CIAO DATE: 07/2012
Volume: 12, Issue: 0
2012
Hannah Arendt in a Global Age: Political Evil and International Theory (PDF)
Matthew S. Weinert
While justifying an Allied alliance with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill quipped publicly that “if Hitler were to invade Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The logic echoes prior calculations of the “lesser of two evils” principle: Liever Turks dan Paaps (“better a Turk than a Papist”), the rallying cry of the Dutch during their sixteenth to seventeenth century revolt against Spanish absolutism, was an adaptation of an earlier Christian adage heard in the Balkans—“Better the turban than the mitre”—when faced with imperial Ottoman expansion.
Measuring Human Rights: A Review Essay (PDF)
David L. Richards
As a response to an emergent quantitatively-oriented research program over the past three decades investigating which human rights are respected/violated and why, there has been a growth in the number and sophistication of measures used to benchmark both overall human rights conditions and the human rights practices of governments. In Measuring Human Rights, Todd Landman and Edzia Carvalho provide a succinct and thoughtful introduction to the endeavor of human rights measurement.
International Organization and Poverty Alleviation (PDF)
William Felice, Diana Fuguitt
Under the leadership of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and former High Commissioner of Human Rights Mary Robinson, efforts were made to mainstream human rights throughout the entire U.N. system. Annan appealed to all U.N. specialized agencies and affiliated organizations to consider how their work was linked to the corpus of internationally recognized human rights in international law. In one of his last acts as Secretary-General, Annan called for basing new reforms at the U.N. on three notions of freedom: freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom to live a life with dignity (Annan 2005). Robinson explicitly linked human rights law to the development policies of international organizations (IOs) such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). She suggested that decisions as to appropriate priorities in the quest for development "can be made easier by using the language and standards of human rights and placing the decision-making process firmly in the context of the government's international human rights obligations. These obligations stretch also to international organizations" (Robinson 1998). The U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) furthermore asserted that development activities that do not contribute to respect for human rights are not worthy of the name (CESCR 1998). Many IOs concerned with issues of poverty alleviation, including the World Bank, responded favorably to Annan and Robinson's challenge and integrated human rights into their programming. Other IOs, including the WTO, were less open to the inclusion of human rights into their programs. This essay will consider several new works that assess the integration of human rights into these organizations.