“There is hardly a reason to circumcise a little boy for medical reasons because those medical reasons don’t exist,” said Dr. Michael Wilks, Head of Ethics at the British Medical Association, who admitted that doctors have circumcised boys for “no good reason.” In the United States, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and in the […]
This anthology brings together voices of more than forty writers celebrating female embodiment while exploring deeper issues of misogyny, violence and sexism in gender identity politics today, demonstrating the intentional silencing and erasure of living female realities. These perspectives come at a time when gender politics and profits from an emerging medical transgenderism industry for […]
Are there any human rights that apply to all women and all men in all cultures at all times? Can we ground human rights in an abstract rationality possessed by every human being? Or, as some philosophers have claimed, are attempts to ground human rights doomed to failure? Do human rights in any case need […]
In 2005, in the wake of the Cornelia Rau scandal, a citizen’s inquiry was established to bear witness to events in Australia’s immigration-detention facilities. Until then, the federal government had refused to conduct a broad-ranging investigation into immigration detention, and the operations within detention centers had been largely shrouded in official secrecy. The People’s Inquiry […]
This is a groundbreaking application of contemporary philosophy to human rights law that proposes several significant innovations for the progressive development of human rights. Drawing on the works of prominent philosophers of the Other including Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Judith Butler, and most centrally the Argentine philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel, this book develops […]
In 1946 the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, began to formulate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The ideals compiled by the commission have become beacons of dignity and hope for people the world over. For the first time ever, essential human rights, as codified in the 1989 Convention on […]
In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and with it a profusion of norms, processes, and institutions to define, promote, and protect human rights. Today virtually every cause seeks to cloak itself in the righteous language of rights. But even so, this universal reliance on the rights idiom has not […]
For more than half a century, the world community has sought to codify a series of fundamental precepts intended to prevent such abuses of human rights as torture, discrimination, starvation, and forced eviction. The United Nations, other international organizations, regional institutions, and governments have developed various procedures for protecting against and providing remedies for human […]
Socially stigmatized, culturally subjugated, and politically marginalized, India’s Dalits have been the most vulnerable community in terms of human rights violations. This book explores the roots of the vulnerability and the present status of this section of Indian society against the backdrop of the changing social, economic, and political scenario. In particular, it examines the […]
Human rights activists Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi provide a broad political history of the emergence and development of the human rights movement in the 20th century through the crucible of the United Nations, focusing on the hopes and expectations, concrete power struggles, national rivalries, and bureaucratic politics that molded the international system of human […]
