Browsing by Subject "Human Rights"

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Animating Children’s Views: An Innovative Methodology for Quantitative Research
(2021-02) Levison, Deborah
UNCRC Article 12 (Convention on the Rights of the Child) states that children's views and perspectives should be listened to, especially when it comes to policy decisions that affect them. In theory, this is great—but it's hardly the norm, particularly in the Global South. Professor Deborah Levison and her research assistant, PhD student Anna Bolgrien, sought to develop a way to survey children in the Global South about difficulties and challenges they may be facing in everyday life, which had to be done without putting children at risk of being overheard and punished by their family members or communities. The result: Animating Children's Views, an open-source, human rights–based interview methodology using simple cartoon vignettes featuring different scenarios (e.g., peer pressure, child labor, street harassment) and a scale of emoji faces ranging from happy to sad. After collaborating with an artist and an animator to create the vignettes, Levison and Bolgrien worked with teams of local collaborators in Nepal and Tanzania to gather quantitative data, with plans to expand the project to Brazil. They hope that other organizations will adopt the Animating Children's Views methodology and use its online library of images and animations to help influence policy changes on a global scale. "The point is that whatever kids have to say, we should be listening to it more," Levison says.
The Battle Between Human Rights and Development in Post-Conflict Situations: Assessed Through the Lens of the Rwandan Model
(2020-05-01) Olubayo, Paul
The principles of human rights and development share both a common vision and a common purpose; the desire “to secure, for every human being, freedom, well-being and dignity”. These basic, underlying principles have been promoted and advocated in various differing forms throughout human history, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) noting that concern for these two principles can be dated as far back as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. Further, throughout history we have seen endeavors to link these two agendas in a mutually beneficial relationship. It has been stated that one of the central achievements of the first World Conference on Human Rights in 1968, was its assertion that ‘the achievement of lasting progress in the implementation of human rights is dependent upon sound and effective national and international policies of economic and social development.’ The international community would take this a step further in 1977 when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights proclaimed the existence of a human right to development, which would later be adopted formally by the UN General Assembly in 1986.
Business and Human Rights: Recommendations to Advance Access to Remedy
(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2013-05-06) Abdallah, Moxamuud; Ahmed, Abdi; Donaldson, Julia; Lance, Krista; McInerney, Janice; Molloy, Connor; Naadha, Mariyam; Reilkoff, Thea; Sande, Erik; Guerra de Sims, Maria del Carmen
Defending Human Rights: The Legacy of Dachau and Nuremberg
(2005-11) Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center, University of Minnesota Law Library
Dictatorships and the Globalization of Repression
(2020-07) Kaire De Francisco, Jose
Dictatorships today are as violent as they were during the Cold War. This has surprised international observers, who a few years ago thought globalization would help protect human rights in these countries. Despite international efforts to hold abusive dictators accountable, human rights appear to have gotten worse in many dictatorships. To explain this puzzle, I first note how globalization threatens the political and economic interests of elites in dictatorships. In turn, elites demand compensation from the dictator. Where elites can credibly threaten the dictator with removal, the dictator is likely to increase repression to placate allies and avoid a coup. This compensation dynamic between autocrats and their ruling coalition explains why some dictatorships respond with increased violence to globalization while others do not. It also helps explain how different elements of globalization interact with each other in the domestic politics of autocracies to improve or weaken human rights.
The Emergence Of Human Rights In The Mayan World: Rural Church And Indigenous Activism In Guatemala, 1943-1983
(2021-09) Tun Tun, Heider
This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach of History and Human Rights to discuss the organization and activism of Indigenous Catholic communities that preceded and shaped the human rights movement of the 1980s in Guatemala. By focusing on the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche from 1943 to 1983, I argue that the human rights movement in Guatemala that called attention to the country’s deep historical roots of racism and discrimination was the result of the activism carried out by Indigenous communities in connection to the Catholic Church. I use the term “Rural Church” to refer to these communities of Catholics from the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche that focused on enhancing the living conditions of the poor and marginalized; since the 1950s members of the Rural Church worked on organizing cooperatives, colonizing new lands, studying the structures of inequality, as well as advancing the teaching of the gospel. By tracing the concept of the Rural Church, this dissertation highlights the importance of rural society and the influence that marginalized and Indigenous communities had on the Catholic Church in Guatemala. This dissertation engages extensively with unpublished archival documentation including the local efforts of De Sol a Sol (“From Sunrise to Sunset”) and Ixim (“Corn” in Maya K’iche) which feature the efforts of Indigenous and local intellectuals to discuss the connections between race, ethnicity, class, and inequality. My archival approach is influenced by the Mayan cyclical view of time which highlights the survival of Mayan people despite numerous attempts of eradication and genocide against their communities.
