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425 books match the query 'Human rights' and 17 start with l

cover of Language: A Right and a Resource: Approaches to Linguistic Human Rights

Language

A Right and a Resource: Approaches to Linguistic Human Rights

Tibor Várady

Central European University Press, 2000

Linguistic Human Rights (LHR) is a fast growing new area of study combining the principles of national and international law with the study of language as a central dimension of ethnicity. Implementation of these principles is aimed at ensuring that no state or society violates these basic rights.

This path breaking study broadens our knowledge of the important role of language in minority rights and in social and political struggles for LHRs. Exploring the interactions of linguistic diversity, biodiversity, the free market and human rights, the contributors present case studies to highlight such issues as Kurdish satellite TV attempting to create a virtual state on the air through trying to achieve basic LHR’s for Kurds in Turkey; the implementation of LHRs in the Baltic states; language rights activism in Canada; the spread of English as an international language; and the obstacles met in education by Roma and the Deaf in Hungary because of lack of appropriate LHRs.

Language: A Right and a Resource is a valuable multi-disciplinary text which can be used in a variety of different areas of study in the legal profession, linguistics, cultural and political studies.

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cover of Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability

Last Train to Auschwitz

The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability

Sarah Federman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

In the immediate decades after World War II, the French National Railways (SNCF) was celebrated for its acts of wartime heroism. However, recent debates and litigation have revealed the ways the SNCF worked as an accomplice to the Third Reich and was actively complicit in the deportation of 75,000 Jews and other civilians to death camps. Sarah Federman delves into the interconnected roles—perpetrator, victim, and hero—the company took on during the harrowing years of the Holocaust.

Grounded in history and case law, Last Train to Auschwitz traces the SNCF’s journey toward accountability in France and the United States, culminating in a multimillion-dollar settlement paid by the French government on behalf of the railways.The poignant and informative testimonies of survivors illuminate the long-term effects of the railroad’s impact on individuals, leading the company to make overdue amends. In a time when corporations are increasingly granted the same rights as people, Federman’s detailed account demonstrates the obligations businesses have to atone for aiding and abetting governments in committing atrocities. This volume highlights the necessity of corporate integrity and will be essential reading for those called to engage in the difficult work of responding to past harms.
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cover of Latent Memory: Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile

Latent Memory

Human Rights and Jewish Identity in Chile

Maxine Lowy

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jewish immigrants and refugees sought to rebuild their lives in Chile. Despite their personal histories of marginalization in Europe, many of these people or their descendants did not take a stand against the 1973 military coup, nor the political persecution that followed. Chilean Jews' collective failure to repudiate systematic human rights violations and their tacit support for the military dictatorship reflected a complicated moral calculus that weighed expediency over ethical considerations and ignored individual acts of moral courage. 

Maxine Lowy draws upon hundreds of first-person testimonials and archival resources to explore Chilean Jewish identity in the wake of Pinochet's coup, exposing the complex and sometimes contradictory development of collective traumatic memory and political sensibilities in an oppressive new context. Latent Memory points to processes of community gestures of moral reparation and signals the pathways to justice and healing associated with Shoah and the Jewish experience. Lowy asks how individuals and institutions may overcome fear, indifference, and convenience to take a stand even under intense political duress, posing questions applicable to any nation emerging from state repression.
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cover of Law and the Gay Rights Story: The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy

Law and the Gay Rights Story

The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy

Frank, Walter

Rutgers University Press, 2014

For much of the 20th century, American gays and lesbians lived in fear that public exposure of their sexualities might cause them to be fired, blackmailed, or even arrested. Today, they are enjoying an unprecedented number of legal rights and protections. Clearly, the tides have shifted for gays and lesbians, but what caused this enormous sea change?

In his gripping new book, Walter Frank offers an in-depth look at the court cases that were pivotal in establishing gay rights. But he also tells the story of those individuals who were willing to make waves by fighting for those rights, taking enormous personal risks at a time when the tide of public opinion was against them. Frank’s accessible style brings complex legal issues down to earth but, as a former litigator, never loses sight of the law’s human dimension and the context of the events occurring outside the courtroom.

