Chapter 6: The Human Rights Revolution

Human Rights Revolution

Post WWII movement to make the internal human rights performance of states subject to international regulation, monitoring, and enforcement. (This movement challenges state sovereignty)

Cultural Revolution

Argument that cultures will have differing human rights standards, and attempts to impose universal notions of human rights risk imposing standards alien to the local culture.

Negative Rights

Human rights who achievement and endurance depend on prohibiting certain government actions (ex: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from torture)

Positive Rights

Humans rights that depend on positive government action, such as the right to education and the right to adequate health care

Genocide

“Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” (1948 Genocide Convention)

UN Commission on Human Rights

Original UN human rights body (1946), created to promote the development and, later, the monitoring of global human rights norms. (Replaced in 2005 by the UN Human Rights Council)

Human Rights Council (HRC)

UN body established in 2005 to monitor human rights practices of states. Intended as a more effective successor to the UN Commission on Human Rights.

High Commissioner for Human Rights

the principal UN human rights official, puts a public face on UN human rights monitoring.

CNN Effect

Impact and power of images of human rights abuses transmitted via the media in galvanizing world opinion to pressure governments to do something about human rights abuses.

Economic Sanctions

The limitation and prohibition of trade, investment, or aid with a target country in order to get that country to change its policies.

Apartheid

Post WWII era system of racial segregation imposed by the white Afrikaner National Party in South Africa.

Constructive Engagement

View that the best way to improve human rights in countries where abuses exist is to maintain economic and political relations in order to influence and exert leverage on the country in question.

Smart Sanctions

Economic sanctions targeted at things most valued by the political leaders of a country, while allowing essential civilian goods and humanitarian assistance to reach people in need.

Humanitarian Intervention

Use of military measures by the international community to end human rights abuses in an otherwise sovereign state.

Ethnic Cleansing

Practice of ridding an area of members of an unwanted ethnic group through acts of violence that make life so dangerous that they choose to flee, thereby cleansing the region and making it ethnically pure.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Global norm, endorsed by the UN, that States have responsibility to protect their citizens from human rights abuses and that, when states fail to do so, the international community has both a right and responsibility to intervene.

Truth Commissions

Domestic bodies charged with investigating, publicizing, and prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations in states emerging from periods of authoritarian rule or severe human rights abuses.

Universal Jurisdiction

Idea that in the case of grave violations of human rights, the judicial bodies of a sovereign star may exercise jurisdiction without regard to the territory where the crime was committed or the nationality of the perpetrators or victims.

Ad hoc tribunals

Temporary courts established by UN Security Council to prosecute human rights abuses.

Nuremberg Tribunal

Tribunal established by the victors of WWII to prosecute Nazi officials for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

International Criminal Court (ICC)

Established in 1998 by the Rome Statute, it is the court of international law human rights law intended to tru individuals (not states) accused of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.

Complementarity

Principle that the ICC will not hear a case unless the domestic judicial system is unwilling or unable to adjudicate the case in good faith.