The European Court of Human Rights: would Marx have endorsed it?

Başak Çalı

Open Democracy - 27 August 2014

It’s not hard to find a critic of the European Court of Human Rights these days. I have no intention, in this post, of joining this increasingly voluble choir of nationalists, fear-mongers and far right or authoritarian regimes. What I want to do is to approach the ECHR in the context of this series of articles on human rights and liberalism, in particular market liberalism, and ask whether Marx would have endorsed the Court as an ‘intrinsic human good’ for  Europeans?

Could the ECHR have convinced Marx that it has succeeded in lifting the veil on abstract rights masking substantive injustices as per his critique of rights in Capital? Could it persuade him it has fought against civil rights becoming a banner for liberal egoism and individualism as per On the Jewish Question?

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Theoria and Praxis: International Joural of Interdisciplinary Thought

Vol 2, No 1 (2014)

The Idea of Human Rights

Table of Contents

Preface

The Idea of Human Rights	PDF
Paul Brienza

Articles

Contributions of Africana Scholars to the Theory of Human Rights in Sociology	PDF
Biko Agozino

Relationality as a ‘Foundation’ for Human Rights: Exploring the Paradox with Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas	PDF
Anya Topolski

Amartya Sen’s Defense of Human Rights and the Challenge of Bentham	PDF
Don A. Habibi

Toward a Democratic Conception of Human Rights	PDF
Sine Bağatur

Subsistence Needs and Individual Duties	PDF
Eric R. Boot

Book Review: Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights by Rosa Freedman

The United Nations was established to safeguard world peace and security, development, and human rights, yet it is undeniable that it sometimes fails to protect the rights of a great many people. This book aims to look at the reasons for that failure. Rosa Freedman offers explanations of how and why the organisation is unable, at best, or unwilling, at worst, to protect human rights. Ben Warwick recommends this read for the understanding of global inaction on grave rights abuses it brings.

Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights. Rosa Freedman. C Hurst & Co. May 2014.

Imagine a family sitting warm, safe, and comfortable at home, when the six o’clock news beams pictures of desperation and gross human rights violations in to their living room. “Switch that off; change the channel”, someone says. “I don’t want to think about that while I eat my dinner”.
A stark, unpleasant, and disturbing picture. Yet Rosa Freedman, in Failing to Protect: The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights, forces us consider whether the United Nations also ‘changes the channel’ when it is presented with accounts of systematic rights abuses. Freedman, a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, is the author of authoritative works on the UN Human Rights Council and is very well placed to guide readers through the UN’s complexities. Freedman uses this expertise to uncover the conspicuous contrasts between the calculating, paralysing politics of countries at the UN, and the horrific violations of human rights they discuss. This book shatters any illusion that the UN as it currently stands is a wholly benign agent for change.
Designed to be accessible to non-specialists, the book avoids the endless acronyms, committee names and document numbers that are often a feature of works in this area The aim of the text is to encourage the public-at-large to ‘start asking questions’ (p. xi), and it remains true to this aim by equipping readers with the information needed to engage in central debates. Freeman details the relevant sources of law, and gives user-friendly analogies with domestic legal situations to make the complexities of international law comprehensible. The book is rich with examples of past failures of the UN, and reflects the author’s clear understanding of the finest details of UN architecture. Freedman also analyses the UN human rights machinery, and key conceptual debates (such as those surrounding cultural relativism (ch. 5)), in a way that empowers the reader to form their own view and become involved in the reform projects.

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A New Book: Failing to Protect The UN and the Politicisation of Human Rights

By Rosa Freedman

Hurst Publishing, May 2014

Every year tens of millions of individuals suffer grave abuses of their human rights. These violations occur worldwide, in war-torn countries and in the wealthiest states. Despite many of the abuses being well-documented, little seems to be done to stop them from happening. The United Nations was established to safeguard world peace and security, development, and human rights yet it is undeniable that currently it is failing to protect the rights of a great many people –– from the victims of ethnic cleansing, to migrants, those displaced by war and women who suffer horrendous abuse. This book looks at the reasons for that failure. Using concrete examples intertwined with explanations of the law and politics of the UN, Rosa Freedman offers clear explanations of how and why the Organisation is unable, at best, or unwilling, at worst, to protect human rights. Written for a non-specialist audience, her book also seeks to explain why certain countries and political blocs manipulate and undermine the UN’s human rights machinery. Failing to Protect demonstrates the urgent need for radical reform of the machinery of human rights protection at the international level.

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A New Website: Teaching Human Rights

An International Student-Teacher Collaboratory

Understanding world issues through interdisciplinary lenses.  The Summer Intensive in Human Rights will continue the discussion of interna­tional human rights in the 21st century, considering broad perspectives on what constitutes human rights in an increasingly diverse and global society. In addition to selecting from the courses below, students also have the opportunity to attend a speaker series and engage with a scholar-in-residence.

http://www.teachinghumanrights.org/node

The Fetish of Staring at Iran’s Women

By HALEH ANVARI

The New York Times - JUNE 16, 2014

TEHRAN — I took a series of photographs of myself in 2007 that show me sitting on the toilet, weighing myself, and shaving my legs in the bath. I shot them as an angry response to an encounter with a gallery owner in London’s artsy Brick Lane. I had offered him photos of colorful chadors — an attempt to question the black chador as the icon of Iran by showing the world that Iranian women were more than this piece of black cloth. The gallery owner wasn’t impressed. “Do you have any photos of Iranian women in their private moments?” he asked.

As an Iranian with a reinforced sense of the private-public divide we navigate daily in our country, I found his curiosity offensive. So I shot my “Private Moments” in a sardonic spirit, to show that Iranian women are like all women around the world if you get past the visual hurdle of the hijab. But I never shared those, not just because I would never get a permit to show them publicly in Iran, but also because I am prepared to go only so far to prove a point. Call me old-fashioned.

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Não Vai Ter Copa Race, Class and the World Cup in Brazil

By MIKE LaSUSA

Counter Punch -  June 10, 2014

At 5pm local time on June 12, the national soccer teams of Brazil and Croatia will kick off the 2014 World Cup at the São Paulo Arena in Brazil’s largest city. The players will compete before a live crowd of tens of thousands and a televised audience of millions more.  At a total cost of roughly $11 billion - and at least eight workers’ lives – Brazil will host the most expensive World Cup in history. Though this is not to understate the scandalous unfolding atrocity in Qatar). Brazilians overwhelmingly supported bringing the event to their country when FIFA awarded them the honor in 2007 (no other nation in the Americas volunteered), but a recent poll from DataFolha indicates that a majority of citizens now oppose it.  Widespread anti-Cup protests have been roiling Brazil’s cities and social media networks for months. The demonstrators’ grievances range from public transportation fare hikes to inadequate wages, housing, education, security and healthcare, among other things. But as evidenced by their use of the slogan “Não vai ter Copa!” (“There will be no Cup!”), it is clear that they intend to use the lavish international spectacle both as a symbol of their concerns and a spotlight to shine on them.  On June 3, a group of anti-Cup activists inflated giant soccer balls in the capital city Brasilia. Protest organizer Antonio Carlos Costa told Agence France Presse, ”We want the Brazilian government to ask the nation’s forgiveness because it promised something it never delivered. It invested a fortune of public money in things that weren’t necessary.” A recent Pew poll found that 61% of respondents believed hosting the World Cup is a ”bad thing” “because it takes money away from public services.”

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