Enhancing Climate Action: Exploring Human Rights Approaches in the Implementation of the Loss and Damage Fund
(2024-05-01) Kantaria, Natia
Climate change is a major challenge facing humanity. The need to address it is unfortunately not matched by sufficient action. Countries either fail to reach agreements, implement policies or stick to their commitments. The recognition of climate change as a human rights issue in UN resolutions, by the Human Rights Council and the recent judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland opens up new possibilities to ‘help’ countries to take action and stick to their commitments. In light of this development, this paper explores how the inclusion of human rights principles into climate change action could enable more possibilities to ensure that countries stick to their commitments. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, and focusing on the Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) as the case, the paper examines in how far human rights principles are part of the LDF make-up and in how far their further addition can ensure states stick to their commitments. Drawing from academic and gray literature, as well as the author's firsthand experience as a practitioner and observer at the 28th Conference of the Parties, the paper concludes that meaningful integration of human rights principles, including references to international human rights law, can create more avenues for states to make them liable. Consequently, this paper underscores the importance of integrating these principles into climate change actions and develops policy recommendations to advance the enjoyment of basic human rights.
Episode 14: Sex Trafficking and Community Wellbeing
(2018-01-26) Martin, Lauren; Conners, Kate
In this podcast, Lauren Martin, director of research at the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) and affiliate faculty member of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, addresses sex trafficking and commercial sex, defining their differences and dispelling myths. When it comes to the relationship between sex trafficking and mega sporting events, an issue that drew increased attention as Minnesota prepared to host the big game, Martin notes that "it's not that there's no impact, it's that the impact is akin to any large event."
Episode 17: Violence and Restraint: Making Strategic Decisions During Civil War
(2018-05-31) Stanton, Jessica; Conners, Kate
"Does civil war always lead to violence against civilians? The short answer is no, according to Jessica Stanton, an associate professor in the global policy area at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Stanton's research has found that more than 40 percent of the civil wars between 1989 and 2010 did not involve large-scale attacks on civilians. ""We haven't paid enough attention to the fact that not all civil wars involve violence against civilians,"" she says. So why do some governments and rebel groups engage in violence against civilians while others exhibit restraint? ""Both violence and restraint can be strategic,"" Stanton says. Understanding why some groups avoid targeting civilians may help policymakers incentivize groups to exercise restraint. Stanton is the author of Violence and Restraint in Civil War: Civilian Targeting in the Shadow of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016)."
Episode 1: Investigating Potentially Unlawful Death: the Minnesota Protocol
(2017-01-25) Frey, Barbara; Conners, Kate
In this podcast, Barbara Frey, director of the Human Rights Program in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, discusses The Minnesota Protocol. The Minnesota Protocol was – and remains – a ground-breaking piece of work with significant impact. However, the time is ripe for revision, to take account of developments in both international law and forensic science. As a key UN text providing guidance on the practical implementation of the duty to protect life and the obligation to investigate potentially unlawful deaths, its updating will ensure its continuing relevance over the coming decades. In a number of resolutions, the UN Commission on Human Rights called for such a revision (also later referenced by its successor, the Human Rights Council).
Episode 4: U.S. History of Immigration and Deportation
(2017-03-17) Lee, Erika; Conners, Kate
As new policies relating to immigration, border enforcement, refugee resettlement, and deportation are being implemented, in this podcast we talk to the director of the Immigration History Research Center, historian Erika Lee, about the origins of U.S. immigration policy and their relevance today.
Episode 5: Jordan's Youth: The Effects of the Syrian Refugee Crisis
(2017-04-17) Assaad, Ragui; Conners, Kate
In this podcast, Ragui Assaad, professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, looks more deeply into the needs of Syrian youth refugees in Jordan and the social underpinnings of unrest.
Episode 7: Intimate Partner Violence in Colombia
(2017-04-25) Friedemann-Sanchez, Greta; Conners, Kate
In 2008, Colombia expanded legislation addressing women's human right to live a life free from violence. The prevalence of intimate partner violence in Colombia is one of the highest in Latin America. In this podcast, Greta Friedemann-Sanchez, associate professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, explores the complexity of implementing the 2008 legislation given Colombia's institutional organization and the context of the conflict.
