication of actors in the BHR regime raises questions and challenges regarding its governance. In the second step, we introduce a concept of governance authority that captures distinctive forms of power and legitimacy, and how they connect to human rights. Third, we discuss how the concept of governance authority can be used to study particular non-state actors in the BHR regime, and how the contributions to this symposium do so. In sum, we discuss avenues for research that disentangle the different types of governance power and legitimacy of multiple actors in the BHR regime to clarify their public and private roles as well as their relevance in BHR governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the increasing role of indicators and rankings in the case of business and human rights. It argues that indicators contribute to forming notions of companies' responsibilities for human rights. The potentially formative power of indicators stems from their substantive content (human rights), from the authority of those who produce them (experts, governance bodies), and from the type of knowledge they convey (numbers offering a sense of precision and comparability). A case study of the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark shows that this indicator scheme shapes notions of business human rights responsibility as being equally centered on commitments, policies, and procedures as on human rights impact. In contrast to the rights-holding and duty-bearing subjects of international human rights law, indicators in the domain of business and human rights put a broad range of stakeholders on equal terms. Contestation has primarily concerned specific instances of highly ranked companies whose operations have negatively impacted human rights. The case shows that rankings can be contentious and are ultimately dependent on their credibility in broader perspective, subject to events that are not necessarily covered by indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholars have noted the importance of negotiations and socialization in shaping state human rights. So far, we know surprisingly little about how negotiation participation shapes human rights practices. I argue that human rights treaty negotiations socialize states in important ways through repeated interactions in a formal institutional structure. Focusing on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, I test whether negotiating states improved, worsened, or made no changes in their rights practices. Using data on UN negotiation participation, I found states negotiating the treaties contributed to positive human rights practices. This finding was the strongest around 10 years after treaty creation, although it was significant decades after treaty creation. The finding held against robustness checks. This research contributes to the study of human rights law, compliance, and socialization within international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the academic discussion about human rights education for children and young people and argues that the current state of research does not provide sufficient support and guidance to nations, schools, and teachers in the establishment of human rights education in schools. The article's aim is to add insights into how scholarly work may be contributing to the low uptake of human rights education in formal schooling. By drawing on educational children's rights research and research on human rights education, three cardinal complications are identified; (1) that the main research fields that address education and rights do not seem to communicate, (2) that it is unclear what are the aims of human rights education are, and (3) that a curriculum for human rights education is missing. The cardinal complications are closely examined and discussed, and a middle ground is explored and progressively visualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health is a human right; as such, a public health crisis is a human rights crisis. Yet the human rights impact of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic seems to have varied widely, both across rights and across countries. How have human rights practices been affected by the pandemic so far? Which human rights were most negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic? Which states were most likely to experience these negative effects, and which states avoided a reduction in the enjoyment of human rights due to the pandemic? To provide some early answers to these questions, the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) added questions to its annual practitioner survey that aimed at determining how a subset of civil, political, economic, and social rights was affected by COVID-19 in 2020 in 39 countries around the world. Using both quantitative and qualitative data from this survey, in combination with other indicators, this article provides a description of COVID-19's human rights impact as seen by practitioners on the front lines around the world, as well as insight into the larger question of which factors enabled states to maintain a high level of enjoyment of human rights just when those rights were needed the most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic affected much of the world's human rights for 2020 and 2021 and will continue to have human rights ramifications for years to come. While many things have fundamentally changed due to the pandemic, COVID-19 has also shined a spotlight on certain realities about the existing international human rights regime that may have been missed before. This concluding article to the special issue focuses on four realities that have become evident during the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses the implications of these realities on the next generation of human rights research. Understanding the future of global human rights, including the right to health, requires the holistic and long-term approach suggested by Chiozza and King, incorporating lessons learned from the current pandemic in ways that will help us predict and solve future human rights challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the pandemic spread globally, there was an explosion of scholarship written on the effects the pandemic had in numerous fields. Human rights scholars were no exception to this trend and sought to identify the effects of the pandemic on many related factors, including on gender violence, freedom of movement, protests, health care, and repression. Scholarship of this type, written in real time and responsive to the rapidly changing circumstances of the pandemic, was necessary for making sense of what was taking place, but provided little consideration for the long-term effects of the pandemic on human rights. Although the pandemic is not over, we believe that sufficient time has passed to allow us to think on the impact of the pandemic in a longer-term context. First, we provide a review of the existing literature on the effects of the pandemic on human rights, categorizing the literature as descriptive or prescriptive. Second, we introduce six articles contained in this special issue entitled "Beyond Complacency and Acrimony: Studying Human Rights in a