NEED DONE TOMORROW 4/14! 1 PAGE SINGLE SPACED

profilekayys__
PPT_Chapter091.ppt
Home>Political Science homework help>NEED DONE TOMORROW 4/14! 1 PAGE SINGLE SPACED

Human Rights

The term “atrocity crimes” refers to three legally

defined international crimes:

Genocide

Crimes against humanity

War crimes

Excurse: Atrocity crimes

Atrocity crimes are considered to be the most serious crimes against humankind. Their status as international crimes is based on the belief that the acts associated with them affect the core dignity of human beings.

*

Atrocity crimes

Genocide, according to international law, is a crime committed against members of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

Crimes against humanity encompass acts that are part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population. Even if non-civilians might also become victims of the attack, for an act to be considered a crime against humanity, the ultimate

target of the attack must be the civilian population.

War crimes can be committed against a diversity of victims, either combatants or non-combatants. In international armed conflicts, victims include those specifically protected by the four 1949 Geneva Conventions, i.e., (1) the wounded and sick in armed forces in the field; (2) the wounded, sick and shipwrecked members of armed forces at sea; (3) prisoners of war; and (4) civilian persons.

Covers what you do in war – not whether war itself is just

Applies to all sides, no matter who started the war

Covers all armed conflicts – international and civil wars

Remember the “Rules of War”!!

War Crimes

*

Grave Breaches: War Crimes

Willful killing

Torture or inhuman treatment

Willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health

Taking of hostages

Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity

  • Compelling service in the forces of a hostile power
  • Willful deprivation of the right to a fair and regular trial
  • Unlawful deportation, transfer, or confinement

Bosnian War and Genocide

Crimes Against Humanity

  • Does not have to be part of armed conflict
  • Actual or constructive knowledge that act is committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on civilian population with knowledge of the attack

Slobodan Milesovic

  • Serbian then Yugoslavian president, 1989-2000,

during wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo

  • Tried for genocide in Bosnia, other atrocities in Croatia and Kosovo
  • International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,
  • Died in his jail cell, 2006.
  • Murder
  • Extermination
  • Enslavement
  • Deportation or forcible transfer of population
  • Persecution against any identifiable group or collectively on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, or other impermissible grounds
  • Imprisonment or other unlawful severe deprivation of physical liberty
  • Torture
  • Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or other forms of severe sexual violence
  • Enforced disappearance of persons
  • Apartheid
  • Other inhumane acts of a similar character causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health

Types of Crimes Against Humanity

C. A crime without a name… Genocide

“The aggressor ... retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands - literally scores of thousands - of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.

“And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks.

“We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

- Winston Churchill describing the brutality of the German forces occupying Russia, 1941.

Genocide
geno – meaning race
cide – meaning killing

  • The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lempkin, a Polish lawyer who emigrated to the United States in 1941, in the midst of the Holocaust.

Before 1944, no word existed to describe a coordinated assault on civilian populations. That year Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar who had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and arrived in the United States in 1941, introduced the word "genocide" to give the crime a name.

*

Human Rights - Introduction

  • Growing interest in “soft power”
  • Movement away from the focus on states and towards concern for individual persons and their well-being
  • Human rights contrasts sharply with realist obsessions with military strength and the growth of national economies
  • Idealistic hopes for a better world

Recent Human Rights History

The Holocaust

One of history’s most appalling acts of systematic persecution and mass murder

Completely violated and degraded the human rights of about 6 million victims—mainly Jewish people, but also mentally and physically challenged people, homosexuals, political radicals, and persons of Slavic origin

The Nazis wanted supremacy of the Aryan race; used domination, persecution, intolerance, hatred

Labour camps and gas chambers; Hitler’s “final solution”

At the end of WWII, the lack of regard for human life, and the mechanization of mass murder, had to be challenged and torn down

Recent Human Rights History, cont’d

A Different Set of Values

  • Events of Holocaust influenced modern human rights
  • Human rights ideal:

Universality: the rights of humans everywhere, not just a single ethnic group or nation

Equal rights for all; tolerance of difference

Goal is to end discrimination, achieve a non-violent respect for all persons

Everyone has the right to be free and to enjoy personal liberties

Individual right to personal property, food/water

Democracy and political participation

Recent Human Rights History, cont’d

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) – (read with class)

  • This unanimous declaration was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1948
  • It was created by a cross-cultural representation of countries, with a special impetus from Eleanor Roosevelt
  • It has no legal weight; it is a political proclamation or statement of intent and principle
  • Despite this fact, most experts consider the UDHR the most influential and inspiring human rights document of our time

Completing the Values Picture: The Point of Human Rights

  • The overall goal of the human rights movement is to secure for everyone a minimally decent life
  • Why should we respect the human rights claims of others?

It’s the prudent thing to do

It’s the fair thing to do

Globally, there is an emerging, overwhelming social consensus in favour of human rights

Every major civilization has a moral duty not to inflict harm on other human beings

Also about achieving the good; creating a better world and higher quality of life

Completing the Values Picture: The Point of Human Rights, cont’d

Realizing Human Rights

Moral or Legal?

