Global Politics by Steven Lamy et al: pgs. 283-285 & 291-295

Review Humanitarian Intervention from our unit on Peace and Conflict

1. How might we define human rights?

2. Why is the distinction between individual versus collective/group rights challenging?

3. What role universal rights and culturally relative rights play in our analysis of human rights?

1. What are the three different generations of human rights?

2. In what ways in the notion of universal human rights being challenged?

This lesson will address the following prescribed content from the IB's Global Politics Guide:

• Human rights laws and treaties

• Protection and enforcement of human rights at different levels

• Monitoring human rights agreements

• Politicization of human rights (R2P, sanctions, HR for political gain, etc.)

The Defense Intelligence Agency was issuing predictions that Hussein would likely try to “defeat decisively” or crush “once and for all” the Kurds, but U.S. diplomats downplayed the campaign against the Kurdish minority and hoped for the best. U.S. patience would have worn thin far sooner if not for American farming, manufacturing, and geopolitical interests in Iraq. The policy of engagement was virtually uncontested at the State Department and White House. Internal memoranda thus tended to lament Iraqi repression only parenthetically: “Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.” One-quarter of the rice grown in Arkansas, Galbraith swiftly gathered, was exported to Iraq. Approximately 23 percent of overall U.S. rice output went there. One staffer representing Senator John Breaux of Louisiana actually appeared before Galbraith in tears and accused him of committing genocide against Louisiana rice growers. U.S. farmers also annually exported about 1 million tons of wheat to Iraq. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the father of the author of the sanctions package, mused to me years later, “The one thing you don’t want to do is take on the American farmer. There aren’t many left, but you’ve got to take care of them.” The administration got immediate assistance from U.S. farm and industry lobbyists who had read the Congressional Record and were horrified that the sanctions bill had slipped quietly by their Senate friends. With a hideous lack of irony, several chemical companies also called to inquire how their products might be affected if sanctions were imposed to punish chemical weapons use.

• Samantha Power in A Problem From Hell

International Human Rights Law

Click here to answer the questions below

1. What are the two components of international human rights law?

2. What role does domestic law play in enforcing international human rights law?

3. How does international human rights law differ from international humanitarian law?

4. What agreements make up the International Bill of Human Rights?

5. Of the additional international human rights treaties and other instruments have been adopted since 1945 are there any that you are surprised to see included? Are there any issues not listed that you are surprised to not see included?

6. What obligations are tied to the ratification of human rights treaties?

7. How does the Human Rights Council and the Human Rights Treaty Bodies assist in enforcing human rights legislation?

8. What role does the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties play in ensuring the enforceability of international law?

9. What is "state responsibility" as it relates to international law?

10. What options does the international community have at its disposal when a state violates international law?

Visit this section of the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and read the background to the international law regarding human rights and then complete these activities:

1. Who is currently on the council. Are you surprised by any of the countries listed there? Why?

2. Look up two countries of your choice. Explore which human rights agreements they have ratified and signed and ones they have rejected. Why do you think their agreements have been rejected?

3. What are the ten different human rights instruments used in international law?

4. What are treaty bodies? What do they do?

5. The International Bill of Human Rights consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and two of the ten HR law instruments: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two Optional Protocols. Visit the website for one of the treaties that is connected to a human rights violation you are wanting to study. In reviewing the treaty, how might the issue you are researching be a human rights violation? How would you go about lodging a human rights violation complaint on behalf of someone suffering the violation you are studying?

6. Which countries are currently represented on the committee for the HR instrument you are looking at?

7. In addition to the International Bill of Rights and the core human rights treaties, there are many other universal instruments relating to human rights. Here is a non-exhaustive list. Choose one of the Geneva conventions to review and research one example of a Geneva convention violation that occurred in your lifetime.

8. Choose one of the additional instruments that you are either interested in or that relate to the HR violation you are studying. How might this legislation be used to support your human rights complaint/what are two elements from this legislation you found interesting?

9. Choose one of the current or past Human Rights Council's investigations and outline what its mandate is and what, if any, human rights violations it has uncovered.

10. How can you lodge a human rights complaint?