The protection regimes (international human rights law, international criminal law and international humanitarian law) are true expressions of the utopian ideals of the international community in trying to deal with mass human rights violations and atrocities. These expressions, however, can create hierarchies in the protection that is awarded and in a sense create categories of exclusion, rather than categories of protection. The subaltern outside these categories, the one that is not protected must be recognized. By using the definition of genocide, more specifically the mental component conceptualised in the Genocide Convention, the aim of this paper is to argue that the protection awarded is limited and therefore exclusionary. Starting from this premise, the question is whether the restrictive nature of the wording can be expanded using the tools of interpretation within international law. Drawing from the large corpus of legal tools, the aim of this paper is to show that there are ways to expand the categories in international criminal law, one of which is the idea of progressive development of the law. The Rome Statute and certain fundamental principles of international human rights law provide pillars of support to this argument. However, in trying to expand the categories of protection that is awarded, the rights of the alleged perpetrator must be taken into account and the Principle of Legality must be respected. / Within this contextual paralysis, the meta critique needs to be situated: That the fundamental aim of the crimes of all crimes is to protect the weak and helpless. Therefore, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas will be used to argue that the creation of priorities of protection cannot stand, as it does not recognize the other, rather only those that have become part of the self.

The universal human right to health care is a cliché that is frequently invoked by politicians and various activist groups to express the idea that inequalities in the distribution of medical resources are unjust. These disgruntled social reformers are largely uninformed about the true nature of human rights, claiming that any society in which some citizens go without comprehensive medical services is institutionalising immorality by violating Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such uninformed and exaggerated claims only serve to distort the public conception of human rights, obscure the legitimate demands of social justice, and impose unrealistic expectations on health care systems of limited resources. In this paper, I intend to uncover the true meaning of the universal right to health care, ultimately rejecting the commonly held notion that inequality in the distribution of medical resources necessarily entails a violation of human rights. In Chapters One and Two, I dissect the notion of human rights in order to further define Article 25, discussing any moral and practical implications the acceptance of this right has for both the individual and society. Chapters Three and Four concern the just allocation of health care resources within society, in accordance with the right to health care, and will assess appropriate distributive principles for the health care institution.

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ABSTRACT Most of the documented benefits of contraceptive service lack in-depth exploration of the lived experiences of service users. This study of contraceptive users in the Sidama Zone, Southern Region, Ethiopia; was conducted with the aim of improving the overall understanding of contraceptive use towards women’s health and empowerment. This knowledge enables alignment of contraceptive service provision with the International Conference on Population Development declaration of rights-based approach. The study employed a mixed method design. The quantitative aspects include use of a descriptive retrospective approach to generate a five year snapshot contraceptive use from health institutions. Percentages were used to compute the contraceptive prevalence in the last five years. The bulk of the study was a qualitative design using interpretive phenomenology- guided by a Heideggerian approach. Data were collected using key informant interviews, focus group discussions and individual in-depth interviews. Data were analyzed using an interpretive phenomenological analysis with hermeneutic circle approach. Results were presented in broad themes following the study questions. The findings of the study indicated that contraceptive use in the study area is steadily improving. In 2008 contraceptive prevalence was twenty- five percent and after five years, it reached forty- two percent. Injectable contraceptive is the leading method, with nearly three-fourth of current users on this method. Recently, every health post offers at least one long acting and two short acting methods. The qualitative finding revealed that women’s experiences regarding the benefits of contraceptive use is encouraging. Women explicated that contraceptive service is an emancipatory and transformative experiences for them as it enabled them to control their bodies, reproduction and fertility by averting unwanted pregnancy thereby engaging in various socio-economic, religious, and political affairs. Controlled fertility gave them more time to plan their livelihood issues. The study’s title, a participant quote, captures the sentiment well: “we got peace, rest and stability”. The study finding further revealed the unique contributions of the health extension program in improving access and convenience to contraceptive service by removing many cultural, gender, and linguistic barriers. The study concludes that contraceptive service pattern has improved greatly in access and coverage; however, the majority of current users are merely on a single method indicating gaps in expanding contraceptive method mix. Women’s experiences about internalizing contraceptive use benefits towards their empowerment and health are encouraging in that they wholeheartedly expressed that the service is emancipatory and transformative. However, there are grey areas from the perspectives of ensuring support from men and dominant community members such as elders. Moreover, there is observed disconnect in conceptualizing and practicing contraceptive service provision from a broader human rights premises among health care workers across the service delivery hierarchy. The research recommends the establishment of smooth and functional mechanisms to ensure all stakeholders involved in service provision develop a shared understanding about the human rights rationale and practice while providing contraceptive service. More efforts are needed to ensure sustainable contraceptive service use by removing the existing cultural and gender barriers. Efforts should be amplified to increase men’s involvement in the reproductive services. Further study is recommended to investigate the nature and factors that influence the incorporation of human rights rationale across the health care system.

