MidEastHRLecture21.pptxHuman Rights: An Introduction
©2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
©2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
I. Human Rights
Individual Human Rights
Freedom from specific abuses or restrictions
Collective Human Rights
The right to have a quality of life that does not detract from human dignity
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The International Bill of Human Rights
©2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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II. Sources of Rights
Universalists
Human rights are derived from sources external to society
Belief in a single, prevailing set of standards that are immutable
Sources include theological or ideological doctrine
Reject cultural imperialism as a poor excuse
Relativists
Positivist approach claiming that rights are a product of a society’s contemporary values
Belief that no single standard of human rights exist, emphasize cultural imperialism
Rights are not timeless, they change with changing social norms
©2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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III. Individual and Community Rights
Value system scale
Individualism on one end
Individual rights more important than societal rights
Communitarianism on the other end
Good of the community takes precedence over good of the individual
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IV. Human Rights: Problems and Progress
Widespread oppression still exist. According to Freedom House, in 2015:
More aggressive tactics by authoritarian regimes and an upsurge in terrorist attacks contributed to a disturbing decline in global freedom in 2014. Freedom in the World 2015 found an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year.
Nearly twice as many countries suffered declines as registered gains—61 to 33—and the number of countries with improvements hit its lowest point since the nine-year erosion began. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a rollback of democratic gains by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intensified campaign against press freedom and civil society, and further centralization of authority in China were evidence of a growing disdain for democratic standards that was found in nearly all regions of the world.
Overview of human rights situation in the Middle East: MERIP
©2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Human Rights: Problems and Progress
Many advances in terms of international law and organization
UN is at center, particularly with the UDHR, the UNCHR, OHCHR, and other agencies
Important treaties on torture, economic rights, and other issues
Increasing influence of NGOs
Making sense of NGOs in the Middle East
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V. Barriers to Progress on Human Rights
State sovereignty
Political selectivity
National Human Rights Institutions in the Middle East
Varying cultural standards
Post-colonial authoritarianism in MENA (Chase, ch. 1, “Introduction”
Nevertheless, “human rights” and “subaltern articulation of alternatives” to dominant forms of culture
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VI.
Chase, human rights and “indivisibility, intersections, multi-disciplinarity, and beyond”..
Frameworks
Next week!
©2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
