Public Acknowledgement and Investigations of U.S. “Targeted Killings” and Drone Strikes

The United Nations, local and international human rights organizations, and journalists have investigated and reported numerous cases in which there is credible evidence of harm to Yemeni, Pakistani, and other civilians from U.S. strikes carried out in secret, often using drones. The families of those individuals are still seeking redress and accountability, and the continued refusal of your administration even to officially acknowledge their losses compounds their sufferin

Governance and returns on investment : an empirical investigation

Using data from the World Bank's Operations Evaluation Department, the authors examine the link between the performance of Bank-financed projects and various indicators of country governance. They find that: there is a strong statistical, and possibly casual, link between civil liberties and project performance. After controlling for a variety of determinants of project performance, they find that in countries with the best civil liberties records projects have an economic rate of return between 8 and 22 percentage points higher than the rate of return in countries with the worst civil liberties. (The average rate of return in the sample is 6 percent). The typical political regime (whether authoritarian or democratic) and the status of more purely political liberties do not appear to significantly affect project performance.Human Rights,Decentralization,Politics and Government,Public Health Promotion,ICT Policy and Strategies,Governance Indicators,National Governance,Politics and Government,Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance,Human Rights

The Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Divide

Contemporary legal discourse differentiates “civil rights” from “civil liberties.” The former are generally understood as protections against discriminatory treatment, the latter as freedom from oppressive government authority. This Essay explains how this differentiation arose and considers its consequences. Although there is a certain inherent logic to the civil rights-civil liberties divide, it in fact is the product of the unique circumstances of a particular moment in history. In the early years of the Cold War, liberal anticommunists sought to distinguish their incipient interest in the cause of racial equality from their belief that national security required limitations on the speech and due process rights of suspected subversives. Toward this end, they took two terms that had generally been used interchangeably and they created the civil rights-civil liberties distinction. Civil rights would forever after be attached to the struggle for racial equality and subsequent campaigns against other forms of public and private discrimination. Civil liberties would be attached to claims of individual freedom against generally applicable government regulatory power. The civil rights-civil liberties divide was contested from the beginning, however. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the radical left condemned the divide as a tool for politically powerful liberal anticommunists to separate themselves from the declining fortunes of their former New Deal allies. In the 1960s, a new generation of critics of the divide made the case that the battles against discrimination and government oppression were indivisible. Some advocated a new label, “human rights,” which would subsume the categories of civil rights and civil liberties, while also recognizing social welfare rights. Despite these revisionist efforts, the civil rights-civil liberties divide survives, still contested, but also reinforced as each new generation puts it to new uses. This Essay not only reconstructs the largely forgotten history of the origins of the civil rights-civil liberties divide, it also identifies the ways in which labeling and categorizing the legal landscape can advance or impede legal change

The Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Divide

Contemporary legal discourse differentiates “civil rights” from “civil liberties.” The former are generally understood as protections against discriminatory treatment, the latter as freedom from oppressive government authority. This Essay explains how this differentiation arose and considers its consequences. Although there is a certain inherent logic to the civil rights-civil liberties divide, it in fact is the product of the unique circumstances of a particular moment in history. In the early years of the Cold War, liberal anticommunists sought to distinguish their incipient interest in the cause of racial equality from their belief that national security required limitations on the speech and due process rights of suspected subversives. Toward this end, they took two terms that had generally been used interchangeably and they created the civil rights-civil liberties distinction. Civil rights would forever after be attached to the struggle for racial equality and subsequent campaigns against other forms of public and private discrimination. Civil liberties would be attached to claims of individual freedom against generally applicable government regulatory power. The civil rights-civil liberties divide was contested from the beginning, however. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the radical left condemned the divide as a tool for politically powerful liberal anticommunists to separate themselves from the declining fortunes of their former New Deal allies. In the 1960s, a new generation of critics of the divide made the case that the battles against discrimination and government oppression were indivisible. Some advocated a new label, “human rights,” which would subsume the categories of civil rights and civil liberties, while also recognizing social welfare rights. Despite these revisionist efforts, the civil rights-civil liberties divide survives, still contested, but also reinforced as each new generation puts it to new uses. This Essay not only reconstructs the largely forgotten history of the origins of the civil rights-civil liberties divide, it also identifies the ways in which labeling and categorizing the legal landscape can advance or impede legal change

Foreword and Prologue

Milton Konvitz (Ph.D. \u2733) embodied the spirit of Cornell University. An authority on civil rights and human rights, and constitutional and labor law, he served on the Cornell faculty for 27 years, holding dual appointments at the Law School and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. This section includes the foreword by Robert B. McKersie and the prologue in four chapters: (1) The Making of a Scholar; (2) Civil Rights; (3) Fundamental Liberties; and (4) Judaic and American Ideals

A Generation of Human Rights: Looking Back to the Future

The author traces the development of human rights in North America since the Second World War, and examines the socio-political environment in which these developments took place. In examining what appears to be an existing backlash against the earlier vigorous pursuit of rights for disadvantaged groups, the author distinguishes between civil liberties and human rights, and focuses on how a preoccupation with civil liberties is impeding the ability to promote human rights. She concludes by discussing the evolution of human rights for women this generation, and observes that while there have been significant gains, especially numerically, there has also been increasing resistance to further fundamental change

Drumming out resistance in Japan: writing back Burakumin identity through music

Noémie Adam is an alumna of the LSE MSc Human Rights programme (2013/14). She researches and writes on human rights and civil liberties in the UK, Europe and Japan

Introduction

This special issue of the Fordham International Law Journal contains seven outstanding articles by jurists from seven countries on three continents. The articles have a common thread in highlighting the necessity for respect of human rights and the human dignity that they are designed to protect. They also demonstrate the significant advances made since the end of World War II of international human rights law. In an age of terrorism there is an inevitable tension between measures designed to protect the lives of innocent civilians and their fundamental civil liberties

The European Juridical Thinking, Concerning the Human Rights, Expressed along the Centuries

The man was ideologically and juridically conceived as a  servant of the city and his rights and liberties were also included in the sphere of a thinking of a preeminently ideological, of a partyminded nature, with negative consequences also within the human relationships, at the basis of which the very reason of these rights and liberties lacked, namely the „communion”, the only carrier of the effects of interior freedom, namely of conscience, of faith and religion. Human rights are usually classified as civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights or as individual and collective rights. They also talk about „the international juridical status of the individual”, which „comprises the ensemble of rights that the individual should have in order to maximize his abilities both at a personal and collective level.”. Among the fundamental human rights and liberties, „religious liberties” take a special place

Joint Submission to the Human Rights Committee: Draft General Comment 36 on Article 6, on the Right to Life

Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic, the International Commission of Jurists, the Open Society Justice Initiative, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Rights Watch (UK) welcome the opportunity to provide the Human Rights Committee (the Committee) with the following observations on its draft General Comment on Article 6 (the draft) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the Covenant) on the right to life, ahead of its second reading