human rights

Examples of human rights in the following topics:

• Corporations and Corporate Power

  • Corporations have powerful legal rights, and some have revenues that exceed the revenues of sovereign nations.
  • Despite not being natural persons, the law recognizes corporations as having rights and responsibilities like natural persons.
  • Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, they can be responsible for human rights violations, and they can even be convicted of criminal offenses, such as fraud and manslaughter.
  • The rapid rise of multinational corporations has been a topic of concern among intellectuals, activists and laymen, who perceive it as a threat to basic civil rights like privacy.
  • Anti-corporate advocates express the commonly held view that corporations answer only to shareholders, and give little consideration to human rights, environmental concerns, or other cultural issues.

• Evaluating Global Theories of Inequality

  • In modern liberal societies, individuals tend to value human rights according to the idea that all people are born with equal value.
  • The logic of human rights does not necessarily imply that all people should achieve equal status, but it does assume that all should have equal opportunities to advance, or Weberian life chances.
  • Those who evaluate global inequality and consider it to violate human rights may advocate for solutions to inequality using the language of social justice.

• The Transfer of Authority

  • In other nations, many of which have experienced undemocratic governments and dictators, transitional justice refers to a state's efforts to address past human rights violations.
  • In the context of transitional justice, memorialization is used to honor the victims of human rights abuses.

• New Social Movements

  • New social movements focus on issues related to human rights, rather than on materialistic concerns, such as economic development.
  • The primary difference is in their goals, as the new movements focus not on issues of materialistic qualities such as economic well-being, but on issues related to human rights (such as gay rights or pacifism).
  • It is clearly elaborated by Habermas that new social movements are the "new politics" which is about quality of life, individual self-realization, and human rights; whereas the "old politics" focused on economic, political, and military security.
  • The concept of new politics can be exemplified in gay liberation, the focus of which transcends the political issue of gay rights to address the need for a social and cultural acceptance of homosexuality.

• Women as a Minority

  • They differ from broader notions of human rights through claims of an inherent historical and traditional bias against the exercise of rights by women and girls in favor of men and boys.
  • Issues commonly associated with notions of women's rights include, though are not limited to, the rights to: bodily integrity and autonomy; vote (suffrage); hold public office; work; fair wages or equal pay; own property; be educated; serve in the military or be conscripted; enter into legal contracts; and to have marital, parental, and religious rights.
  • The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, advocates "the equal rights of men and women," and addresses issues of equality.
  • Described as an international bill of rights for women, it went into effect on September 3, 1981.
  • Any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment, or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil, or any other field.

• Sexual Violence

  • Forms of sexual violence include: rape by strangers, marital rape, date rape, war rape, unwanted sexual harassment, demanding sexual favors, sexual abuse of children, sexual abuse of disabled individuals, forced marriage, child marriage, denial of the right to use contraception, denial of the right to take measures to protect against sexually-transmitted diseases, forced abortion, genital mutilation, forced circumcision, and forced prostitution.
  • FGM has violent connotations and is used by individuals who conceive of the practice as a violation of human rights.
  • The practice has been the target of many human rights campaigns as a serious affront to the fundamental human rights of the girls undergoing the operation.

• Gender and Social Movements

  • The feminist movement refers to a series of campaigns on issues pertaining to women, such as reproductive rights and women's suffrage.
  • It focused on de jure (officially mandated) inequalities, primarily on gaining women's suffrage (the right to vote).
  • If first-wavers focused on absolute rights such as suffrage, second-wavers were largely concerned with other issues of equality, such as the end to discrimination.
  • In 1948 the UN issued its Universal Declaration of Human Rights which protects "the equal rights of men and women", and addressed both equality and equity issues.
  • The most important strategy to achieve this was considered to be "gender mainstreaming " which incorporates both equity and equality, that is that both women and men should "experience equal conditions for realizing their full human rights, and have the opportunity to contribute and benefit from national, political, economic, social and cultural development. "

• Ethics

  • To ensure the safety of participants, most universities maintain an institutional review board (IRB) that reviews studies that include human participants and ensures ethical rigor.
  • It has not always been the case that scientists interested in studying humans have followed ethical principles in their research.
  • Several studies that, when brought to light, led to the introduction of ethical principles guiding human subjects research and Institutional Review Boards to ensure compliance with those principles, are worth noting, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which 399 impoverished black men with syphilis were left untreated to track the progress of the disease and Nazi experimentation on humans.
  • Ethical oversight in science is designed to prevent such egregious violations of human rights today.

• Democracy

  • In a representative democracy, every vote has equal weight, no unreasonable restrictions can apply to anyone seeking to become a representative, and the freedom of its citizens is secured by legitimized rights and liberties which are generally protected by a constitution.
  • The right to vote has been expanded in many jurisdictions over time from relatively narrow groups (such as wealthy men of a particular ethnic group), with New Zealand the first nation to grant universal suffrage for all its citizens in 1893.
  • The term "democracy" is often used as shorthand for liberal democracy, which may include elements such as political pluralism, equality before the law, the right to petition elected officials for redress of grievances, due process, civil liberties, human rights, and elements of civil society outside the government.
  • However, the democratic principle has also been expressed as "the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given … and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known. " This type of freedom, which is connected to human natality, or the capacity to begin anew, sees democracy as "not only a political system… [but] an ideal, an aspiration, really, intimately connected to and dependent upon a picture of what it is to be human—of what it is a human should be to be fully human. "
  • However, it is also possible for a minority to be oppressed by a tyranny of the majority in the absence of governmental or constitutional protections of individual or group rights.

• Population Growth and Overpopulation

  • Presently, every year the world's human population grows by approximately 80 million.
  • Thus, human populations do not always grow to match the available food supply.
  • Mass extinctions of plants and animals as habitat is used for farming and human settlements
  • In strongly patriarchal nations, where women enjoy few rights, a higher standard of living tends to result in population growth.
  • Abernathy argues that foreign aid to poor countries must include significant components designed to improve the education, human rights, political rights, political power, and economic status and power of women.