Dancing Across Borders: ‘Exotic Dancers,’ Trafficking,and Canadian Immigration Policy

This article analyzes a Canadian immigration program that authorizes issuance of temporary work visas to ‘exotic dancers.’ In response to public criticism that the government was thereby implicated in the transnational trafficking of women into sexual exploitation, Citizenship and Immigration Canada retained the visa program de jure but eliminated it de facto. Using a legal and discursive analysis that focuses on the production of female labor migrants variously as workers, as criminals and as bearers of human rights, the article argues that the incoherence of Canadian policy can only be rendered intelligible when refracted through these different lenses. The article concludes by considering policy options available to the state in addressing the issue.     

Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and,Yes, from American Sociology

The U.S. Constitution includes civil and political rights—as individual rights—but does not include what is internationally understood to be “human rights,” namely rights we enjoy as equals, including economic, social, and cultural rights, and protections for vulnerable persons, such as children, minorities, mothers, and refugees. The United States has not ratified any international (United Nations) or regional (Organization of American States) human rights treaty, is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court, and is no longer a member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. It might be concluded that Americans do not know what human rights are. It is more complicated than that. While opinion polls show that Americans often endorse individual rights—e. g., the rights of women—they do not frame them as being interdependent or being within the purview of government. Can we conclude that human rights have no place in the United States? Not at all. This article concludes by showing that many U.S. institutions of higher learning have programs in human rights and that some academic associations, including the American Sociological Association, recognize human rights.     

Rethinking law from below: experiences from the Kuna people and Rojava

ABSTRACT

This article presents a modest summary of the vivid discussions around the role of law and human rights that took place during the workshop ‘Seeking answers from below to the contemporary crisis of democracy’ in Siena in October 2018. Representatives from social movements, CSOs and academic considered law as one of the central issues to be discussed in order to better grasp and counter the global power structures. Law historically serves national and global elites’ interests, being applied to maintain the status quo of social injustice and inequalities. Therefore, this article presents some ideas and provokes some fundamental questions on how law and human rights can be part of an emancipatory project. Based on concrete experiences of the participants, from Rojava to the Kuna people, we critically discuss how legal instruments can be used to strategically defend people’s rights, strengthening the use of law from below.     

Having the Last Word: Human Rights Reporting (Re)Imagined Through Critical Qualitative Methodology

Human rights monitoring and reporting have emerged as major practices of human rights lawyers and advocates in both non-governmental organizations and inter-governmental organizations. This reporting is a form of knowledge production, often geared towards advocacy on behalf of human rights protection but also seeking to provide an ‘objective’ report of some kind. NGOs and IGOs employ a range of methodologies, but these are rarely formalized and tend to rely more on general institutional reputation and credibility, as well as the professionalism of individual practitioners. Some scholars have recommended more formal, standardized methods and have raised the possibility of borrowing models from other contexts. This paper considers contributions that critical methodologists from the social sciences and related disciplines might offer to human rights practice, particularly human rights monitoring and reporting. Traditional methodological approaches in the social sciences and in law have been criticized, interrogated, and (re)developed in recent years from numerous perspectives, but it does not appear that these critical approaches have penetrated international legal work, especially human rights lawyering. This paper suggests that critical qualitative methodologies offer great opportunity to reconceptualize traditional approaches to method and practice in human rights work.     

Walking the Tightrope:

In societies where homosexuality is legally proscribed, gays and lesbians rely on private and informal networks for mutual self-help, information dissemination, sociability, and the sharing of gay goods. This is particularly the case in Singapore where an authoritarian and paternalistic state is actively involved in the marriage and procreation of its citizens, and is hostile to homosexuality. In the era of AIDS, a new social movement has developed in ways that de jure seek to educate the public about AIDS but de facto serve the needs of the larger gay community. The dual roles of Action For AIDS are fraught with tensions, ambivalence and problems, but represent a strategic response to the social and political conditions in which the organization is located.     

