Freedom from religion is fundamental to the human rights system but it is under threat

In recent years there has been an attempt to redraw the boundaries of human rights on grounds of traditionalism, religion and conservatism. Frances Raday argues that current debates regarding state and religion should be determined on the basis of their impact on human rights, without deference to religious norms or sentiments

CEDAW and the Jurisprudence of UN Human Rights Mechanisms: Women’s Human Rights in the Context of Religion and Culture

Cet article examine les problèmes inhérents au patriarcat religieux dans les régimes traditionnels, (le judaïsme, le christianisme, l’islamisme) qui posent face aux droits humains les défis idéologiques entre eux et les groupes internationaux qui font la promotion des droits humains laïcs (CEDEF et les autres). L’auteure admet que les mécanismes à l’intérieur des Nations Unis n’ont pas essayé de créer une synergie entre la liberté religieuse ou la croyance et l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes. Ces deux domaines, souvent conflictuels rendent les femmes particulièrement vulnérables. L’auteure préconise un régime d’une “empathie normative universelle” qui sera réussi seulement si les droits humains laïcs seront alignés sur le progrès en herméneutique des femmes qui installeront l’égalité dans leur religion

Privatisation, outsourcing and employment relations in Israel

This chapter focuses on the effect that outsourcing, as a subset of privatization, has had on employment relations in Israel. In particular, chapter highlights the adverse, and perhaps counter-intuitive, effects that the law has had on the plight of Israeli contract workers. Israeli governmental agencies and local councils have turned to outsourcing as a means to circumventing post limits and due to the Ministry of Finance’s pressures to increase ‘flexibility’ in the civil service. Intriguingly, paradoxically, and tragically, the law’s effort to regulate this growing phenomenon has led employers resorting to tactics which have redefined agency workers (teachers, nurses, etc) as workers subject to the “outsourcing of services” (teaching, nursing, etc). This has moved such workers into a legal void, depriving them of rights and protection

Self-Determination and Minority Rights

This Article tries to wend its way through the trail of human debris, the visions and the shattered dreams on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to a rational analysis of the applicability of international human rights norms, to the conflicting claims of two peoples to the same land. The right of both Jews and Palestinians to self-determination seems to be self-evident from the stories of the two peoples. Almost forty years after the Six Days War, the author turns to this issue in an attempt to analyze where this conflict now stands in terms of international human rights. This article will concentrate on structuring a basic analytical framework, incorporating both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, and will try to show the symmetries and asymmetries between them. This involves discussion of the rights of two peoples to self-determination and the means by which such parallel rights can be implemented. It also involves discussing differences in the means of implementation of the right to self-determination for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and minority rights for Palestinian-Israelis living in Israel within the 1948 Armistice Lines