This textbook looks at the theory of human rights, its historical roots, and goes on to examine several key areas of human rights, including the intersection between human rights and international law, access to treaty-based mechanisms and their practice and case law, international human rights courts and tribunals, including those with a criminal function, justiciability of rights before the courts, civil and political rights, as well as socio-economic rights.

In the Spring of 1848 waves of liberal revolts roll over the Europe (the Springtime of Peoples). The insurgents demand more (guarantees for) freedoms and liberties cemented in new and liberal constitutions. And most of them want a parliament (parliamentary system) as well, with democratically chosen representatives at the helm instead of non-elected, autocratic leaders who are not politically answerable to anyone, lest to a parliament. Many of the authoritarian governments of the day initially give in to the demands of the people: a new fourth generation of liberal constitutions sweeps over the European continent (much of which are rolled back after a short while). This constitutional wave also ushers an era of new nations and the rise of nationalism.

This chapter begins an extended exploration of how judges conceptualized the emancipated person. It illuminates the pivotal connection between cases that asked judges to resolve disputes that had grown out of slavery (e.g., contracts for the sale of an enslaved person) and those that required them to consider the rights of newly freed people (e.g., the right to testify). It traces judicial deliberations, analyzes the law’s power to “make and unmake persons,” and considers the effects of that power on freedpeople. As property in persons was destroyed, freedpeople emerged – phoenix-like – from the ashes. In this formulation, emancipation revived the formerly “dead” enslaved person, as she emerged from the wreckage of the peculiar institution.

Abstract: Democratic ideas and habits do not arise automatically; they have taken centuries to develop, and stitching democracy together after its fault lines have been exposed, as they recently have been in the United States, is a long-term affair. Citizenship education requires contributions from an extended curriculum – math and science, art, and the humanities, as well as social studies and civics – focused on the specific needs of rising citizens. One place to begin is by taking the idea of citizenship as an office seriously and then asking what kind of education is needed to make that office effective in advancing democratic culture.

This chapter is dedicated to the role of the potential opposition in autocracies. It deals with the various forms of repressing dissent and how autocratic incumbents keep the opposition at bay. Like the previous and the subsequent chapters, it condenses in a first step our current knowledge about the topic, carving out the lessons learned for the conceptualization of the over-politicizing and de-politicizing logics. It introduces the broad distinction between soft and hard forms of repression. While the former violates civil liberties and political rights, the latter infringes upon the person’s integrity rights. It is argued that over-politicizing autocracies seek to justify even the usage of hard repression by inflating a friend-foe distinction and declaring an internal foe. In contrast, de-politicizing regimes avoid using this type of repression, as it risks breaking the silent autocratic contract between the passivated people and the regime that is supposed to materially deliver.

Australia is unusual in lacking a formal bill of rights. Nevertheless, rights protections have developed, initially in the context of the emergence of settler colonialism within the British Empire. While Indigenous people were only gradually brought within the status of subjecthood, and have continued to be denied fundamental rights, early settlers including convicts had a well-developed sense of their rights as freeborn Britons. The development of the jury system, self-government and democracy were the context for a rights regime associated with a colonial liberal order in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the late nineteenth century, Australia developed a system of social rights based on the elevated status of the male breadwinner. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the British basis of rights claims remained dominant in Australia, but from the 1940s Australia was gradually drawn within an international human rights order, in a manner that strengthened the ability of marginalised groups to make rights claims through appeals to international standards and covenants. Despite the continued absence of a constitutional or legislative bill of rights, governments and courts have been active in recent decades in developing rights protections across a wide domain.

This chapter sketches the development of international human rights law. The legal position of individuals was perceived by states as a domestic affair of the sovereign state, which could effectively treat its citizens as it pleased. It was not until after the Second World War that this fundamentally changed and international law began to grant individuals rights to protect them from the state. The chapter further presents the main categories or generations of human rights and discusses their key characteristics. Human rights are generally organized in three categories or generations: (a) civil and political rights; (b) economic, social, and cultural rights; and (c) collective rights. This chapter will subsequently turn to several matters concerning the scope of human rights norms, including their addressees, their territorial scope of application, and the circumstances under which human rights may be restricted by the state. Finally, this chapter will explain how human rights are monitored and enforced under international law.