‘I nearly lost my work’: chance encounters,legal empowerment and the struggle for disability rights in Ghana

This article uses a case study from Ghana to argue that rights-based legal instruments are important but insufficient steps towards securing disability rights in non-western societies. Despite Ghana’s implementation of a Disability Act and ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a grassroots perspective shows that legislation and the model of legal empowerment will not automatically produce equal access to human rights. The paper will present this argument through a case study of an individual who became disabled in 2008 and struggled for four years to secure his rights to healthcare and employment. I also argue that the case has a wider significance for disability rights in Ghana and beyond.     

Migration and the population census in Asia and the Pacific: issues,questions and debate

Skeldon discusses the main issues to be resolved when designing questions and strategies to collect migration-related data. The strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches are assessed in the light of the data collected by countries in the Asia-Pacific region during the 1980 round of Censuses. Each country has its own particular needs and must devise its questions accordingly. However, there are a few general principles that are likely to improve the quality of the basic data collected. Some of these principles follow. 1) Detailed information on migration can only be collected through specialized surveys. The census data must be able to provide information on the basic spatial and temporal structures of migration and only upon these can detailed subsequent work proceed. 2) De facto enumeration will not only provide a better quality of information, but will also capture a higher proportion of total human mobility than de jure enumeration. A question of last previous residence and a finely coded duration of residence question are likely to generate the most useful migration data. For reasons of simplicity, continuity, and utility, the question on birthplace is a fundamental census question. 3) In order not to overload census questionnaires, additional information on migration is best collected either through specialized census sample modules or through separate sample surveys.     

Protection of Migrants' Human Rights: Principles and Practice

In principle, migrants enjoy the protection of international law. Key human rights instruments oblige the States Parties to extend their protection to all human beings. Such important treaties as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have been ratified by more than 140 states, but many political, social or economic obstacles seem to stand in the way of offering those rights to migrants. In an attempt to bridge this protection gap, the more specifically targeted International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families was created and adopted by the United Nations in 1990. This treaty is not yet in force, but the number of States Parties is increasing towards the required 20. In the past few years the human rights machinery of the United Nations has increased its attention towards migrants' human rights, appointing in 1999 the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Governments, as the acceding parties to international human rights instruments, remain the principal actors as guardians of the human rights of all individuals residing in their territories. Receiving countries are in a key position in the protection of the migrants that they host. However, active defence of migrants' rights is politically difficult in many countries where anti‐immigrant factions are influential. Trafficking in migrants is one example of the complexity faced by states in formulating their migration policies. On the one hand, trafficking has made governments increasingly act together and combine both enforcement and protection. On the other, trafficking, with its easily acceptable human rights concerns, is often separated from the more migration‐related human smuggling. The latter is a more contentious issue, related also to unofficial interests in utilizing cheap undocumented immigrant labour.     

Let's help caregivers and children in informal kinship care: de facto custodian legislation

Caregivers in informal kinship care encounter numerous difficulties when lacking a legal relationship with the children in their care. The de facto custodian guardianship, a concept that is relatively unknown in social work, provides an additional legal option to caregivers by allowing them to present their caregiving history during custody hearings. This article introduces the significance of the de facto concept and provides detailed information on its components and limitations. Recommendations are forwarded for social education and practice.     

Migrant Rights: International Law and National Action

Migrant rights were put squarely on the agenda of the Global Forum on Migration and Development when it met in Manila in 2008, as the principal theme of the governmental and civil society discussions. The Forum proceeded with the assumption that migrant rights are a development issue, as well as a fundamental human rights issue. This article begins with a review of the normative framework for protecting migrant rights. While norms by themselves will not prevent abuses, they can serve as a basis for advocating implementation of policies and programs to achieve these goals. We argue that there is ample international law setting out the basic rights of migrants even though the principal migrant‐centric instruments are not widely ratified. Failures in protecting migrant rights arise from the lack of implementation of these standards at the national level. The article then discusses a range of programs, mostly implemented by or in destination countries, which hold potential for overcoming barriers to the protection of the rights of migrants. These practical steps can be found in a wide array of countries, most of which have not become party to the Migrant Workers Convention. The article concludes that these initiatives have been implemented in an ad hoc manner, necessitating a more systematic approach at the national level to the protection of migrant rights.     

