This report explores and questions the history of human rights rhetoric through the 18th century anti-slave trade poem of Hannah More, Slavery, a poem. Hannah More used the term ‘human rights’ more than 150 years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Nevertheless, when historians and political scientists track the history of human rights, it is frequently presented as “from Locke through Paine” as part of a narrative of the “coming of age” of democracy in a longer quest for rights stemming from 18th century revolutions and radicalism. This report looks instead at the episodic nature of human rights rhetoric through 18th century ideas of the human. As argued here, More’s use of the term ‘human rights’ indicates an attempt to reconcile the tension between Enlightenment and Christian discourses to promote the anti-slave trade cause. / text

This dissertation analyzes how transnational feminist advocacy and ideas about gender shaped modern human rights doctrines that remain central to this day. After World War II, United Nations delegates drafted and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). During this process, international feminist activists disagreed about how to incorporate women's long-standing rights claims into the emerging human rights framework. Fiery interwar debates about laws and standards that regulated female labor persisted, prompting influential U.S. feminists to oppose the inclusion of gender-specific rights. To challenge U.S. opposition, key delegates to the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) forged an unofficial coalition. Despite the fact that these CSW delegates held competing ideas about gender and represented distinct national governments, they collectively crafted a significant but little-known women's human rights agenda and lobbied UDHR drafters to adopt it. Their proposals not only included political and civil rights, but also promoted particular economic and social rights for women as a group. They maintained, for instance, that child care and maternity leave should be obligations of the state. Indeed, the CSW insisted that recognition of their women's human rights agenda was essential to building a socially-just postwar order. While Anglo-American women dominated interwar NGOs, the CSW showcased myriad international voices and won critical allies among liberal and conservative UN delegations by linking the advance of women's human rights to notions of modernity and democracy. As a result, the CSW made substantial political and civil rights gains, such as the guarantee of equal rights in marriage and divorce. Yet feminist delegates had to juggle their internationally-minded agenda with the interests they were to serve as national representatives. This task was further complicated by nascent Cold War politics and a growing anti-feminist backlash at the UN. In this context, UDHR drafters ultimately rejected the CSW's call for women's economic and social rights--a "social revolution" for women--in favor of the perceived stability of the "traditional" family. By the early 1950s, anti-communist pressures led the CSW to sever the pursuit of women's rights from the developing human rights framework at the UN. Feminists' absence from the UN human rights debates over the next several decades removed a forceful challenge to U.S.-led efforts to privilege political and civil rights over economic and social rights, and fostered a tacit hierarchy of rights that persists to this day. This dissertation places the CSW's competing vision of universal human rights at the center of the postwar human rights project, and expands our understanding of the history of international women's activism and human rights. By analyzing official UN records, delegates' papers and memoirs, and the records of governmental and non-governmental organizations, it reveals that postwar human rights advocacy was critically shaped by women's activism of the interwar period. Furthermore, this dissertation demonstrates that the CSW's demands for women's rights shaped the context from which the universal human rights framework emerged. Indeed, feminist activism and debates about the rights of women influenced UDHR drafters' views about human rights in ways that expanded, but also significantly curtailed postwar human rights standards. As a result, feminist activists continue to fight today for full recognition of women's rights as human rights.

Magister Legum - LLM / The international community saw the need to completely eradicate the use of torture and, as a result, adopted the 1984 Convention against Torture. The Convention obliges states to take effective legislative, judicial, and administrative and any other measures necessary to prevent acts of torture and other forms of ill-treatment within their jurisdictions. Cameroon, following the preamble of its Constitution, which prohibits torture in all its form, ratified the Convention in 1986 and other international treaties that deal with the prohibition of the use of torture. According to article 45 of the Constitution, duly ratified international treaties and conventions enter into force following their publication into the national territory. Cameroon has amended its Constitution and incorporated intoits domestic laws, provisions which prohibit the use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment. It goes further to prescribe appropriate penalties for public officials and other persons working in official capacity, who subject detainees and prison inmates to torture and other forms of ill-treatment.Despite all these instruments and mechanisms put in place to prevent and eradicate the use of torture and other forms of ill-treatment, this heinous crime continues to be widespread and is practiced systematically in almost all regions in the country and with impunity. This study will analyse whether Cameroon has put in place adequate constitutional and legal framework and mechanisms to guarantee the right to freedom from torture and other forms of ill-treatment for persons deprived of their liberty.

