Posts Tagged ‘ Human rights ’

Where else would they exist?

Jul 11th, 2019 1:51 pm | By

Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch takes a look at Pompeo’s conference on human rights.

[A]s Pompeo suggested, the purpose of the commission is not to uphold all rights but to pick and choose among them: “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right? How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored?”

But human rights do not exist in the eye of the beholder. International treaties that have been widely ratified (though many not by the United States) codify what they term “inalienable” human rights.

The fact that treaties … Read the rest



With the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and the Union of South Africa abstaining

Jan 17th, 2016 11:10 am | By

This day in history – December 18 1948. The New York Times:

Paris, Dec, 10–A universal Declaration on Human Rights nearly three years in preparation, was adopted late tonight by the United Nations General Assembly. The vote was 48 to 0 with the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and the Union of South Africa abstaining.

The declaration is the first part of a projected three-part International Bill of Rights. The United Nations now will begin drafting a convention that will be a treaty embodying in specific detail and in legally binding form the principles proclaimed in the declaration. The third part will be a protocol for implementation of the convention possibly by such measures as establishment of an International Court

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And full as much heart

May 16th, 2015 11:15 am | By

More on that question of empathy and fiction we were talking about the other day, from a 2010 article by Joshua Leach on the ur-B&W.: Individual Rights and Collective Responsibility.

This is a truth commonly understood: that people fighting for human rights are not animated by self-interest or callous self-regard. In fact, human rights arise out of our most fundamental collective moral imperative: namely, to protect the weak and vulnerable from harm. Empathy is where they begin and end.

According to Lynn Hunt’s fantastic book, Inventing Human Rights, rights language grew up in tandem with eighteenth century epistolary novels, such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, which introduced empathy into fiction and extended human feeling across class

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



So comrades come rally

Apr 24th, 2012 5:34 pm | By

I’m going to look some more at Nahed Eltantawy’s anger at Mona Eltahawy’s article about misogyny in the Middle East, because there’s something really sinister about it.

I refuse to be lumped into this monolithic group of oppressed, abused and hated victims. Arab women’s problems are not the same across the board. Even within one country like Egypt, what I see as a problem, might not be the most pressing issue for the woman next door. So, I refuse to have Eltahawy talk on my behalf as if she is the expert who can accurately identify my plight.

It’s as if she thinks Eltahawy is doing something bad to her…is in fact oppressing her and abusing her and making … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



An affront to principles of human rights

Jan 31st, 2012 2:47 pm | By

Al Jazeera reports on Baltasar Garzón defending his investigation of Franco-era crimes.

“The amnesty law refers to crimes of a political nature, in no way can it be said that crimes against humanity of the kind that were alleged could have any political nature,” the 56-year-old judge said.

“As such it was not even necessary to make a reference to the amnesty law,” he said on the opening day of his testimony in Madrid.

Victims’ families who filed the case in 2006 had described disappearances, illegal detentions and killings, which amounted “in some cases to crimes against humanity, genocide,” he said.

The judge is being prosecuted for ordering the investigation in 2008 into the disappearance of 114,000 people during Spain’s

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



He has all the right enemies

Dec 12th, 2011 4:06 pm | By

The FT (I’ll refrain from belaboring the irony, apart from saying I’m refraining) does a profile of Peter Tatchell.

Tatchell’s campaigns for gay rights, racial equality, civil liberties and democracy have attracted death threats, bullets and bombs from an unsavoury mixture of homophobes, neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists.

“The bricks now bounce off the windows,” Tatchell jokes, “although I can’t walk outside and feel totally relaxed.” Nonetheless, the man who made front pages around the world in 1999 by attempting a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe  remains an indomitable campaigner. He has just returned from addressing the  Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, which is the kind of “tent city” protest that he proposed three decades ago.

He lives in … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



“A war with people of faith”

Dec 8th, 2011 3:25 pm | By

And then there are the Republican contestants battling each other to see who can be Most Evil.

Starting point: the Secretary of State addressed delegates to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday and

delivered what historians will one day look back upon as a monumental speech, in which she declared that the continuing oppression of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people is “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time.”

Sexual minorities, Clinton said, “are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse.” She addressed the pernicious argument — common in Uganda and many other

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



My faith dispels any doubts

Sep 1st, 2011 4:40 pm | By

And by the way three cheers for female genital mutilation.

…some communities see the practice as an integral part of their culture. “I have two daughters and five nieces, all circumcised by doctors. I do not consider it a human rights violation because, according to our religious teachings, it has been divinely ordained. My faith dispels any doubts that some might put in my mind,” says Shaheen Abdullah.

Good old god! “He” designed us the way we are and then ordained that the females of us have to have our genitals chopped off. Why not just not include the genitals in the original package then? Why construct the thing only to ordain that it should be carved up and … Read the rest

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Checking the compass

Jun 1st, 2010 10:52 am | By

Thomas Jones says in the Telegraph (reviewing Hitchens’s memoir):

The drift from left to right is hardly unusual, and the causes for his disillusionment with socialism and attraction to liberalism – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, visits to Cuba and Poland under Communism, the pleasures and freedoms of life in the United States – are made plain enough.

I’m not sure that really is a move (or drift) from left to right. That would make displeasure and unfreedom left, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I know, the idea is more that some coercion is worth the price for the sake of more pleasure and freedom (or more something) for everyone, and that does describe part of … Read the rest