Human Rights Quarterly最新文献

When the Legislative Council of the Australian island state of Tasmania rejected gay law reform in July 1991, a group of enterprising activists took their case to the United Nations. In April 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled in their favor. The case, Toonen v Australia, is a landmark human rights judgement that has proved highly influential in the years that have followed. Using interviews with the principal participants, this article provides a historical narrative of their activist journey.

Amid Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the human rights community has understandably focused its attention on human rights violations committed by the Russian state, leaving the human rights implications of Ukraine’s martial law on civilians largely unexamined. This article highlights the ways Ukraine’s travel restriction on “battle-aged” civilian men has harmed three overlapping groups: civilian men, families (including women and children), and trans and nonbinary individuals. It then demonstrates that wartime policies such as this one are at odds with several areas of international human rights and humanitarian law: the right to freedom of movement, the right to conscientious objection, and the principle of respect for family life—all of which are meant to be implemented without discrimination on basis of gender. We conclude this type of gender-based law is not justified according to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ rules on derogation in time of national emergencies and emerging customary law and should receive greater attention by the human rights community.

All armed groups have internal regulations, and these regulations frequently involve the governance of affect, intimacy, and reproduction. Drawing upon my ethnographic research with female former combatants from Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), I explore the gendered aspects of these governance regimes. How was intimacy dictated and policed by commanders and peers? What are the tropes regarding women and violence, and how are these frequently eroticized? What forms of reproductive governance were exercised within the ranks? For women who chose to leave the FARC, either informally or via official Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration programs, to what extent does reintegration involve the redomestication of “transgressive” women?

This article critically analyzes the agreement signed in 2020 between Volkswagen do Brasil and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which marked the closure of previous civil claims filed by a group of employees who were victims of gross violations of their human rights and alleged the complicity of the company during the dictatorship in Brazil. The conclusions challenge the triumphant story provided by both the State and the company itself and highlight the dark side of using negotiated agreements in the context of civil litigation as a way to achieving guarantees of justice, truth, memory, reparation, and non-repetition.

Drawing on fieldwork in Greece, Uganda, and Israel, this empirical study is an enquiry into the forms of agency adopted by refugee and asylum-seeking women who are survivors of, or in situations of risk of, sexual and gender-based violence. The article identifies the main agentic behaviors reported by participants to prevent and address multiple and intersecting discriminations leading to sexual and gender-based violence. It ascertains various types of agency, including passive versus active agency; silence as agency versus silence as oppression; and individual versus collective agency. The study then also asks what functions these forms of agency fulfill. It finds that they are responses to the state’s failure to prevent and address sexual and gender-based violence in four ways: (1) to acknowledge asylum-seekers sufficiently; (2) to protect asylum-seekers from sexual and gender-based violence; (3) to guarantee access to justice to sexual and gender-based violence survivors; and finally (4) to prevent further discrimination of the hosted community. Thus, this article argues that refugees and asylum-seekers adopt different types of agency to react against the state’s inability to provide protection from sexual and gender-based violence.

The CIRIGHTS Data Project scores a representative sample of all internationally recognized human rights. In this article, we use CIRIGHTS scores to discover global patterns in government respect for human rights. The findings show that worker rights, including the right to form a trade union and bargain collectively, are among the least protected human rights. The right to be protected from torture is also among the least protected rights, but, on average, other physical integrity rights—protection from extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearance—are among the most protected rights. We introduce an Overall Human Rights Protection Index for all countries, which shows that nearly two-thirds of the world's countries score less than 65 on the 100-point scale. A heat map shows that countries tend to have similar index scores if they share an international border. We discuss the implications of these patterns for future research and policymaking.

How do societies remember historical political violence? We draw on an original dataset of more than 150 memorialization projects proposed by truth commissions in 28 post-violence countries, from 1970 to 2018. These projects include the removal of monuments, installation of museums, inauguration of national days of remembrance, and more. Truth commission recommendations data allows us to not only consider memory sites once established, but also to examine blueprints for the types of memory that could have been made. We develop a typology and inductively generate a theory of the political contests and conflicts that different memory projects are likely to trigger—contests and conflicts that we expect influence the likelihood of project initiation and completion. We conduct an initial probe of the theory using our new data. In so doing, we offer the first systematic, global study of setting and implementing the memorialization agenda in post-violence societies.