This minor dissertation argues that there is more than a disjuncture between theory and practices, particularly for refugees and migrants and doctors in South Africa. The core idea of the Bill of Rights is that socio-economic rights are for everyone. Yet, its application suggests everyone means all citizens in the post-apartheid period, rather than all residents in South Africa. In the international domain, the human rights discourse calls on states to recognise responsibility extending to all peoples residing in a sovereign nation- state; but progressive realisation can hamper this aspiration. By employing progressive realisation within South African law, the idea that the state pays for what it can and makes future efforts to change, socio-economic rights for everyone currently cannot be achieved. This dissertation examines how Constitutional Court rulings on access to healthcare and relevant statutes have not been uniformly granted to everyone causing a disjuncture between law and practice.

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The globalized neoliberal agricultural regime operates within a neocolonial context and was therefore built upon the ideologies, law, and legacy of the colonial-era. Both capitalism and colonialism, in theory, and in practice, share characteristics that are inherently contrary to the realization of human rights. Given that the human rights framework operates within a globalized capitalist economy, there are systemic barriers to the universal realization of human rights. This thesis holds that the concept of food sovereignty not only highlights this reality but presents a nuanced emancipatory path forward towards a post-capitalist world where universal human rights realization is not only possible but inherent to the functioning of food sovereignty itself. Food sovereignty presents as a praxis for Marxist agrarian theory in establishing an approach to closing the metabolic rift. The existence of the Food Sovereignty Movement also confirms the existence of the metabolic rift as the theoretical disconnect between capitalism and human rights which underpins the current agricultural system. As a concept, it accounts for the systemic obstacles to the universal realization of the right to adequate food while also providing an alternative food system centred on the decisions of small-scale food producers. Contrary to capitalist and colonialist approaches to food production, food sovereignty is concerned with universal access to culturally appropriate nutritious foods produced through ecological means. Through a combination of normative and descriptive claims, this thesis examines the official recognition and realization of the right to food sovereignty as a proxy of Marxist ideology. Food sovereignty empowers the rights-holder to ensure the continued realization of their right to adequate food in underscoring the fact that rights realization is not static in nature but, an ongoing endeavour. As such, the process called for to implement an alternative food system is one of decolonization. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / Despite the existence of enough food for the sustenance of the global populace, there are obstacles prohibiting economic and physical access to food. These obstacles are created and maintained by the institutions and social structures that put forth policies encouraging economic and social inequality. The role which small-scale food producers play in global society is integral to the realization of the human right to adequate food. However, the current agricultural system de-values their work. Conceptually, food sovereignty highlights the oppressive nature of the agricultural system and puts forth a response that focuses on small-scale food producers assuming control over the food system. Commodification and exploitation are inherent characteristics of both the capitalist and colonial systems. Food sovereignty aims at dismantling oppressive systems through anti-capitalist and anti-colonial efforts sanctioned by the mobilization and collaboration of oppressed peoples within the context of food production.

Background. A nationally representative study of psychiatric disorders in South Africa provided an opportunity to study the association between perpetration of human rights violations (HRVs) during apartheid and psychiatric disorder. Prior work has suggested an association between perpetration and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but this remains controversial. Methods. Subjects reported on their perpetration of human rights violations, purposeful injury, accidental injury and domestic violence. Lifetime and 12-month prevalence of DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th edition) disorders were assessed with Version 3.0 of the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI 3.0). Socio-demographic characteristics of these groups were calculated. Odds ratios for the association between the major categories of psychiatric disorders and perpetration were assessed. Results. HRV perpetrators were more likely to be male, black and more educated, while perpetrators of domestic violence (DV) were more likely to be female, older, married, less educated and with lower income. HRV perpetration was associated with lifetime and 12-month anxiety and substance use disorders, particularly PTSD. Purposeful and DV perpetration were associated with lifetime and 12-month history of all categories of disorders, whereas accidental perpetration was associated most strongly with mood disorders. Conclusion. Socio-demographic profiles of perpetrators of HRV and DV in South Africa differ. While the causal relationship between perpetration and psychiatric disorders deserves further study, it is possible that some HRV and DV perpetrators were themselves once victims. The association between accidental perpetration and mood disorder also deserves further attention.

Prisoner rights in Canada have historically been met with disrespect and disregard. Advocates have continuously fought for better protections of prisoner rights and legislation that bans the harmful treatment of prisoners. However, during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic concerns arose about how prisoners’ rights were affected. Therefore, the question guiding this research is: How have the human rights of prisoners and (anti) carceral advocacy for their rights been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer this question, a document analysis was conducted, using documents from academics who work in the field, government departments, and advocates working in a variety of areas. This thesis fills the gap in scholarly inquiry that the pandemic has created as the circumstances and the effects of the pandemic are unknown. The government reacted to the pandemic by implementing protocols that suited them with little regard for how prisoner rights could be affected, and neglected advocates recommendations for change. Advocates reacted by shifting their strategies to ensure they could continue advocating during the pandemic. The thesis revealed that during a crisis, both positive and negative reactions can co-occur. The pandemic created a state of exception within the penal system; therefore, an increase in rights violations occurred. However, an opportunity for positive change also emerged. Advocates used this opportunity to change their strategies and maintain their advocacy. By contrast, the government did not seize the same opportunity, as is evidenced by how the recommendations that advocates had been supporting were not implemented properly to protect prisoners.