  • Human rights are both moral and legal
  • A legal right is a right that has been codified: it has been written into the law, and there is a remedy for cases in which it is violated; they are not always morally correct
  • A trophy law is a law that has been written and passed but it does not get enforced and does not reflect reality on the ground; created essentially for show
  • Individuals are duty-bound:

Not to violate another person’s rights

To support social institutions needed to minimize rights violations and to maximize the chance of right-holders having secure possession of their rights

Realizing Human Rights, cont’d

The Basic Structure

  • Refers to the social institutions that are the most important to the realization of human rights
  • Institutions that count as part of the basic structure of society include the modes of:

Economic organization

Political organization

Legal organization

Deploying armed force

Delivering basic social services

Family association permitted and encouraged

Realizing Human Rights, cont’d

Realizing Human Rights, cont’d

Rights Violation

  • Distinguish between intentional and non-intentional violations

Intentional violation: occurs when an institution chooses not to respect human rights

Unintentional violation: occurs when an institution wants to, but cannot, respect human rights

International Human Rights Law

  • The UDHR is the most inspiring document, but it has no legal weight
  • Two global, multilateral human rights treaties that have weight are:

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)

  • Most countries have signed and ratified both treaties

International Human Rights Law, cont’d

The Three Generations of Human Rights Today

  • First-generation rights, known as civil and political rights, include the right to:

Life or security

Hold private property

Freedom

Political participation

Recognition as a person before the law

Not to suffer unfair discrimination

Basic “due process” protections and entitlements

  • Magna Carta: the world’s first rights document

International Human Rights Law, cont’d

  • Second-generation rights, also known as socio-economic and cultural rights, include the right to:

Material subsistence

Basic education

Basic healthcare and public health measures

Form a union

Basic safety standards on the job

Equality beyond non-discrimination

International Human Rights Law, cont’d

  • Third-generation rights are harder to define
  • Tend to feature cultural and environmental claims
  • They are the most recent generation rights claims, and tend to include the right to:

Clean air and drinkable water

Environmental protection

“Thicker” forms of socio-economic equality

Cultural protection of minority groups

Democracy

International Human Rights Law, cont’d

International Human Rights Law, cont’d

  • The move from first- to third-generation rights is not only a chronological move but also a move in terms of cost, controversy, and contestedness
  • First-generation rights are the most widely accepted, least controversial, and least costly
  • Most societies now accept second-generation rights
  • Third-generation rights are very much up in the air; they can sometimes seem exaggerated and unclear

Studies in Technology

A Human Right to the Internet?

  • In May 2011, a UN panel asserted a new human right, to access the Internet and all its information

Is it true that we do, or should, have a human right to access the Internet?

Global Human Rights Treaties

  • Some of the more high-profile global human rights treaties include:

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG)

The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CEFORD)

Various other treaties relating to the rights of indigenous or native peoples, refugees, the physically and mentally challenged, and prisoners

Global Human Rights Institutions

Only governments can take each other to the world court, and they must both volunteer

The ICJ cannot enforce any decision

  • High Commission on Human Rights

Issues public summary of every country’s strengths and weaknesses on human rights; serves as a kind of public shaming to spur change in a pro-human rights direction

The Commission was hijacked by some of the world’s worst human rights violators; other countries fought back and have rebranded as the Human Rights Council

Regional Human Rights Treaties and Institutions

  • Important regional human rights treaties include:

The African Charter on Human Rights and People’s Rights

The Inter-American Convention on Human Rights

The European Social Charter

The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam

The Charter of Paris for a New Europe

The Helsinki Final Act

The Asian Human Rights Charter

Other Tools For Human Rights

  • International human rights law is a limited tool
  • Other tools include:

Diplomacy

Incentives

Sanctions

Armed force

Positive incentives: becoming an EU member, “most favoured nation” trading status

  • New tools:

Civil society engagement

NGO activity

Traditional media and new media strategies

Human Rights NGOs

They call public, media, and government attention to important issues of concern

They raise issues that often focus on protecting the world’s least powerful and most vulnerable people

They pressure governments to act

They provide education, funding, and expertise

They both apply and alleviate pressure on state governments

Women’s Human Rights

  • The human rights of women merits special attention

A before-the-fact appeal to fairness

Women everywhere, especially in the developing world, are treated unfairly, and their rights are not equal to those of men

An after-the-fact appeal to good consequences

Realizing the rights and well-being of women has two crucial payoffs:

Huge increase in infant survival and in the development and well-being of children

Clear and measurable improvements in society

Women’s Human Rights, cont’d

  • Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
  • UNICEF provides compelling data on the unfair treatment of women throughout their lifecourse:
  • Birth

Preventable deaths during childbirth: 500,000 women/year

Sex selection used to favour male children

Greater abortion and abandonment of female infants

  • Childhood

Boys get more nutrition and education

Girls work more on less nutrition

70% of world’s illiterate people are females

Women’s Human Rights, cont’d

Adolescence

Girls bear disproportionate burden of harassment, sexual assault or abuse, and sexually transmitted diseases

Girl brides; sex tourism and trafficking; female genital mutilation; honour killing

Motherhood and mature adulthood

Many women have inadequate nutrition, information, and medical care during pregnancy

Wage gap and feminization of poverty

Old Age

Many elderly women live in poverty or in situations subjected to elder abuse