The National Question in Canada: Quebec

The contemporary conflict between the province of Quebec and the federal government in Canada has recently been a focus of international attention. Quebec is inhabited by a majority group of French-speakers whose ancestry is rooted in Quebec, whose historical religion is Roman Catholicism, and who are known collectively (in French) as “Quebecois.” The conflict involves Quebec’s claim to special recognition as a separate entity—a nation or a “distinct society”—within Canada. This claim clashes with the rights of individuals to express themselves in the official language (French or English) of their choice and also puts in doubt the idea of a national “Canadian” identity

The Full-Belly Thesis: Should Economics Rights Take Priority Over Civil and Political Rights? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper will discuss the relationship between civil/political and economic/social/cultural rights (as they are defined in the International Bill of Human Rights) in sub-Saharan Africa. There is an on-going debate, especially in United Nations circles and in non-governmental organizations, as to whether the separate sets of rights embodied in the two 1966 Covenants on human rights are intrinsically related, such that they must be developed and enlarged simultaneously, or whether, on the other hand, one set of rights takes priority over the other. Are they, in other words, sequential or interactive? Many spokespeople for Third World countries maintain that economic, social, and cultural, but especially “economic” rights (usually meant as the right to development) must take priority over civil and political rights. In the Western world, on the other hand, the assumption is sometimes made that civil and political rights must take priority over economic rights. I will address this debate using evidence from a number of (formerly and presently) English-speaking countries in sub-Saharan Africa, namely Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. I will argue that suspension of civil and political rights in these countries until after economic development has been achieved will in effect mean that neither development nor rights will be attained. The argument for postponement is that economic development must be achieved before political liberties are allowed. A rather narrow functionalist perspective is adopted; economic development is taken as a goal, and civil and political rights are discussed as means which might or might not result in economic development. Civil/political are seldom considered as goals in and of themselves, although social and cultural rights are considered as goals, especially in Africa. In this paper, I will discuss civil/political rights both as means to ends and as goals in themselves

Universal Women\u27s Rights Since 1970: The Centrality of Autonomy and Agency

This article reviews the development of universal women’s human rights since 1970. It begins by discussing how the international feminist movement influenced the development of women’s legal human rights, and continues by reviewing three debates in the literature on women’s rights. The first debate is whether human rights as originally formulated were actually men’s rights; the second debate is about the relationship between culture and women’s rights; and the third considers the effects of globalization on women’s rights. The author defends a liberal approach to human rights via the principles of equality and autonomy for women, but also argues that the socialist approach is very important for women to achieve their economic human rights. Autonomy, moreover, is the means by which women can negotiate their own way between “Western” style personal liberation, and participation as they see fit in their own religions and cultures

Reconsidering the Right to Own Property

This article considers whether there should be a separate international Covenant to elaborate on the human right to own property. Citing two contemporary cases—namely,the semi-starvation faced by many citizens of Zimbabwe and the shortage of food in Venezuela—I argue that a human right to own property protects the economic human rights to adequate food and freedom from hunger. The right to own property is also crucial to the economic development necessary to ensure that human beings can supply themselves with food and otherwise support themselves. As such, it is a strategic human right, a right that protects other rights. I also argue that the right to own property is an intrinsic human right, valuable in itself as a component of human dignity. The article ends with a brief proposal for an elaborated Covenant on the human right to own property

Human Security: Undermining Human Rights?

This article warns that the human security discourse and agenda could inadvertently undermine the international human rights regime. Insofar as human security identifies new threats to well-being, new victims of those threats, new duties of states, or new mechanisms for dealing with threats at the inter-state level, it adds to the established human rights regime. When it simply rephrases human rights principles without identifying new threats, victims, duty-bearers, or mechanisms, however, at best it complements human rights and at worst it undermines them. A narrow view of human security is a valuable addition to the international normative regime requiring wstate and international action against severe threats to human beings. By contrast, an overly broad view of human security ignores the human rights regime; by subsuming human rights under human security, it also undermines the primacy of civil and political rights as a strategic tool for citizens to fight for their rights against their own states

Economic Imperialism and Oligopolization of Trade in the Gold Coast: 1886-1939

This article will deal with the mechanisms of the economic takeover of the Gold Coast, between approximately 1885 and 1939. Two aspects of the takeover are dealt with: the progressive oligopolization of trading, shipping, and banking in the colony, and the influence which oligopolistic British firms exerted on government policy. The oligopolization resulted in the underdevelopment of the African trading class and its inability to develop into a genuine capitalist class; while the pursuance of a government policy dedicated to maintaining Ghana\u27s role as a peripheral import-export economy resulted in the internal economic underdevelopment of the colony

Evaluating Human Rights in Africa: Some Problems of Implicit Comparisons

Since the 1970s, many humanistically minded academics have become concerned with the comparative measurement and analysis of human rights. The new concern is partly a result of the introduction of human rights as a subject of United Nations debates and foreign policy deliberations, especially in the United States during the Carter Administration (1977–81). Frequently, on the intergovernmental and national levels, the debate is nothing more than a new means of rhetoric, with an additional patina of moral concern, for asserting a nation-state’s normal national security interests. In the United Nations and other such fora, a favorite tactic of debate is to compare one’s own country’s human rights strengths with another country’s human rights weaknesses. Thus socialist countries criticize the lack of welfare security in capitalist countries, while the latter reply with an indictment of the lack of civil liberties in the former. Former imperialist powers criticize the human rights practices of their former colonies. Developed countries and underdeveloped countries are also compared, almost inevitably to the latters’ disadvantage. Finally, since no country has completely lived up to the United Nations ideal as embodied in the International Bill of Rights, it is fair game for adversaries to hold up that ideal as a mirror to reflect human rights abuses. In this paper, I illustrate the problems of how implicit human rights comparisons affect one’s evaluations of human rights performance, by discussing the kinds of comparisons to which Africa is often subject. I refer for factual examples to a select group of sub-Saharan African countries, namely, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—all (presently or formerly) English-speaking countries, colonized by the United Kingdom, which obtained their independence in the early 1960s. I illustrate below how one’s implicit evaluations of human rights in English-speaking sub-Saharan Africa can change, depending on the comparison one makes