The Rwandan Genocide occurred between April and July of 1994. Within those four months, approximately a million Tutsi were brutally murdered by the Hutu in an effort to cleanse the country of a Tutsi presence. The genocide was the culmination of decades of unrest between the two groups created from Western influence under colonialism and post-colonial relationships. The international response to the genocide was scarce. While international intervention waned, the international media kept the genocide relevant in its publications. This thesis examines print media sources from the United States, Britain, and France. This thesis argues that the reporting of the genocide exacerbated larger issues concerning the relationship between the West and Africa. The journalists perpetuated Western superiority over Africa by utilizing racism to preserve colonial ideologies and stereotypes of Africans. In turn, this inherent Western racism complicated the implementation of human rights legislation that would have helped save Tutsi lives. This thesis places the Rwandan genocide, through the reports of Western media, into the larger historiographic context of the Western African dichotomy.

A small island nation near Australia was invaded and occupied by the Indonesian military regime in 1975, which lasted until 1999. This dissertation examines the global solidarity movement, whose success was due to the skill of its leaders, the collective agency transnational mobilization, effective social movement framing, which helped to create, act upon, and transform important critical junctures throughout the conflict. The East Timorese resistance movement against the Indonesian occupation took an ethnically and politically fragmented society and transformed it into a powerful transnational resistance movement that brough together military, clandestine, diplomatic, and global civil society actors together in supporting East Timor’s right to self-determination. Social movement frames punctuate the severity, immorality, and injustice of conditions. However, existing accounts on claims-making, framing trajectories, and outcomes tend to downplay the influence of contingency and indeterminacy in social movements. Indeed, as social constructionists contend, collective constructions are historically produced and culturally contingent. As claims-makers advance public claims developed within institutional realities, this underscores the range of contingencies and uncertainties actors manage in mobilizing their agendas. With East Timor's case, this sandwich thesis contends that understanding social movement framing and trajectories requires keeping institutional, discursive, and geopolitical contexts intact. Movements are embedded in histories, institutions, or fields that shape the outcome of framing trajectories and the outcome of social movement claims-making. However, social constructionists help us understand that resources, frames, and opportunities are perceived and constructed by actors. Therefore, the theoretical perspective provides substantial credence to the roles of contingency and human agency in social movement mobilization. Ultimately, objective structures, such as political/discursive opportunities or legal texts, are not enabling but generate social movement action insofar as moral agents perceive them. Often, this work is discursively constructed. This reality underscores the dimension of contingency in social action and social movement framing and mobilization because objective structures do not automatically determine what actors will select as a specific course of collective action or framing strategies. Frame and framing trajectories are particular to, and instantiated in, the contexts and develop over time as moral agents mobilize meaning by interacting with targets, sensitive to local conditions, emergent contingencies, and competing interests. By focusing on the social framing process, I show how framing or collective action frames emerge and are diffused in different ways across national contexts. The emphasis is not to address the broader institutionalized logics, such as political/discursive opportunities and geopolitics, but to understand how these aspects are incorporated in the framing practices of moral agents as strategic action as “endogenous to a field of actors” (Lounsbury et al., 2003:72), whose interests and national, not only transnational, but embeddedness also influence the interactional dynamics of their framing actions and trajectories. In this way, framing practices can be understood as struggles over audiences' minds and hearts, where actors compete in moral politics to secure symbolic power and political legitimacy. The macro-level logic indeed impacts the structure of frames. The diffusion and acceleration of claims within historically contingent events depend simultaneously on pre-existing, strong cultural framing and an influential social movement culture rooted in the abstract ideals of human rights that are transnationally dispersed but integrated. Strategic framing choices depend on various logic. Firstly, expanding political and discursive opportunities is crucial in accelerating mobilization. Moreover, the diffusion of frames and public claims can further propel mobilization and help to build convergences across sociopolitical allies. Agency and structure are often interpenetrating. Namely, depending on the choices made by actors at specific ‘critical junctures,’ they can either propel the social force of mobilization or hamper it, depending on perceived choices (agency). Social movements, especially transnational advocacy networks, prove more effective in frame diffusion when they build solidarities around shared meaning and international norms (human rights) that allow them to converge effectively around shared purposes and sustain collective mobilization across extended periods. Transnational networks of solidarity (the global solidarity movement) harnessed collective mobilization at the global level by converging the diffusion of their frames and claims around human rights talk. The thesis also considers various logics such as path dependency, contingency, historical events, and geopolitics in shaping the national and global movement mobilization and claims-making field. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Human Rights Due Diligence is a key topic in the debates among human rights advocates and the business world. Its understanding varies from a standard ofexpected care to a process to manage business risks. As introduced in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, it is a process through which business enterprises should identify, assess and properly address human rights risks. Today, the concept is used or tends to be incorporated in avariety of legal instruments, from international soft-law to regional and national regulations. However, the understanding of what is the objective of human rights due diligence, its content, and the required standard still vary. Relying on the international soft-law instruments and the developments in national law, this study analyzes the foundation and narrative of human rights due diligence, content, common elements, and scope of obligation in a way to identify similarities and/or differences in the concept within different jurisdictions.