comparing comparisons: human rights · 2019-05-23 · comparing comparisons: human rights with...
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
The defeat of fascism in Europe ushered in a new period of international concern and awareness that a global system of institutions, legal guarantees and mechanisms should be established to promote and protect individual and collective rights.
These desires found expression in the creation of the United Nations system and its key documents for the promotion and protection of human rights: the 1945 United Nations Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
These two documents were soon followed by two more legally binding instruments, promulgated in 1966 and entered into force in 1976: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (IESCR).
These two international legal instruments and those that followed have set an ideal standard of achievement for the promotion and protection of human rights. Countries that sign and ratify these instruments are legally obliged to uphold their commitment to protect human rights as set out in the instruments.
As of 2000, there were between 122 and 190 countries that were signatories to these various instruments.
The Research Questions
▪ What are human rights? Why do countries violate human rights? How can human rights
be better promoted and protected?
▪ These three inter-related questions have motivated scholars from many disciplines in the
field of human rights, while there has been renewed attention to them in political
science.
▪ Rights and rights discourse have long been a concern of political theory and political
science, but attention to human rights has increased since the advent of the ‘third wave’
of democratization and the end of the Cold War.
▪ Normative political theory has struggled to find the foundations that justify the existence
of human rights, while empirical political science has sought to define, measure,
compare, and improve their protection worldwide.
▪ There remain unresolved problems with the ontological and epistemological status of
human rights that transcend political theory, philosophy, and anthropology.
Human Rights Categories
Many scholars argue for minimal and pragmatic understandings of human rights as the respect for human dignity and protection from the permanent threat of abuse, whether that understanding is in terms of Western-derived concepts of rights or their ‘homeomorphic’ equivalents.
Today, there are three broad categories of human rights, including :
1) civil and political rights,
2) economic, social and cultural rights, and
3) solidarity rights
Many Country Studies
▪ Human rights research in this area begins by measuring the protection of human rights
in a way that is comparable across a global selection of countries and then examines
the explanatory factors that account for its cross-national variation.
▪ While the reporting of human rights violations in various parts of the world suggests
which areas may have the most problems, establishing equivalent measures is often
problematic for ethical, methodological, and political reasons.
▪ The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) came under strong political
criticism for its 1991 Human Development Report,which used a measure of human rights
that ranked all UN member states.
▪ One popular measure is known as the ‘political terror scale’ (see Gastil 1980; Gibney and
Dalton 1996), which scores a country according to the frequency of these violations, and
ranks countries from low protection of rights (i.e. frequent violations) to high protection
of rights (no violations).
Few Country Studies
▪ While similar research questions are posed to those in the global comparisons, the
smaller number of cases allows deeper investigation into the similarities and
differences that are observed.
▪ The smaller selection of cases also allows human rights research to move beyond
the questions posed by the global comparative studies and examine key questions
that are more intimately linked to the cultural and political specificities of the
countries under comparison.
▪ Samples: a collection of analyses on the diffusion of international human rights
norms (Risse et al. 1999), a comparison of truth commissions (TCs) in fifteen
countries (Hayner 1994), and a further comparison of TCs in Uruguay and Chile (de
Brito 1997).
Single Country Studies
▪ The field of human rights research is full of single-country studies that serve the
different comparative functions.
▪ By definition, they focus on countries with particularly problematic human rights
records and include official reports from international governmental and non-
governmental organizations, domestic commissions and NGOs, journalistic and
descriptive accounts, and research monographs.
▪ The Nunca Más (CONADEP 1984) report from Argentina and the Nunca Mais (Dassin
1986) report from Brazil are classic examples of such descriptive accounts of human
rights abuse under conditions of authoritarianism.