‘A New Language that Speaks of Change Just As It Steps Toward It’: Transnationalism,Erotic Justice and Queer Human Rights Praxis

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movements have too often been dominated by US liberal individualist framings of lesbian and gay rights, resulting in the hegemony of US‐focused issues and institutional actions, despite the irony that the US government has been relatively unsupportive of LGBT rights on the international stage. We argue that transnational, grassroots queer movements embody more profound aspirations that do not limit the meaning of queer liberation to singular identity politics or rights‐restraining institutions. Specifically, we point to transnational and Third World‐based queer movements that offer more complex structural analyses of sexual oppression as well as more visionary praxes of sexual rights. Drawing on lessons from two cases of queer human rights praxis from the Philippines and México, we assert that a queer grassroots enactment of human rights allows for multiple subaltern constituencies to find – and to make – a place in human rights discourses; queer identity and actions create social formations that expand human rights agendas to further embody the intersectionality, interdependence and transnationality of daily life. Key to these enactments of queer human rights praxis are prefigurative politics and rooted cosmopolitanism, which catalyze new expansions of human rights to include intersectional framings and practices of erotic justice.     

“The EU Should Talk to Germany” Transnational Legal Consciousness as a Rights Claiming Tool among Undocumented Migrants

Migrants must often negotiate their rights while being hampered by their precarious resident status, within contexts where the overlap of migration, welfare, labour and gender regimes lead to incoherent and contradictory institutional set‐ups that hinder their claiming of rights. The analysis of the legal consciousness of undocumented migrants in Germany reveals a complex set of orientations. On some occasions they waive their rights, accepting lower working conditions in order not to lose their jobs – a finding that confirms existing research. At the same time, they also informally “enact” rights and access to institutions themselves. They appeal to the experiences of undocumented migrants with laws and access to social services in other countries. The finding of relatively widespread transnational legal consciousness adds a new dimension to the scholarship on migrant legal consciousness and claims‐making, which has hitherto portrayed undocumented migrants as living in a legal limbo between their countries of origin and destination.     

Human Rights and the Social Work Curriculum: Integrating Human Rights into Skill-Based Education Regarding Policy Practice Behaviors

This article provides a model for social work educators seeking to integrate human rights content in the policy course. Each of the four policy-related practice behaviors (e.g., policy formulation, policy analysis, policy advocacy, and collaboration in policy practice) is examined with respect to the traditional methods used in social welfare policy courses and the ways in which these methods can be expanded to include human rights content. Available literature and multimedia resources are noted and practical human rights applications are presented with the goal of supporting efforts to achieve this integration.     

Global Human Rights and State Sovereignty: State Ratification of International Human Rights Treaties, 1965–20011

This research seeks to understand the factors that lead nation‐states to ratify international human rights treaties in the contemporary world, despite their potential cost for state sovereignty. We argue that normative pressure from international society, along with historical contingencies during the Cold War, encouraged many states to ratify these treaties. We present an event‐history analysis of ratification of seven key international human rights treaties in 164 countries in the period between 1965 and 2001. The results lend support to the world society argument as well as to our historical argument and also specify that normative pressure and imitation have been important factors shaping states’ decisions to ratify international human rights treaties.     

Protecting and Benchmarking Migrants’ Rights: An Analysis of the Global Compact for Safe,Orderly and Regular Migration

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM) was to be “guided by human rights law and standards” in recognition of the rights of international migrants, who are currently protected by an overlapping patchwork of treaties and international law. The GCM contains many laudable commitments that, if implemented, will ensure that states more consistently respect, protect, and fulfil the rights of all migrants and also that states incorporate data on migration into a more cohesive governance regime that does more to promote cooperation on the issue of international migration. However, many concerns remain. Using a legal analysis and cross‐national policy data, we find that the GCM neither fully articulates existing law nor makes use of international consensus to expand the rights of migrants. In its first section, this article provides a concise analysis of the GCM's compliance with a set of core principles of existing international human rights law regarding migrants. In the second section, we apply a novel instrument to create an objective, cross‐national accounting of the laws protecting migrants’ rights in various national legal frameworks. Focusing on a sample of five diverse destination and sending countries, the results suggest we are close to an international consensus on the protection of a core set of migrants’ rights. This analysis should help prioritize the work necessary to implement the GCM.     

