Reconceptualising and contextualising sexual rights in the MENA region: beyond LGBTQI categories

In recent years, LGBTQI rights have become central to debates around international development, human rights, refugee protection, and diversity. Yet research and experience in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) reveals significant problems with LGBTQI as a way of identifying individuals who do not conform to heterosexual and binary gender norms, in order to support their rights. In this article, we draw on experience of working to advance gender and sexual rights to illustrate the shortcomings of LGBTQI identity categories, and use findings from the Centre for Transnational Development and Collaboration’s (CTDC) four-year programme of research into LGBTQI rights in the MENA region to support our argument further. This research identified major problems in policies and debates on the rights of individuals whose sexual orientation and/or gender identity differs from the norm. In response to this, CTDC has developed a tool to address rights in programme development and advocacy, using a new approach, Sexual Practice and Gender Performance (SPGP), for work in the MENA region.     

Coming together. Experiences and lessons from an LGBTQI project in three countries

This article reflects on experiences and lessons from an LGBTQI project implemented by Oxfam and its partners in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and a third country in Asia where LGBTQI work is strongly criminalised. It argues that protecting and promoting the rights of LGBTQI persons, so that they can live a decent life without violence, needs a systemic shift in social norms and attitudes, even in contexts where laws and policies promise equality. Development policymakers and practitioners can usefully channel funding and other forms of support to LGBTQI leaders, groups, and movements who are best placed to lead the social change needed. The article shares a wide range of strategies used by the project and calls for development organisations and funding agencies to work with LGBTQI organisations in solidarity and sustain their vital activism, long term. It focuses in particular on the key strategies of supporting the development of safe spaces, both in ‘real life’ and online. These spaces are extremely important for psychosocial well-being, challenging social norms, fostering collective consciousness, and collective action. The article also focuses on advocacy to place LGBTQI issues in the spotlight, internationally as well as nationally.     

Indigenous internationalism: native rights and the UN

Abstract

Since 1982, with the creation of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the UN has taken steps toward addressing the violations of indigenous human rights around the globe that have characterized the colonization of indigenous peoples by western nations since the 15th century. This article explores the question of whether actions taken by the WGIP and other UN bodies promise to relieve this legacy; or whether the UN, as the proper overseer of international law concerning human rights today, continues that legacy in revised form, as some analysts have claimed. A brief overview of positions taken by key figures in the history of international law concerning indigenous peoples since the early 16th century provides a background against which to compare the work of the UN. My conclusion is that while the UN has in some ways sustained the inherited order of neglect of indigenous rights, it has, more importantly, created openings which make it possible for indigenous peoples to assert their claims. While this is not a story of continuous progress, it does suggest that there is reason to respect the UN's efforts in this relentlessly neglected area of human rights.     

Violence against women: the international legal response

Violence against women has only recently become an international legal concern, because human rights law has been directed to protect men in their public lives. The failure of human rights law to protect women from gender-specific violence has occurred because much of the violence against women occurs in private and because cultural assumptions are used to justify the oppression of women. The silent nature of this violence has masked the reality of the international nature of the problem. Also, international law primarily regulates the behavior of states. Women have lobbied for recognition of the problem of violence against women within the UN agencies concerned with crime and those concerned with women's issues. It is illustrative of the marginalization of women's human rights issues that the international instrument which guarantees women's equality, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), was not drafted through the Human Rights Commission. CEDAW's Recommendation 19 directs the attention of states towards the elimination of gender-based violence, but the participation of the 139 states which are party to CEDAW is limited by reservations the states have attached to their participation. Wider commitment to the eradication of violence against women has been sought using other UN bodies, and, in 1993, the Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Conference on Human Rights called for the integration of women's human rights into all UN human rights activities, the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and the Security Council of the International Tribunal was established to prosecute offenses committed in the former Yugoslavia, including rape. In 1994, the UN appointed a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women to provide a continuing focus on gender violence. These calls for the recognition of the human rights of women and girls must be reinforced by the Fourth World Conference on Women. Such international instruments will not change women's lives alone, however. Improvement in the status of women will depend upon education, support services, and training of public officials. While working for social change, activists must also work to insure implementation of the instruments governments have adopted.     

Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina's Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years

Abstract

This article explores how human rights framing by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has evolved over the last 20 years. It discusses how the movement has worked towards institutionalizing new categories of rights, such as the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’, thereby contributing to the creation of new human rights standards at the United Nations (UN). It also critically addresses some of the challenges the movement has been confronted with when framing its demands in terms of rights. Its overall argument is that LVC has managed to tap the potential of the rhetoric of rights to find common ground, thanks to its innovative use of non-codified rights. This has enabled activists to ‘localize’ human rights and make them meaningful to their various contexts. However, it contends that further advancing the movement's goals will require serious consideration of some of the key limits of the human rights framework.     