Post-COVID-19 World" that in some ways address the shortcomings of the previous human rights literature. Finally, we provide concluding remarks we hope can act as inspiration for future scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human rights violations through militarized control have been the cornerstone of Indian statecraft in Indian-administered Kashmir. This article offers a close reading of the April 2017 episode of using a civilian Kashmiri Muslim man as a human shield by the Indian Army in Indian-administered Kashmir. Whereas the existing scholarship on the relationship between militarization, human rights violations, and Hindutva politics have employed political or feminist analytical frameworks, this article focuses on rereading the episode of human shield usage to analyze how "universality" of human rights in India is being redefined. It reflects on how the ruling right-wing government in India appropriates the language of violations and afflictions to embolden its strategies to alter the grammar of human rights in India. Drawing on a discourse analysis of the human shield event, the article deliberates on how anthropology of Hindutva and right-wing extremism research could pay greater attention to the conversation between Hindutva theology of rights and neoliberal ethics when approaching questions of recurrent human rights violations in Kashmir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intergovernmental institutions constitute "ecological" settings in which international human rights laws and norms are developed and shaped over time. Yet understandings of these settings remain limited. Notable feminist scholars of international law have argued that uncritical reliance on gendered dichotomies—such as objective/subjective, legal/political, and binding/nonbinding—has stunted knowledge of these spaces. I extend this critique by arguing reliance on yet another gendered dichotomy—the secular/religious—has further limited knowledge in this area. Moving past this unreflective reliance provides needed space to identify previously unrecognized ways supposedly local and global factors intersect to shape human rights norm-making within intergovernmental legal institutions. I demonstrate this using data collected as part of a qualitative study that examined how UN officials who work with women's rights conceptualize the meaning of religion and its relationship to the human rights legal standards they work to interpret, monitor, and advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the emergence of various international justice narratives that operate as legal nonperformatives, making the law and law making seem liberatory. It shows that the ratification of a treaty may not qualify as a form of state expression or a speech act advocating human rights. Instead, it can be interpreted through semiotics as sending a signal about a stance. By examining this proleptic space, we can begin to make sense of what we cannot yet see, and perhaps begin to forecast whether the core tenets of international human rights will soon be reinvented or merely perpetuated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We convened a conference funded by the National Science Foundation at Arizona State University in April 2021. The 40 papers presented at the conference, a subset of which form this special issue, together demonstrated that, far from collapsing in the face of duress, law is a malleable tool that is deployed in novel ways to promote human rights. Collectively, the conference participants illustrated that the power of human rights lies not in their essentialized transcendence of time, culture, and context, but in their enduring promise that a more just world can emerge from sustained and creative struggle through, against, and at the margins of states, laws, and institutions. Ultimately, the key questions to emerge are not whether human rights law and practice will survive, but rather, what are the forces that continue to sustain, revitalize, and transform them? And what are human rights in the process of becoming? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kurdish women reported sexual violence in state custody during intense conflicts between the Turkish military and the guerrilla organization PKK. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews with lawyers and activists in Turkey, we trace the development of legal mobilization by human rights lawyers and activists who characterized state-led sexual violence in the Kurdish region as a war crime against women and brought cases before domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Inspired by the work of Kerem Altıparmak, we develop the concept of "legal exhaustion" to characterize the emotional and relational aspects of legal mobilization in the context of war and counterterrorism politics. Bringing together scholarship in sociolegal studies and critical approaches to human rights, we argue that legal exhaustion is productive—not just an unproductive and constraining state—prompting human rights lawyers to sustain legal mobilization in/outside courts and critique national and international laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of countries have recently cracked down on non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Much of this crackdown is sanctioned by law and represents a bureaucratic form of repression that could indicate more severe human rights abuses in the future. This is especially the case for democracies, which, unlike autocracies, may not aggressively attack civic space. We explore whether crackdowns on NGOs predict broader human rights repression. Anti-NGO laws are among the most subtle means of repression and attract lesser domestic and international condemnation compared to the use of violence. Using original data on NGO repression, we test whether NGO crackdown is a predictor of political terror and violations of physical integrity rights and civil liberties. We find that although de jure anti-NGO laws provide little information in predicting future repression, their patterns of implementation—or de facto civil society repression—predict worsening respect for physical integrity rights and civil liberties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes prisoners' accounts of human rights violations and protections in two types of prisons in the Dominican Republic: "new" prisons that uphold goals of rights and rehabilitation and "old" prisons that mostly warehouse people. This mixed-methods study finds that prisoners experience significant violence, mostly by other prisoners in old facilities and mostly by corrections staff in new facilities, with different rationales and possible responses. I consider three types of recourse mechanisms: top-down (courts or external commissions), bottom-up (advocacy), and internal institutional (grievance processes and human rights training). I argue that each of these carries constraints, and prisoners perceive official channels to favor the institution. The prevalence of rights violations and the narrow recourse options generate cynicism and frustration among prisoners and their families, which can undermine the legitimacy gained through other important improvements in the reform