A Measure of Justice: The Rabinal Human Rights Movement in Post-War Guatemala

This article explores one region’s struggle for human rights and legal justice in post-war Guatemala. Rabinal—a target of state-directed genocide in the 1980s—suffered one of the highest fatality levels of the war. In the post-war era, Rabinal human rights activists have led the struggle to demand exhumations of mass graves, build memorials, and push for criminal investigations and trials. Despite some important local victories, few of those responsible for the violence have received punishment. But that does not mean this movement is a failure. Instead, this article highlights the cultural, expressive and inprocess benefits of mobilization. Rabinal activists have restored their sense of agency and confirmed their collective identity as fighters for legal justice. Meanwhile, this local mobilization has contributed to Guatemala’s uneven process of democratization.

Managing International Migration in Australia: Human Rights and the “Last Major Redoubt of Unfettered National Sovereignty”

This article challenges the view of many commentators that the capacity of liberal democracies to regulate international migration has been significantly compromised by the growth of international human rights norms and the role of independent judiciaries in enforcing those norms. Focusing on three Australian case studies that deal with deportation, mandatory detention of refugee claimants, and judicial review of migration decisions, the article concludes that international and domestic legal constraints still leave very substantial latitude to liberal democratic States to regulate the size and composition of international immigration flows. With only modest qualifications, migration policy remains “the last major redoubt of unfettered national sovereignty.”     

Travelling theory in China: contextualization,compromise and combination

In this article we explore the dissemination of human rights ideas in China through an ethnographic study of three women's organizations: the government's ‘letters and complaints’ department, the governmental NGO affiliated with it, and a legal aid centre; all are located in Beijing. We argue that there are two paths in China for the transmission of international human rights ideas – a government one and a non‐government one. The government path, featured as contextual and compromising, is rooted in socialist and collective values, and the governmental organizations we studied function squarely within the domestic legal framework and the concept of ‘women's rights and interests’. The non‐governmental path, by contrast, characterized by vernacularization, namely a combination of international ideas with local practice to promote legal reform in China, is the result of economic development and interactions with the international community. Both paths interact within their different spheres to further the development of women's rights.     

The humanitarian road to Nagorno-Karabakh: media,morality and infrastructural promise in the Armenian diaspora

The Armenia Fund Telethon is an annual media event broadcast from Los Angeles that calls on all Armenians to give donations for humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects in Armenia and the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork during the 2013 and 2014 editions dedicated to the new Vardenis–Martakert highway connecting the two territories, this article examines the transnational ritual sphere through which de facto state formation in Nagorno-Karabakh is transformed from a political issue into a humanitarian question for diaspora households worldwide. While the new road facilitates mobility, its participatory materialisation appeals to distant addressees with the promise of helping Karabakh Armenians stay put and strengthening Armenian claims on de jure Azerbaijani territories. Challenging scholarly accounts of the Armenian diaspora as past-centred, subjective and symbolic, the Telethon’s humanitarian governance constructs Nagorno-Karabakh as materially diasporic and subjectivities in Los Angeles as objectively tied to the present-day conflict in the South Caucasus.     

Unauthorized Migrants and the (Il)Logic of “Crime Control”: A Human Rights Perspective on US Federal and Local State Immigration Policies

Immigration control, widely regarded the sovereign right of nation states, has often been pursued at the expense of civil and human rights. More than a century ago, nativists legitimated a punitive approach to immigration control that treated migrants’ rights as secondary by branding millions of newcomers to the United States as a “dangerous class”. In many ways, recent policies similarly criminalize immigrants and deploy crime control strategies in response. This article reviews the most significant of these policies at the federal and local state level, including: border security measures, detention and deportation, the 287(g) program, anti‐immigrant city ordinances, and the Arizona law (SB1070). Each initiative has been framed as necessary to protect American citizens from serious crime. We focus on four ways in which these policies violate human rights: first, border security measures that result in migrant deaths violate the right to life; second, detention and deportation violate the right to liberty; third, detention and deportation punish unlawful residents as though they were guilty of criminal rather than civil violations of the law, imposing penalties that are arbitrary and disproportionately harsh; and fourth, local state policies to counter illegal immigration encourage racial profiling, a practice that violates the right to freedom from discrimination.