This thesis provides a historical study of the Canadian government's changing foreign policy toward the development of an international bill of rights at the United Nations from the 1940s to the 1970s. Canada was initially reluctant to support international human rights instruments because the concept of 'universal human rights' articulated at the UN challenged customary understandings of civil liberties in Canada, and federal policy makers felt an international bill of rights would have a negative impact on domestic policy. By the 1970s, however, the Canadian government was pushing for the ratification of the International Covenants on Human Rights and working to present Canada as an advocate for the UN's human rights regime. This study considers this change in policy by examining the domestic and global factors that influenced the government's approach to international human rights. Within Canada, rights activism led to increased public awareness of human rights issues, and transformed Canadian understandings of rights and of the role of government in promoting these rights. This led to pressure on the Canadian government to support human rights initiatives at the United Nations. In this same period, the geopolitics of the Cold War and the rise of anti-colonialism shaped debates at the UN over human rights. As global support for the UN's human rights instruments grew, Canada became the subject of criticism from other states. Concerned about the negative implications, at home and within the international community, of appearing to stand in opposition to the principles of human rights, Ottawa changed its policy. Despite the government’s new rhetoric of support for the international bill of rights, however, federal policy makers continued to question the benefit of these instruments for Canada. This lack of commitment accounts, at least in part, for Canada’s continued failure to fully implement its international human rights obligations. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This work concerns with legislative changes which had direct influence on guarantee of human rights in PRC in the period of Hu Jintao's party chairmanship. Firstly the theoretic base of conception of human rights in PRC and in the world, which has been already compiled by specialists of humanrights and sinologists, is outlined. The specifics of humanright conception in dependency of historical conditions are explained. Then the method of research is introduced and concrete historical connections in given period, which is the basis for evaluation of legislative changes, are explained. These legal changes are analyzed in following chapter. Final summary sums up results, confronts them with initial expectations and presents general principles which are asserted during the formation of a new humanright legislative nowadays.

The 14th Dalai Lama-Tenzin Gyatso (DL) has expressed strong support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). While this may seem to be consistent with his outspoken promotion of basic "human values" and "universal responsibility" (Piburn, 2002), there is an unresolved metaphysical conflict between his endorsement of the UDHR and concomitant ideas like "inherent dignity" and "inalienable rights," on the one hand, and, on the other, his espousal of the Buddhist "Middle Way" or "Centrist" (Madhyamaka) thesis that all phenomena (i.e., persons, things, and ideas like "human rights") lack "intrinsic existence" (svabhāva). In this dissertation I argue that an "unforced consensus" (Taylor 2011) on rights can be achieved through an application of the Madhyamaka interpretation of the "two truths" (dvasatya; bden pa gnyis). Metaphysics, however, is only one dimension of the Madhyamaka account of reality. There is an equally (if not more) important "cognitive dimension" that pertains to how one sees and interacts with the world (Westerhoff, 2009). I believe this can be effectively applied to an analysis of the psychology of human rights foundationalism (i.e., the mindset that reifies rights). The DL believes that ultimately the safeguarding of human rights culture depends on a cognitive shift at the individual level. I explore the philosophical implications of this belief, and I contend that it is consistent with the concept of human development and education in the UDHR. I conclude that Tibetan Buddhist ideas and practices can potentially help bridge the divide between human rights foundationalism and anti-foundationalism in a manner that reinvigorates the utility of the UDHR, and yet does not philosophically yield to an essentialist world-view.

In 1996, Zimbabwean graphic designer Chaz Maviyane-Davies created a set of human rights posters which represent several articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, from what he calls an “African perspective”. In this study I investigate how Maviyane-Davies has constructed ‘African-ness’ and probe what he refers to as the “alternative aesthetic” that he is trying to create. I use a visual social semiotic approach to examine the discourses he draws on to re-image and re-imagine Africa and Africans in a manner that contests the stereotypical representations found in political, news and economic discourses about Africa, paying particular attention to the ways he uses images of the body. My analysis of the posters shows how complex and difficult it can be to contest regimes of representation that work to fix racialised and derogatory meanings. In response to the pejorative stereotypes of the black body, Maviyane-Davies uses images of strong, healthy, and magnificent people (mostly men) to construct a more affirmative representation of Africa and Africans. Significantly, he draws on sports, touristic, traditional and hegemonic discourses of masculinity in an attempt to expand the complexity and range of possible representations of African-ness. In so doing he runs the risk of reproducing many of the stereotypes that sustain not only the racialised and gendered (masculinist) representations of Africa, but also a sentimentalisation and romanticisation of a place, a people and their traditions. Apart from women in prominent positions, other conspicuous absences from these images include white people and hegemonic references to Western modernity. I do not believe he is discarding whites and modernity as un-African, but is rejecting the naturalisation of whiteness as standing in for humanity, and particular icons of Western modernity as significations of ‘modernity’ itself