Human Rights Judges as Individuals
(2021) Panchal, Shailja T
International courts have been industrious over the past couple of decades. International courts such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) have become the hot spot for settling jurisdiction of many sorts across borders. Regional human rights courts in Europe, Latin America, and Africa have sought to protect the rights of individuals against government intrusion. As individuals and states increasingly turn to the international judicial system, the risk of “tribunal fatigue” emerges (Alford 2000 p. 160). This has led to “backlash” against these legal bodies and state exit, resulting in growing scholarly attention (Madsen et al. 2018; Voeten 2019) . This research explains the role, agenda, and framework of international courts as unitary entities, but an understanding of international judges with separate individual behaviors and voices has been overlooked.
The Human Rights Performative: The Belarus Free Theater on the Global Stage
(2017-05) Kompelmakher, Margarita
This dissertation investigates the staging of human rights in the theatrical work of the Belarus Free Theater (BFT), a social justice theater company from Minsk, Belarus that has become one of the most prominent human rights theater companies in the world since 2007. Drawing on bilingual fieldwork and archival research conducted over a five-year period in Belarus and the UK, this project reveals how liberal values--such as freedom of speech and individuality--are translated across post-Soviet Europe and the European Union. The chapters in this dissertation trace a historical shift in human rights cultural politics from identity-based aesthetics to ethical aesthetics grounded in the principles of survival, testimony and sensation. These principles have increasingly become the gold standard for cross-cultural exchanges since the Helsinki Accords in the 1970s. I demonstrate how these principles are not ‘objective’ aesthetic judgments but, in fact, part of a colonial and racially charged mode of liberal human rights governance. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights how artist-activists from Belarus make claims to alternative worldviews to mainstay liberal democracy. It argues that cultural institutions must engage with cultural translation in order to avoid falling prey to a form of human rights governance that implicitly positions certain groups as artistically inferior and backwards on a spectrum of political freedoms.
Human Rights versus Humanitarian Aid – and Compromises: The Case of MN Missionaries during the Armenian Genocide
(2017-08) Bhatnagar, Prashasti
Local Struggles in Global Paradigms: Afro-Colombians, Human Rights and Development
(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2012-05-18) Wu, Brandon
In this paper, I examine the conditions under which Afro-descendant Colombians have collaborated with international allies in order to protect their rights and their livelihoods in the context of national economic development policies that have resulted in violence and displacement. Looking specifically at Afro-descendant communities in the Uraba region of northwestern Colombia, I invoke two theoretical traditions of social change, each with different implications for strategy and policy. The constructivist and neo-institutional schools emphasize transnational norms, networks and institutions and imply that greater engagement with major international human rights NGOs and institutions is a necessary strategy for the protection of Afro-Colombian human rights. On the other hand, conflict- and dependency-oriented perspectives foreground the importance of underlying economic incentives for human rights abuses and imply that the human rights framework as most widely accepted is too limited to truly address the full set of challenges faced by Afro-Colombians. These theories thus emphasize the key role of social movements and solidarity networks making more fundamental challenges to certain aspects of the global economy. Using these theoretical frameworks, I address the questions: how have Afro-Colombians engaged with the international human rights regime to struggle against the economic forces that threaten their autonomy and livelihoods? To what extent has this engagement been beneficial? What are the unintended consequences, and are there any ways in which internationalization has been harmful? Finally, given this analysis, what are the implications for how international activists and NGOs can most helpfully engage in the struggle for Afro-Colombian empowerment?
The Media of Memories: Argentine and Brazilian Transitional Justice as Seen on TV
(2019-03) Hill Cosimini, Amy
Grounded in my own observation of the recent string of Latin American shows, such as Montecristo (Argentina, 2008) and Amor e revolução (Brazil, 2011), which directly confront traumatic national pasts, this project investigates what representative 21st century Argentine and Brazilian fictional and testimonial televisual accounts (telenovelas, miniseries and testimonial interviews) communicate about the role of television in the construction and mediation of the officially sanctioned memory narratives promoted by normative transitional justice mechanisms. In this vein, this project—The Media of Memories: Argentine and Transitional Justice as Seen on TV—poses a series of interrelated questions:1) How can transitional justice processes take place on the small screen? 2) How can understanding these televisual practices advance existing theories on transitional justice as it relates to the right to memory, and the protection of memory’s productive problematics—such as the respect for silence, gaps and hauntings inherent in remembering mass atrocities? And finally, 3) What alternative spaces for advocacy, if any, are opened up by these television programs? In the end, my project contends that television programs, in the Argentine and Brazilian cases, have the potential to operate as malleable discursive spaces that question hegemonic memory regimes and complicate normative truths put in place by the State. Furthermore, the telenovelas, miniseries, and testimonial interviews analyzed throughout this project function, to varying degrees, as dynamic memory mediums that simultaneously promote memory as memory entrepreneurs, profit from memory, frame what truths should be remembered, and digitally transmit memory. Thus, I maintain that moving televised images have the potential to operate as a widely accessible form of transitional justice that not only translates judicial arguments to the mass populace, but also provides alternative spaces for the re-definition of justice and the performance of multilayered activism. Through its visual depiction and fictionalization of the limit experiences of collective traumas, television stages those realities that resist verbal narration and operates as a form of symbolic reparations that restores dignity to victims, develops a more inclusive narrative of the past, and protects the right to memory.