Chronicling the past half-century of gay and lesbian history, Law and the Gay Rights Story offers a unique perspective on familiar events like the Stonewall Riots, the AIDS crisis, and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Frank pays special attention to the constitutional issues surrounding same-sex marriage and closely analyzes the two recent Supreme Court cases addressing the issue. While a strong advocate for gay rights, Frank also examines critiques of the movement, including some coming from the gay community itself. Comprehensive in coverage, the book explains the legal and constitutional issues involved in each of the major goals of the gay rights movement: a safe and healthy school environment, workplace equality, an end to anti-gay violence, relationship recognition, and full integration into all the institutions of the larger society, including marriage and military service.  Drawing from extensive archival research and from decades of experience as a practicing litigator, Frank not only provides a vivid history, but also shows where the battle for gay rights might go from here.
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cover of Law, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorism

Law, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorism

Roger Douglas

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Roger Douglas compares responses to terrorism by five liberal democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—over the past 15 years. He examines each nation’s development and implementation of counterterrorism law, specifically in the areas of information-gathering, the definition of terrorist offenses, due process for the accused, detention, and torture and other forms of coercive questioning.

Douglas finds that terrorist attacks elicit pressures for quick responses, often allowing national governments to accrue additional powers. But emergencies are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such laws, which may persist even after fears have eased. He argues that responses are influenced by both institutional interests and prior beliefs, and complicated when the exigencies of office and beliefs point in different directions. He also argues that citizens are wary of government’s impingement on civil liberties and that courts exercise their capacity to restrain the legislative and executive branches. Douglas concludes that the worst antiterror excesses have taken place outside of the law rather than within, and that the legacy of 9/11 includes both laws that expand government powers and judicial decisions that limit those very powers.

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cover of Lawyers Beyond Borders: Advancing International Human Rights Through Local Laws and Courts

Lawyers Beyond Borders

Advancing International Human Rights Through Local Laws and Courts

Maria Armoudian

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice?  Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror.

Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

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cover of Legal Care: Advocacy and Friction in Family Detention

Legal Care

Advocacy and Friction in Family Detention

Erin Routon

University of Arizona Press, 2026

Family detention garnered much public attention when it expanded dramatically in 2014 as significantly increased numbers of migrant groups began arriving and requesting asylum at the Mexico-U.S. border. During this period, the Obama administration designated three detention facilities, two in South Texas, to hold such families while they underwent part of the asylum legal process. One became the largest immigrant detention facility in the country. 

In Legal Care anthropologist Erin Routon explores the operations of these facilities through the unique perspectives of volunteer legal advocates. Routon offers a compelling ethnographic account of the hidden labor and emotional resilience of those advocates. Through the lens of “legal care,” Routon reframes legal aid as a form of caregiving, revealing how these advocates resist the structural and legal violence of family detention while supporting asylum-seeking parents and children. Drawing on immersive fieldwork and firsthand narratives, the book exposes the human cost of administrative incarceration and the quiet power of care in spaces designed to exclude.

Timely, urgent, and deeply humane, this work speaks to scholars and practitioners across anthropology, law and society, migration studies, and carceral justice. Routon’s accessible and evocative writing invites readers to reconsider activism and advocacy, offering new language for understanding resistance and solidarity in the face of institutional violence. This book is essential reading for anyone committed to justice, care, and the future of immigration policy in the United States.

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cover of Legal Rights: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

Legal Rights

Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1997

The idea of legal rights today enjoys virtually universal appeal, yet all too often the meaning and significance of rights are poorly understood. The purpose of this volume is to clarify the subject of legal rights by drawing on both historical and philosophical legal scholarship to bridge the gap between these two genres--a gap that has divorced abstract and normative treatments of rights from an understanding of their particular social and cultural contexts.
Legal Rights: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives shows that the meaning and extent of rights has been dramatically expanded in this century, though along with the widespread and flourishing popularity of rights, voices of criticism have increasingly been raised. The authors take up the question of the foundation of rights and explore the postmodern challenges to efforts to ground rights outside of history and language. Drawing rich historical analysis and careful philosophical inquiry into productive dialogue, this book explores the many facets of rights at the end of the twentieth century. In these essays, potentially abstract debates come alive as they are related to the struggles of real people attempting to cope with, and improve, their living conditions. The significance of legal rights is measured not just in terms of philosophical categories or as a collection of histories, but as they are experienced in the lives of men and women seeking to come to terms with rights in contemporary life.
Contributors are Hadley Arkes, William E. Cain, Thomas Haskell, Morton J. Horwitz, Annabel Patterson, Michael J. Perry, Pierre Schlag, and Jeremy Waldron.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.
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cover of Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State

Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa

Human Rights, Society, and the State

Edited by Lydia Boyd and Emily Burrill

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

In recent decades, a more formalized and forceful shift has emerged in the legislative realm when it comes to gender and sexual justice in Africa. This rigorous, timely volume brings together leading and rising scholars across disciplines to evaluate these ideological struggles and reconsider the modern history of human rights on the continent. Broad in geographic coverage and topical in scope, chapters investigate such subjects as marriage legislation in Mali, family violence experienced by West African refugees, sex education in Uganda, and statutes criminalizing homosexuality in Senegal. These case studies highlight the nuances and contradictions in the varied ways key actors make arguments for or against rights. They also explore how individual countries draft and implement laws that attempt to address the underlying problems.
Legislating Gender and Sexuality in Africa details how legal efforts in the continent can often be moralizing enterprises, illuminating how these processes are closely tied to notions of ethics, personhood, and citizenship. The contributors provide new appraisals of recent events, with fresh arguments about the relationships between local and global fights for rights. This interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars in African studies, anthropology, history, and gender studies.
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cover of Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Edited by Timothy J. White; Foreword by Martin Mansergh

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

From the early 1970s through the mid-1990s, Northern Ireland was the site of bitter conflict between those struggling for reunification with the rest of Ireland and those wanting the region to remain a part of the United Kingdom. After years of strenuous negotiations, nationalists and unionists came together in 1998 to sign the Good Friday Agreement. Northern Ireland's peace process has been deemed largely successful. Yet remarkably little has been done to assess in a comprehensive fashion what can be learned from it.
            Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process incorporates recent research that emphasizes the need for civil society and a grassroots approach to peacebuilding while taking into account a variety of perspectives, including neoconservatism and revolutionary analysis. The contributions, which include the reflections of those involved in the negotiation and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, also provide policy prescriptions for modern conflicts.
            This collection of essays in Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process fills a void by articulating the lessons learned and how—or whether—the peace processes can be applied to other regional conflicts.
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cover of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States

Life Interrupted

Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States

Denise Brennan

Duke University Press, 2014

Life Interrupted introduces us to survivors of human trafficking who are struggling to get by and make homes for themselves in the United States. Having spent nearly a decade following the lives of formerly trafficked men and women, Denise Brennan recounts in close detail their flight from their abusers and their courageous efforts to rebuild their lives. At once scholarly and accessible, her book links these firsthand accounts to global economic inequities and under-regulated and unprotected workplaces that routinely exploit migrant laborers in the United States. Brennan contends that today's punitive immigration policies undermine efforts to fight trafficking. While many believe trafficking happens only in the sex trade, Brennan shows that across low-wage labor sectors—in fields, in factories, and on construction sites—widespread exploitation can lead to and conceal forced labor. Life Interrupted is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform.

All royalties from this book will be donated to the nonprofit Survivor Leadership Training Fund administered through the Freedom Network.
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cover of Life in a Cambodian Orphanage: A Childhood Journey for New Opportunities

Life in a Cambodian Orphanage

A Childhood Journey for New Opportunities

Kathie Carpenter

Rutgers University Press, 2021

What is it like to grow up in an orphanage? What do residents themselves have to say about their experiences? Are there ways that orphanages can be designed to meet children's developmental needs and to provide them with necessities they are unable to receive in their home communities? In this book, detailed observations of children's daily life in a Cambodian orphanage are combined with follow-up interviews of the same children after they have grown and left the orphanage. Their thoughtful reflections show that the quality of care children receive is more important for their well-being than the site in which they receive it. Life in a Cambodian Orphanage situates orphanages within the social and political history of Cambodia, and shows that orphanages need not always be considered bleak sites of deprivation and despair. It suggests best practices for caring for vulnerable children regardless of the setting in which they are living.
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cover of Life, Emergent: The Social in the Afterlives of Violence

Life, Emergent

The Social in the Afterlives of Violence

Yasmeen Arif

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

How does an inquiry into life as it lives (or dies) amid mass violence look like from the perspective of the “social”? Taking us from Sierra Leone to India to Lebanon, Life, Emergent challenges conventional understandings of biopolitics, weaving a politics of life through the lens of life, not death. 

Arguing that the “letting die” element of biopolitics has been overemphasized, Yasmeen Arif zeros in on biopolitics’ other pole: “making live.” She does so by highlighting the various means and the forms of life configured in the aftermath—or afterlives—of violent events in contexts of law, justice, community, and identity. Her analysis of the social repercussions is both global and local in scope. Arif examines the convictions made in the Special Court of Sierra Leone, the first hybrid court of its nature under international criminal law. Next, she explores the making of a justice movement in the context of Hindu–Muslim violence in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, India. From there she revisits the Sikh carnage in Delhi of 1984. Finally, she explores a span of civil violence in Lebanon, and particularly, its effects on the city of Beirut. 