This thesis examines how American and German constitutionalism, as shaped by the U.S. Supreme Court and the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht), have mediated the tension between threats to stability and the imperative of renewal through occasional or constant interventions in their democratic processes. To do this, it primarily assesses the 1960s U.S. reapportionment cases and the European Parliament electoral threshold cases of 2011 and 2014. It also considers the ideas of four thinkers, theorists and jurists who have wrestled with the dilemma of how to maintain the bond between citizen and state: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville. Stability and renewal represent the twin orientation points for constitutionalism and the courts against which they must adjust to possible democratic threats, or new political and social forces in need of recognition. Threats to the state can emerge either from a surfeit of illiberal views in politics and society aimed at destroying an existing constitutional order, or when democratic channels become starved of new opinions through the constitutional or unconstitutional exclusion of voters and parties. A distinctive feature of the approach taken is the conceptual division between the ‘legal/institutional' space in which the Supreme Court and Bundesverfassungsgericht interpret constitutional meaning, and the ‘civic space' in which citizens accept or reject constitutional meaning. One central question is how American and German constitutionalism, and the U.S. Supreme Court and Bundesverfassungsgericht shape and influence the vital civic space that is integral to the democratic relationship between citizen and state, and the survival of the state itself. Ultimately it is concluded that without acceptance of the importance of law and constitutionalism by citizens in the civic space, the influence of the Supreme Court and the Bundesverfassungsgericht becomes purely institutional and effectively consigned to the courtroom.

A universal human dignity, conceived as an inherent and inalienable value or worth in all human beings, which ought to be recognised, respected and protected by others, has become one of the most prominent and widely promoted interpretations of human dignity, especially in international human rights law. Yet, it is also one of the most difficult interpretations of human dignity to justify and ground. The fundamental problem rests on how one can justify bestowing an equal high worth to all human lives, whilst also attributing to all human life a worth that is superior to all non-human animal life. To avoid the speciesist charge it seems necessary to provide further reasons, over and above species membership, for why all humans have a unique worth and dignity. However, intrinsic capacities, such as autonomy, intelligence or language use, are too demanding for many humans (including foetuses or the severely cognitively disabled) to meet the required minimum standard, whilst also being obtainable by some non-human animals, regardless of where the level is set. This thesis offers a solution to this problem by turning instead to the significance of the relational ties between individuals or groups that transcend individual capacities and abilities, and consequently does not require that all individuals in the group need meet the minimum required capacity for full moral status. Rather, it is argued that a universal human dignity could be grounded in our social nature, the interconnectedness and interdependence of human life and the morally considerable relationships that can and do arise from it, especially in regards to our shared vulnerability and dependence, and our ability to engage in caring relationships. Care represents the antithesis to the dehumanizing effects of humiliation, and other degrading and dehumanizing acts, and as a relational concept, human dignity is often best realised through our caring relationships. The way that individuals and groups treat each other has a fundamental role in determining both an individual’s sense of self-worth and well-being, as well as their perceived public value and worth. Thus, whilst species membership is not in itself morally fundamental or basic, it often shapes the nature of our social and moral relations. These relational ties between humans, it is argued, distinguish us most clearly from other non-human animals and accord human relationships a special moral significance or dignity.

The aim of this work is to analyse the progress made by Turkey in human rights area and identify how important role of Islam there is. The work attempts to refute the idea that Muslim society is not possible to create a functioning legal system that takes sufficient account of the protection of human rights. Reforms of 20 and 30 years of the 21st century were used as theoretical basis. For the analysis of advances in the field of legislation was used Turkish Constitution as the basic document, which is the most important from the point of view of the European Union. A key part of this thesis is an analysis of current problems in the field of human rights and criticism of the international community, especially the European Union that Turkey must face. The work attempts to identify how important role is played by Islam in the issue.