Human Rights

Session 12 (Week 14, November 30). (1) What Are Human Rights as They Are Conceived Today? (2) What Are the Families of Human Rights?(3) Are There Inevitable Tradeoffs between Promoting Development and Respecting Human Rights?

Read first: Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990)

Then: ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (2013)

Next: Nickel, "The Contemporary Idea of Human Rights," Making Sense of Human Rights, 7-22

Then: Nickel, "A Framework for Justifying Specific Rights," Making Sense, 70-91

Finally: Nickel, "The List Question," Making Sense of Human Rights, 92-106

So you'd like to know more...

Susan Waltz, "Universalizing Human Rights: The Role of Small States in the Construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 23 (2001): 44-72

Mary Ann Glendon, "The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the Human Rights Idea," Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 27-39

Nickel, "Making Sense of Human Rights," Making Sense, 35-52. (On the tests we should use to decide whether something is a human right.)

Jack Donnelly, "Defining Development," "Development-Rights Tradeoffs," "Development and Civil and Political Rights," Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Cornell UP, 2013): 225-231. [Available on Moodle.]

Robert E. Goodin, "The Development-Rights Tradeoff: Some Unwarranted Economic and Political Assumptions," Universal Human Rights 1 (1979): 31-42

Charles R. Beitz, "What Human Rights Mean," Daedalus 132 (2003): 36-46