This thesis is a study of the relationship between gender, citizenship and reproductive rights in the poblaciones of Santiago, both in relation to the Chilean State and in terms of the categories of international human rights law. At a time in which there has been a great deal of debate about women's international rights and new areas of rights directed at women have begun to be defined, this study seeks to draw attention to the need to consider how such rights operate in specific cultural contexts. In particular, it considers how dominant cultural discourses of gender are constructed and reproduced in the context of marginal urban communities in Santiago, Chile, and the constraints they may place on the conception and exercise of women's citizenship. The thesis sets out to show the ways in which these discourses are embedded in state institutions and reproduced in its practices. It describes the ways in which the law operates in a discursive way to allow or disallow interpretations of events and thereby conditions and delimits women's citizenship. Rather then depicting these dominant discourses as totalizing, the thesis aims to present a more complex picture in which women may on the one hand be seen to be complicit in their own subordination, but on the other to adopt alternative discourses, for example the new feminist discourse on human rights and the discourses emanating from NGOs which focus on concepts of freedom and autonomy. Women may be seen to reinterpret these discourses in the course of applying them to their own situations, accepting, rejecting and transforming them in the process. It draws on interviews with 89 women living in marginal urban communities, which investigate the exercise of citizenship and the variables affecting women's capacity to operationalise their rights. The data aims to show how rights discourses, including human rights can play a transformative role in the content and practice of citizenship. The extension of the concept of citizen to incorporate new areas of rights such as reproductive and sexual rights, creates the potential for women to use these conceptual tools to challenge traditional gender discourse that discriminate against them and inhibit the exercise of their citizenship. The thesis lays out the theoretical debates in relation to gender and citizenship, the state, the universalist-relativist debate in anthropology and the feminist discourse on human rights and argues in favour of a perspective that incorporates a gendered analysis of the cultural factors influencing the operation of laws.

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Aboriginal rights are rooted in the historical relationship between the Indigenous peoples of Canada and the Crown and attempt to reconcile the prior occupation of lands by the Aboriginal peoples with claims of Crown Sovereignty. Treaty rights, on the other hand, owe their existence to a series of consensual agreements between the signatories and represent an ongoing relationship between the parties. Treaties represent an integral part of the early Indigenous-European relationship, initially offering peace and friendship and later a vehicle through which the Europeans could acquire lands from the Aboriginal peoples for settlement. In the seminal decision R. v. Sparrow, the Supreme Court of Canada for the first time attempted to address the scope and content of these constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights. The court concluded that Aboriginal rights existed at common law and that these common law rights, whatever they may be, received constitutional protection by virtue of s. 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. Thus, any legislative enactment designed to infringe on these rights must meet constitutional standards for justification. Despite strict limitations on infringement, in the period following Sparrow, the Court has watered down the effects of this decision by diluting the legislative intent portion of the test to such a degree that it risks becoming a non-factor in the justification process. In this paper, I contend that the use of the Sparrow test, particularly as that test has been interpreted by the Court in the period following Sparrow is flawed, and to use this test as a tool for determining when constitutionally protected Aboriginal treaty rights might be infringed multiplies this flaw to a critical point.

In this essay I argue that all children have a right to Autonomy Facilitating Education (AFE), and a corresponding right to freedom from indoctrination. Citizens of liberal-democratic societies have a fundamental interest in autonomy because it underpins what Rawls called the moral powers, because self-consciously liberal democratic societies cannot coherently endorse anti-perfectionist liberalism and must endorse at least weak-perfectionism with respect to children`s prospective right to autonomy, and because it is constitutive of a form of civic virtue the general diffusion of which is necessary for the vitality and sustainability of liberal democratic society. Autonomy consists in the exercise of two cognitive capacities: one self-reflective, the other self-affective. The aim of AFE is to develop these capacities by meeting three basic pedagogical requirements: The Knowledge Requirement develops the ability to access information. The Skill Requirement develops the ability to rationally evaluate and understand the relevant information. The Disposition Requirement develops the psychological disposition to engage the first two deliberative abilities (which together generate one’s considered best judgment) and then commit to that judgment and not deviate from it without first engaging the deliberative abilities again in light of new information, newly acquired evaluative skill or new understanding of the information. These requirements can be met from a range of pedagogical approaches, and parents have the right to provisionally privilege their own worldview in the pedagogical approach to their child’s AFE. I use this account to evaluate two Canadian case studies: the first involving lawsuits over the Ethics and Religious Culture program in Québec, the second involving recent changes to Alberta’s Human Rights legislation enshrining parents’ rights over their child’s education. / Graduate

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