School‐based human rights education: case studies in Hong Kong secondary schools

In an era of rapid globalization, space and time are seriously compressed. People from different nations, cultures, religions and other backgrounds have become much more interconnected and interdependent. Since people are rapidly intermingling, what values should be considered as standards and norms in regulating this situation, so that people of different backgrounds can relate peacefully to each other with mutual respect? United Nations (UN) human rights standards could be considered as sets of shared global norms and values in a search for global ethics. As a consequence, the UN has been eager to promote human rights education (HRE), aiming at the cultivation of a human rights culture. This paper reports on two case studies of school‐based curriculum development of HRE in two Hong Kong secondary schools. We also recommend some research directions important for the implementation of HRE in schools. It is hoped that the paper can provide some insight into the development of quality HRE in schools.     

Formerly Incarcerated Women Speak Out

This article presents the stories of formerly incarcerated women as they transition from prison back to their communities. The purpose of the article, based on feminist and visual ethnographic research methods, is to learn from the women themselves about the entities that support their efforts to rebuild their lives and stay out of prison as well as the barriers that impede such efforts. A major focus of this article is the women who mobilized on behalf the civil and human rights for all formerly incarcerated people and thus become their own advocates for change in policies and societal attitudes toward those with criminal records.     

Creating LGBTQI+ programing in urban higher education: Considering the creation process of a campus resource room

Abstract

While many community college campuses provide resources of some kind for students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or other sexual or gender-non-binary minorities (LGBTQI+), surprisingly few institutions have dedicated physical spaces designated for that purpose. This article explores, by way of a case study on the establishment of an LGBTQI+?resource room on a community college campus, the processes that must be considered and undertaken when establishing such spaces. Needs assessments, identification of stakeholders, and strategies for making an LGBTQI+?resource room a reality on campuses that have never had such spaces or initiatives are discussed for the purposes of carefully considering the components of a proposed template for campus administrators, staff, faculty, and students to follow. While outcomes described in this article are specific to one particular case, the procedures by which they were achieved were undertaken with the hopes that they might be replicable by other similar institutions, in light of the very few LGBTQI+?spaces in community college contexts.     

UN genocide commemoration,transnational scenes of mourning and the global project of learning from atrocity

This paper offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse‐historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities. UN commemorative discourse characteristically links memories of Holocaust and Rwandan trauma in a ‘chain of communication’ with those of other episodes of brutality (e.g., Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur) chiefly to convey the continuity of human barbarity across time and endorse certain presuppositions regarding the fate of a fallen humanity in this more ‘post‐secular’ age. As scenes of mourning, UN commemorations unite participating international delegations in their expressions of grief for the victims of ‘preventable tragedies’ in the past but also, it must be said, their uncertainty regarding new horrors likely to occur in the future. The duty to remember is reiterated continuously as both a mark of respect to those who have already perished and as a warning of atrocities yet to unfold. This paper explores how the historical constancy of violence is interpreted by the UN through a detailed critical analysis of its recently inaugurated ‘remembrance through education’ programme aimed at a transnational collective learning from atrocity.     

Working with autistic children and young people: sense, experience and the challenges for services, policies and practices

This paper aims to create narratives of autistic experience that are not restricted by a primary consideration of impairments or deficits but rather related to ideas about 'assets' as a means of developing professional practice. It is argued that children's rights legislation (UN Convention on Children's Rights, 1989, and in the UK, the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, 2001) can encourage professionals working with autistic young people to search imaginatively for ways of conceptualising and accessing not only those assets but also the thoughts and feelings of their clients. Examples are taken from the author's own casework as well as from autistic 'insider' accounts which, it is argued, are providing insights into the inherently social contexts for the development of human feelings, thinking and meaning. While primarily directed at professionals, the intention is to encourage theories and the development of practices which are responsive to the wishes and views of disabled people and as such assist in their 'fight for full equality and social inclusion'.     

LGBTQI+ icons between resistance and normalization: looking for mediatization of emotions in hashtags

ABSTRACT

The mediatization of emotions emerges as an affordance of social media, the study of which involves paying attention to digital practices and to the construction and expression of public affection. This happens both for the great events and for the daily demonstrations of support or its denial. In this article we work on the phenomenon of the mediatization of emotions linked to two LGBTQI+ icons and expressed in hashtags on Twitter. Placing it in a specific context – the one of well-known television characters who have declared their homosexual orientation or transgender identity. The objective is to understand if the cloud of feelings they have created on Twitter is to be attributed to a true globally mediatized emotional exchange, or just an expression of emotions on the social media, and discover which emotional dynamics, linked to the LGBTQI+ world, they express.     