This rigorously argued book brings together the various strands of life and the social that each chapter has disentangled—and in doing so it begins to frame a politics of, and in, life. 

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cover of Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums

Lifting the Shadow

Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums

Amy Sodaro

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism, and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.
 
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cover of Linking Human Rights and the Environment

Linking Human Rights and the Environment

Edited by Romina Picolotti and Jorge Daniel Taillant

University of Arizona Press, 2003

All over the world, people are experiencing the effects of ecosystem decline, from water shortages to fish kills to landslides on deforested slopes. The victims of environmental degradation tend to belong to more vulnerable sectors of society—racial and ethnic minorities and the poor—who regularly carry a disproportionate burden of such abuse. Increasingly, many basic human rights are being placed at risk, as the right to health affected by contamination of resources, or the right to property and culture compromised by commercial intrusion into indigenous lands. Despite the evident relationship between environmental degradation and human suffering, human rights violations and environmental degradation have been treated by most organizations and governments as unrelated issues. Just as human rights advocates have tended to place only civil and political rights onto their agendas, environmentalists have tended to focus primarily on natural resource preservation without addressing human impacts of environmental abuse. As a result, victims of environmental degradation are unprotected by the laws and mechanisms established to address human rights abuses. This book brings together contributions from human rights and environmental experts who have devoted much of their work to unifying these two spheres, particularly in the legal arena. It presents a variety of issues and approaches that address human rights and environmental links, demonstrating the growing interrelationship between human rights law and environmental advocacy. Its coverage includes reviews of existing international laws and treaties that establish the rights to a healthy environment, an overview of mechanisms that allow both individuals and groups to seek remedy for abuses, and specific cases that document efforts to seek redress for victims of environmental degradation through existing human rights protection mechanisms. Through examples ranging from water rights to women's rights, this collection offers practical ways in which environmental protection can be approached through human rights instruments. The volume reproduces a legal brief (amicus curiae) filed before an international human rights tribunal making the human rights and environment linkage argument, and includes the subsequent precedent-setting decision handed down by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights recognizing this linkage. Linking Human Rights and Environment is a valuable sourcebook that explores the uncharted territory that lies between environmental and human rights legislation. More than a theoretical treatise, it argues that human rights activism presents a significant opportunity to address the human consequences of environmental degradation and can serve as a catalyst for inspiring ideas and action in the real world.
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cover of Long Journey to Justice: El Salvador, the United States, and Struggles against Empire

Long Journey to Justice

El Salvador, the United States, and Struggles against Empire

Molly Todd

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

As bloody wars raged in Central America during the last third of the twentieth century, hundreds of North American groups “adopted” villages in war-torn Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Unlike government-based cold war–era Sister City programs, these pairings were formed by ordinary people, often inspired by individuals displaced by US-supported counterinsurgency operations.

Drawing on two decades of work with former refugees from El Salvador as well as unprecedented access to private archives and oral histories, Molly Todd’s compelling history provides the first in-depth look at “grassroots sistering.” This model of citizen diplomacy emerged in the mid-1980s out of relationships between a few repopulated villages in Chalatenango, El Salvador, and US cities.

Todd shows how the leadership of Salvadorans and left-leaning activists in the US concerned with the expansion of empire as well as the evolution of human rights–related discourses and practices created a complex dynamic of cross-border activism that continues today.
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cover of Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance

Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance

Elizabeth Skomp and Benjamin M. Sutcliffe, Foreword by Helena Goscilo

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

Novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya is a crucial cultural figure in contemporary Russia, garnering both literary awards and best-seller status. Engaging with the past to combat the creeping authoritarianism of the Putin era, she has become the latest in a long line of Russian dissident authors championing the values of liberalism and tolerance while critiquing the state. Ludmila Ulitskaya and the Art of Tolerance is the first English-language book about this influential writer, contextualizing her in the shifting landscape of post-Soviet society and culture.
            Drawing on interviews with Ulitskaya and sources not readily available to Western scholars, Elizabeth A. Skomp and Benjamin M. Sutcliffe explore the ethical ideals that make Ulitskaya’s novels resonate in today’s Russia—tolerance, sincerity, and diversity—and examine how she uses innovative imagery to personalize history through a focus on body and kinship. This is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Russian literature and society.
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