process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether and how the circumstances of Colombian ex-combatants with disabilities were recognized in the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes in the period following the adoption of the 2016 peace agreement. Our results suggest severe procedural and substantive shortcomings during the drafting of the peace agreement and the implementation of the DDR processes that exacerbated the exclusion of ex-combatants with disabilities from available opportunities for their social, economic, and political reintegration. We conclude that a better understanding of the disabling impact of conflict and the experiences of impairment and disability could have mitigated such neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how increasingly converging human rights and humanitarian discourses, accompanied by existing structural asymmetries, can reconstitute rights and obligations within a prominent weapons category: small arms and light weapons (SALWs). Its contribution is to theoretically refine and apply a power-analytical approach to the convergence of humanitarian, human rights, and weapons law and, in particular, the nexus between human rights and SALWs. We focus on the dynamics leading to the adoption of two major agreements very different in nature: the UN Programme of Action and the Arms Trade Treaty. Charting multiple, intermeshing, and often contradictory operations of power, we analyze the shifting role of human rights and the emergence of an entirely new phenomenon: human rights-centered arms control. Attention is drawn to the underlying paradox: Although the norm of human rights has risen from obscurity to prominence in arms control, the arms industry has been given stronger political and legal protection. Although policy advocates and norm entrepreneurs have usually preferred complete humanitarian disarmament, what we can abstract from this analysis is that a less ambitious, human rights-centered weapons treaty may well be the preferred model of arms control for a commercially prominent, widely circulated, and often-used category of weapons defying stigmatization. What follows are concluding remarks and a graphic synthesis of key findings (Figure 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automation technology is increasingly used to replace workers, stirring anxiety about work and the prospect of mass unemployment or underemployment. Noting that we live not only in "the age of automation" but also in "the age of rights," this article poses a specific question: Can automation help create an environment more conducive to the fulfillment of human rights? It examines work and reconceives the right to work in relation to work-related rights (e.g., the right to adequate living, the right to leisure) by emphasizing their interdependency. It contends that automation, from a human rights perspective, presents an opportunity to delink work from subsistence needs and fulfill various rights. Exploring redistributive proposals that directly or indirectly deal with work-related rights, the article identifies four models that can both benefit from automation and help realize its emancipatory human rights potential: guaranteed full employment, universal basic income, state socialism/planned economy, and communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although an extensive literature on the British idealist theory of human rights exists, it is limited by its focus on prominent British idealist philosophers and its predominant interest in civic and political rights. This article broadens our understanding of the subject by examining the lesser-known British idealist John Stuart Mackenzie's work on economic and social human rights. Mackenzie's reflections on the matter appear to be significant as an early example of employing human rights language as a solution to widespread poverty and destitution in Britain. His use of a tripartite idealist perception of human nature allows Mackenzie to underline the complexity of human potential and human need that must be protected in all spheres of social interaction. In light of ongoing challenges to the legitimacy of economic and social rights as human rights, Mackenzie's work constitutes a solid example of a maximalist approach to human rights that aims to not merely ensure survival but leads to the realization of a truly human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of human rights in Pacific Island Countries (PICs). It expands the focus from "culture" to "institutions" to analyze how PICs have engaged with the international human rights regime. We reveal that although the Pacific Island Countries have ratified more international human rights treaties and engaged proactively with the international human rights regime in recent years, this shift has not substantially led to accountability necessary to protect, respect, and promote human rights. To unpack this contradiction, we propose an analytical approach, what we call, an "institutional logic." Using the institutional logic, we argue that the current situation of human rights in PICs is primarily determined by the presence or absence of necessary institutional arrangements pertaining to rights. Thus, we conclude by suggesting that significant institutional reforms are indispensable for protecting and promoting human rights in PICs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how justice mechanisms could serve to advance corporate accountability in transitional justice. In doing so, Argentina will act as a case study. Therefore, it first explores how corporate accountability for human rights abuses can be addressed in transitional justice, specifically focusing on justice mechanisms and including examples of previous experiences. It also provides relevant insights from the international framework of business and human rights in order to examine how this field has contributed to developing international standards for corporate-related human rights abuses in transition. Based on this background, the article reviews the context of the last Argentinian dictatorship and corporate involvement in human rights abuses perpetrated. Next, it analyses how the transitional justice process in Argentina has dealt with this issue, particularly regarding domestic prosecutions to corporate managers. Finally, the article offers some concluding considerations and suggestions for the way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even as some of the problems Kingston deals with have barely emerged as issues on the international human rights stage, victims of human rights violations should have a say in the framing of their own narratives. These exciting, intellectually innovative books tackle difficult yet intersecting questions regarding human rights, marginalization, and personal agency. Global human rights laws, norms, and institutions provided frames and venues for rights seekers to make claims and provided new political opportunities as local groups engaged with these universal human rights tools. William Simmons shows how victims of human rights abuses, martyrs, activists, and even perpetrators of human rights violations can all experience joy. [Extracted from the article]