Migración y Derechos Humanos: Un encuentro multidisciplinario en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea
(2009-08) Reyes Zaga, Héctor Alberto
This dissertation pursues a new strategy for the study of contemporary Mexican narrative —particularly that which is produced on the border with the United States— using human rights as an analytical framework. By examining Mexican narrative through a human rights hermeneutics, I argue that we can better situate the intricate negotiations among legal, cultural, and political discourses of subjectivity they set in motion. This negotiation is particularly fraught in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the drastic shift in public and legal stances on immigration that followed them. The dissertation’s introduction outlines human rights theory and positions this study of resistance literature at the nexus between postcolonial, legal, and human rights theory. Chapter One examines the notion that immigrants are vulnerable subjects of human rights as recognized by intergovernmental organizations such as the International Labor Organization, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States. It then further reviews this condition as portrayed through international laws and treaties designed by the above entities to protect these subjects. Chapter Two demonstrates that immigration policies established by state and federal authorities in the United States breach international treaties and have caused the “criminalization” of Mexican immigrants. Here, I analyze ethnographic and statistical data from the perspective of cultural anthropology with the purpose of finding an explanation of the relationship between human rights violations of Mexican immigrants and the increment of border enforcement in the United States. Chapter three sets up the analytical categories derived from the framework created in the first two chapters and establishes a dialogue between human rights and Mexican narratives depicting immigrants. The following chapters then apply these categories to the study of an array of literary works created by Mexican authors such as Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Hugo Salcedo, J. Humberto Robles Arenas, Victor Hugo Rascón Banda, and Rosario Sanmiguel. In particular, I look to examine the ways in which these works represent the effects of human rights violations of Mexican immigrants and thereby enter into salient debates within the field of human rights, mainly the debate regarding national sovereignty versus individual rights.
Modernity and ethics: the ghost of terror in French thought.
(2010-08) Reinberg, Mira
"Modernity and Ethics" examines the different incarnations of terror in literary and philosophical works, as well as in film, in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I follow texts engaged in thinking the dialectic between Enlightenment and violence and which had critical influence on French and Francophone thought in particular and contemporary global thought in general. Three principal questions emerge from my reading of these works: First, in light of the turbulent post-colonial reality in North Africa and France, as well as the Middle East, are there unique historical moments that call for a state of exception in which the law is suspended for raison d'Etat, or does ethics demand a rethinking of insurrection? Second, how do the positions which these writers take toward the understanding of violence shift the ideological frameworks that articulate or contest the conceptualization of terror? And third, what are the ethical stakes in the intersection of art and resistance? In works by Genet and films by Godard which confront the question of revolution I trace an ethics of resistance that is grounded more in the artistic interpretation of lived conflicts than in political endorsement or condemnation of violence. I analyze the notion of the gaze in Genet's work, and of time in films by Godard. I examine the continuing dialogue of modern thinkers such as Marx, Arendt, Benjamin, and Lyotard with the ethics of universalism founded by Enlightenment thought. The tension of this dialogue is exemplified in Hegel's conceptualization of the Reign of Terror as the logical consequence of an ideological philosophy. Modernity is haunted by the relationship between two seemingly incompatible phenomena: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and terror. The philosophical debate illuminates crucial questions that indicate the difficulty in articulating a viable understanding of modern conflicts. With a reading of Lacan's essay "Kant avec Sade," in which psychoanalysis confronts (Kant's) moral categories with Sade's literary formulation of "happiness in evil," I analyze the discourse of evil in a 19th-century short story by Villiers. A psychoanalytic analysis of the literary text provides important insights into the understanding of categorical ethical formulations.

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