The needs of refugee women: a human-rights perspective

While the issue of giving women their human rights has been firmly placed on the agendas of international conferences, the plight of refugee women has gone largely unrecognized. Refugee women face rape, sexual abuse, sexual extortion, and physical insecurity. Such violations precipitate their flight, characterize their attempts to gain refugee status, and continue during their tenure in refugee camps, where they are excluded from positions of authority. Because the definition of refugees in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees omits sex as a grounds for determining refugee status or as a grounds on which it prohibits discrimination based on sex, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees decided in 1985 that such claims must fall under the classification of membership of a particular group. Unfortunately, agreement with this is discretionary for states. It has been argued that states which protect aliens from discrimination based on sex must afford the same privilege to refugees, but, again, such behavior is subject to debate. Concerns about the human rights of refugee women should be strengthened by being addressed in the existing framework of human rights conventions in international law, such as the Commission on the Status of Women and the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). One recent advance in this area was the establishment of the Yugoslav and Rwanda War Crimes Tribunals which will investigate the sexual abuse of women during the armed conflicts. The issue of violence against women in every situation must remain on CEDAW's agenda. In addition, the Fourth World Conference on Women provides a welcome opportunity to place these issues in the forefront of global efforts to protect women.     

From basic needs to basic rights

After arriving at an understanding that basic rights refer to all human needs, it is clear that a recognition of the basic needs of female humans must precede the realization of their rights. The old Women in Development (WID) framework only understood women's needs from an androcentric perspective which was limited to practical interests. Instead, women's primary need is to be free from their subordination to men. Such an understanding places all of women's immediate needs in a new light. A human rights approach to development would see women not as beneficiaries but as people entitled to enjoy the benefits of development. Discussion of what equality before the law should mean to women began at the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi where the issue of violence against women was first linked to development. While debate continues about the distinction between civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights, the realities of women's lives do not permit such a distinction. The concept of the universality of human rights did not become codified until the UN proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The declaration has been criticized by feminists because the view of human rights it embodies has been too strongly influenced by a liberal Western philosophy which stresses individual rights and because it is ambiguous on the distinction between human rights and the rights of a citizen. The protection of rights afforded by the Declaration, however, should not be viewed as a final achievement but as an ongoing struggle. International conferences have led to an analysis of the human-rights approach to sustainable development which concludes that women continue to face the routine denial of their rights. Each human right must be redefined from the perspective of women's needs, which must also be redefined. Women must forego challenging the concept of the universality of human rights in order to overcome the argument of cultural and religious diversity which erodes women's rights. Women can, however, challenge the traditional patriarchal understanding of human rights, drawing on the energy contained in the "basic needs to basic rights" approach.     

State homophobia? India’s shifting UN positions on LGBTQ issues

Why has India adopted contradictory policies with regard to LGBTQ rights at the UN? From 2004 to 2010, India consistently supported draft language for a UN resolution to allow a Special Rapporteur to investigate extra-judicial executions that would include the term ‘sexual orientation’. More recently, however, India has opposed or abstained from UN votes on LGBTQ rights. While India's conservative posture on LGBTQ issues was catalyzed by the Supreme Court's re-criminalization of homosexual activities in 2013 and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP, we argue that the state's posture is not a reflection of deep ideological commitments or a new strategic realignment. Instead, India's policy reflects a generally uncoordinated foreign policy apparatus that has been unprepared to respond to the rapid ascendancy of LGBTQ issues on the human rights agenda. It is not currently possible to predict India's future posture due to its lack of a clear policy commitments.     

The Social Model of Disability Under the Shadow of the Revolution: Ex-combatants Negotiating Identity in Nicaragua

The social model of disability, which defines disability as the product of social discrimination rather than the physical, cognitive, or sensory differences of individuals, became the dominant logic of the international disability field with the 2006 passage of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. As such, grassroots disability associations around the world are advocating for new rights. These campaigns promote a new identity frame of disabled persons as a universally oppressed group. This identity, however, does not benefit all groups equally and actually threatens some. Using qualitative methods, I compare the usage of the disability identity by two grassroots associations in Nicaragua. Ex-Contra soldiers with disabilities use the identity to obfuscate their discredited history as “traitors” and, instead, represent themselves as unjustly discriminated against disabled persons deserving special benefits and human rights protections. Ex-Sandinista soldiers with disabilities also make claims, but only reluctantly as disabled, preferring to self-identify as war wounded. Because of changes in law, however, Ex-Sandinista soldiers are increasingly unable to make claims as war heroes, but must instead access benefits as persons with disabilities “in general.” This case demonstrates how actors strategically use the social model of disability in relation to local political culture and group identity.     

