The intellectual historian John Pocock once observed that with the rise of commercialization, the status of citizens was no longer seen as a function of their actions and their virtues but came to be constructed in juridical terms, in terms of rights and of ownership of things. He posits an opposition between virtue (part of a political way of life) and rights (part of a commercial way of life) that was eventually bridged with the help of the social notion of manners – and this might help explain why we associate the virtue of prudence with a certain kind of prudishness.

Chapter 6 focuses on how the effects of foreign interventions depend on the identity of the intervener. It shows that in Tunisia and the United States, the presence of capable and unbiased monitors (not any monitors) increased election credibility. In Georgia, an unusually certain electoral environment, the same was true when the analysis focused only on individuals with significant uncertainty in their beliefs about election credibility. Intriguingly, in Tunisia, the monitors perceived as capable and unbiased were those from the Arab League. Returning to meddlers, Bush and Prather find that most respondents did not believe meddling was likely to affect the election results. If they did believe meddlers were capable, however, then they observe the predicted negative relationship with election credibility. Moreover, in a hypothetical scenario in which a foreign actor successfully meddled in a future election in Georgia, they find the expected decrease in election credibility. This chapter shows how dependent the effects of foreign actors are on beliefs about the actor’s capabilities and biases.

This chapter briefly discusses the gay rights/queer movement, LGBTQ+/Queer studies, and queer theory. It reviews the concept of LGBTQ+ and the status of LGBTQ+/sexual minorities under international and regional human rights law. In particular, rights related to transgender people and intersex people, and the issue of same-sex marriage are explored in the regional contexts.

An additional role the virtues can play involves helping to evaluate (and thereby possibly even guide) conduct. It is here in particular that responsibility or accountability mechanisms often come up short or can at least be said to be naturally limited. Typically, such mechanisms focus on single instances of conduct, divorced from what preceded or inspired them, or then conduct might be such that it can hardly be caught by rules. Some have pleaded strongly for “intelligent accountability,” but the combination of having rules and organs or agents to apply and enforce them as they relate to particular facts makes such an idea well-nigh impossible. In the typical accountability scheme, the act under review usually gets simplified and stylized. This has heuristic benefits in that it simplifies what actually goes on, but these benefits may come at the cost of proper understanding.

This chapter examines some of the most recent human rights concerns including genocide and racism. It also discusses the impact of COVID-19 on human rights including the relationship between government and human rights, the right to health, and technology, and human rights. The chapter highlights the erosion of democratic institutions but looks to the promising future of human rights.

Sadistic methods employed to extract information from those in custody date back to antiquity. The right against torture is considered a ius cogens, allowing no state to derogate from the obligation not to use such methods. This chapter provides a glimpse of the devastating techniques governments have used in various settings including medical experimentation. It also reveals methods by which officials, such as the CIA, circumvented their own laws in much-condemned efforts to obtain information deemed critical for national security. This includes extraordinary rendition via “torture jets” and use of medical professionals in illicit interrogations. The photographs used to expose the gross violations of human rights also constituted violations of human rights.

This chapter presents an array of institutions at many levels: international, regional, and national and municipal levels. The survey of mechanisms identifies the key features of each system, noting the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. Landmark decisions illustrate facets of the systems. The overview concludes with two famous success stories of enforcement in civil litigation, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala (US) and In Re Pinochet (UK).

This chapter first provides a glimse of the development of international labor rights movement. It then discusses the concept of labor rights including the right to strike. It explores the issues of equal opportunity and equal treatment, right to unionize and collective bargaining, freedom from forced and compulsory labor, and child labor, four so-called “core labor standards,” and their status under international and regional human rights law. The chapter also examines the relationship among labor rights, migration and globalization, focusing on the issues of how to promote workers’ rights effectively in developing countries in the global economy. Labor rights concerning migrant workers are considered as well.

The chapter first identifies the puzzle of how China’s illiberal polity could convince many quarters of the world to support the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Chinese-led transformative, global infrastructural program. The next section investigates how China’s all-in commitment quickly launched the program but doing so at the expense of its sustainability. The following section discusses why credibility matters for the BRI and China’s broad foreign policy agenda. The last section considers how mounting sustainability challenges are transforming the dynamics of the BRI, forcing China to scale back its investment and ambitions. The conclusion highlights how China’s priority has changed from projecting Beijing’s commitment to securing the BRI’s long-term viability and what the policy shift means for the initiative’s future evolution.

This chapter first explores the marginalized condition of women around the world and traces the history of the transnational feminist movement. It discusses the relevant concepts such as public/private sphere, gender equality v. gender equity, and intersectionality. After a survey of the status of women’s rights under international and regional human rights law, it then examines various issues including the right to equality between men and women in marriage and family life, women’s rights in public and political life, sexual and reproductive rights, women’s land, property, housing rights, women’s rights to food, water, and sanitation, women workers’ rights in the workplace, and violence against women.

The introduction highlights the attraction of the idea of human rights. It affords insight into the development of the new international standards, considers the philosophical foundations, presents matters of cross-cultural interpretation, and broaches the subject of controversies. The controversies reveal the underlying tension between cultural relativism and universalism. By turning to difficult challenges, it is possible to come to grips with shared values or cross-cultural universals. The powerful idea of human rights appeals because of the peremptory norms, known as ius cogens, e.g., the rights against slavery and genocide.

It is not too difficult to claim, in a cocktail party type of way, that global governance should be more virtuous, and that those who run our lives and our institutions should be decent human beings. That is the easy part, if only because it makes intuitive sense that what could possibly be useful in some settings (professional sports, for example) is not so appropriate in other settings. We accept ruthlessness in our professional athletes – indeed, to the point that it might be difficult for them to become truly exceptional without a ruthless streak. But we do not think that quite the same applies to judges, or high-ranking civil servants, let alone religious leaders. Not even our statespersons, even if we would want them to serve the national interest (whatever that may be), are expected to display quite the same amount or sort of ruthlessness. Michael Jordan and Cristiano Ronaldo may be single-minded and ruthless; the Dalai Lama or the Pope may not, and neither may Germany’s long-serving prime minister Angela Merkel.

This chapter discusses the theoretical controversies surrouding the death penalty, the status of the death penalty under international human rights law, the death penalty in the United States and China. It also explores other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments including mass incarceration, life imprisonment, shackling, and solitary confinement.