This chapter sketches the development of international human rights law. The legal position of individuals was perceived by states as a domestic affair of the sovereign state, which could effectively treat its citizens as it pleased. It was not until after the Second World War that this fundamentally changed and international law began to grant individuals rights to protect them from the state. The chapter further presents the main categories or generations of human rights and discusses their key characteristics. Human rights are generally organized in three categories or generations: (a) civil and political rights; (b) economic, social, and cultural rights; and (c) collective rights. This chapter will subsequently turn to several matters concerning the scope of human rights norms, including their addressees, their territorial scope of application, and the circumstances under which human rights may be restricted by the state. Finally, this chapter will explain how human rights are monitored and enforced under international law.

Most histories of Reconstruction begin their narrative in December 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln announced his Ten Percent Plan, reserving most of the authority to restore the collapsing Confederacy in the executive branch. Frederick Douglass also thought that Reconstruction began in 1863, but in January rather than in December. That month, after the final Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the War Department at long last permitted states to recruit black soldiers, which Douglass believed was the first step toward black citizenship and voting rights. Although Republicans envisioned Reconstruction as a policy only for the Confederacy, Douglass understood that the entire nation required political reclamation. If William Lloyd Garrison and a good number of white abolitionists assumed their struggle concluded with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865, Douglass understood that the fight had just begun. He knew that the antithesis of slavery was not freedom, but equality.

This chapter surveys the legal history of privileges and immunities provisions, from early international treaties and the Wales Act of 1535–36 to the Articles of Confederation and the Comity Clause of the U.S. Constitution. It argues that these provisions were all antidiscrimination provisions: they did not guarantee any particular set of rights, but required equality in the provision of civil rights to those for whose benefits the privileges and immunities provisions were written.

This chapter summarizes developments in international human rights law, mechanisms, and policies since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. We first describe the nine core human rights treaties, including the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which together converted the Declaration’s ideals into international law, and the seven conventions with the goals of eliminating racial discrimination, discrimination against women, torture, and enforced disappearances, and protecting the rights of children, migrant workers, and their families, as well as persons with disabilities. We follow with summaries of the Genocide Convention and of the UN declarations proclaiming the rights of indigenous peoples and LGBTI individuals. We next describe the UN mechanisms for advancing human rights, including the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Council, and International Criminal Court. These are followed by summaries of UN policies for protecting persons from governmental abuses, ending the world’s worst poverty and suffering, and providing human rights guides for businesses. We then summarize developments in international humanitarian law (the laws of war) and conclude with a brief overview of the five regional human rights systems.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), approved by the UN General Assembly in December 1948, advanced the revolutionary idea that all human beings were entitled to the same basic rights regardless of “the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory” in which they dwelled. This meant that it extended to the 700 million people – almost a third of the world’s population – who in 1948 called the dozens of dependent territories home and injected human rights into the larger issue of decolonization of the Western colonial empires. The UDHR won approval without a dissenting vote, though eight nations, including the six members of the Soviet bloc at the United Nations – the Soviet Union, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia – abstained.

The core of the chapter addresses the relationship between power and knowledge. In essence De Sousa Santos makes the point that knowledge has to disconnect itself from power, so that it is not a captive of it. De Sousa Santos also explores the conditions under which not only knowledge but also politics at the national and international levels could be democratized.

The chapter serves as an introduction to the volume. It outlines the rationale behind the project, and the methodology mobilized for the book. In addition, the chapter offers a summary of the conversations. In particular it outlines key aspects of justice. It addresses justice in general at the international and global levels, and indicates how these key assumptions serve as part of the theoretical background for the conversations.