Human rights

Question 1

UDHR definition, pros-cons

Answer 1

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a declaration written and published in 1948, following the atrocities of World War II. It aimed to protect the individual from the state.
+ It serves as a moral compass, and has forever settled and engrained the concept of human rights in our society (nonexistent before then)
- non-binding, western, individualist, not contemporary

Question 2

What are positive rights and negative rights?

Answer 2

Positive rights: action, provide a claim for something. Provided by the government.
negative rights: inaction, limit something.

Question 3

When did human rights as a concept become highly ‘needed’

Answer 3

Industralization! Colonialism reconstructed society as to only favour the external power. With indust. people are no longer selling their work, but more so their labour. When people no longer work for their own use, but instead go and sell it in a market, the group selling these controls the livelihood of planters.

Question 4

First generation rights

Answer 4

Liberty. Civil and political rights. Right to have an opinion, to engage politically and religiously.

Question 5

Second generation rights

Answer 5

Equality. Social and economic rights. Right to work, healthcare, food and education. “Security-oriented rights”

Question 6

Third generation rights

Answer 6

Fraternity. Cultural rights. Live in a reasonable environment, political rights, and economic development. Most clearly includes collective over individual.

Question 7

Eric Hobsbawm

Answer 7

“Human rights can never be accomplished by adding the sum total of minorities’ interests”

Question 8

Three waves of activism around HRs (according to Kenneth Cmiel)

Answer 8

First: 1950s, Eleanor Roosevelt and initial drafting of UDHR
Second: 1970s, ‘explosion of interest in HR’. Growth of Amnesty International and other HR orgs. Corresponds with the growth of globalization. UN at centre of promotion of HR, while NGOs were more interested in media distribution of cruel acts. Relationship between NGOs and UN worsened because the discussion became ‘less focused on HR’
Third wave: 1980s and 1990s when activism started to include women’s, economic, health, and indigenous rights

Question 9

second wave of HRs activism criticism

Answer 9

Prominence of HR groups points to the paradox that in the 1970s, when all these HR violations were being published and headlining, they were truly just masking the origin of these abuses in the systemic problems of globalization (i.e the abuses to labour, multinational corporations, capitalism but only like 10 people own all the money)

Question 10

Moyn

Answer 10

“The tragedy of HR is that they have occupied the global imaginary yet have contributed or actually done very little, merely nipping at the feet of the neo-liberalist giant as its path goes unaltered and unresisted”