The local diffusion of international human rights norms – understanding the cities for CEDAW campaign

While the international human rights norm literature has revolved mainly around the diffusion and implementation of human rights at the national and global level, less is known how international human rights norms are adopted on the local level. To fill this gap, this article will focus on the Cities for Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) campaign which encourages cities in the United States to adopt ordinances incorporating principles set forth by UN CEDAW. This article will analyze how the Cities for CEDAW campaign frames international gender norms to make them relevant in local contexts. Drawing on original interviews with Cities for CEDAW activists, this article will further our understanding how local human rights activists can utilize international human rights treaties to integrate human rights norms on the local level.     

Human rights for women: battles of culture and power

In Africa, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focussing on human rights have mushroomed during the past 10-15 years, and, with several of these organizations run by and for women, it is possible to find free legal aid for women in almost every capital city. The collapse of the extended family and, thus, the framework for customary law has meant that women are faced with problems of maintenance and widows with problems of inheritance. Customary law and the protection it afforded women and children has also been weakened by a poverty-driven shift in urban areas from a focus on community support to a focus on individual survival. The vacuum left by this change in legal and social structure is being filled by the human rights NGOs. Paradoxically, in the face of such change, a static, communal, and neutral concept of "culture" was held out by African state representatives at the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights to justify their opposition to the acceptance of the crosscultural legitimacy of human rights, especially for women. While these arguments were being aired at the Conference, African NGOs were vigorously using examples of the marginalization of women to promote the opposite view. The most important aspect of these conflicting views is which group has the most power and resources to voice its interpretation of the situation. With most African countries governed by a dual system of laws, customary law and common or civil law (left over from colonialism), human rights groups are working to instill human rights principles into common law through the ratification of international conventions. Thus, persons in need could be viewed not as victims but as individuals entitled to enforceable and universal rights. Misuse of the term "culture" can marginalize women even as it is being promoted as a protective device for women. A more useful view of culture is as something which transcends traditional boundaries and locates people and institutions in the global community where they are protected by the acknowledgement of their human rights.     

Organizational responses to the Convention on the Rights of the Child: international lessons for child welfare organizations.

This article describes ways several large, international, child-focused institutions have responded to the nearly universal ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Although governments (with the exception of the United States and Somalia) are the actual signatories to the CRC, non-governmental organizations played an active role in drafting the CRC, and continue to monitor its implementation and integrate it into their own work. Many have expanded their own human rights/child rights program approaches in recognition of the CRC's principles. Children's participation in organizations, perhaps the most radical element of the CRC, is a challenge to all groups.     

Incapsulating hands: on the (in)dependence of young adults in the UNHCR’s Maratane Refugee Camp

Drawing on research with a small group of young women and men in Maratane Refugee Camp, Mozambique, this paper argues that youth envisage themselves as incapsulated in the camp’s physical and ideological boundaries. It shows that the United Nations’ (UN) mandate of finding durable solutions to international problems is difficult to achieve when young people envisage themselves as reliant or dependent on the UN. It argues that greater attention needs to be given to the mentoring of young people within the UN system, so that they are equipped with viable and realistic life expectations and skills.     

Sociology and Human Rights in the Post‐Development Era

This article explores the dilemmas of the sociology of human rights – a growing field of academic research. Sociologists are increasingly conceptualizing poverty, global economic inequality, and social inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation not as social problems, but rather as human rights abuses. The shift of emphasis from the social problems perspective to the human rights perspective demands a different set of remedies from IGOs, national governments, and local authorities. Whereas in the past sociologists tended either to recommend modifications to social policies or to propose large‐scale social transformation, they now find themselves advocating the implementation of human rights on the global, national, and local levels. This has brought sociologists into the area of global governance. The process of delineating an explicitly sociological perspective on human rights is impeded by two overlapping dilemmas: (1) the tension between an approach that emphasizes the analysis of ‘rights effects’ on the global, national, and local levels and an approach that stresses the advocacy of rights as a palliative for social inequalities; and (2) the tension between an interdisciplinary vision, in which sociology would join other disciplines in illuminating human rights and a unidisciplinary vision, in which sociologists and their allies would push for a unified social science founded on human rights.