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

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, 2000–2009: Massive Human Rights Violations and the Failure to Protect

This article reviews human rights violations in Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2009, under the rule of Robert Mugabe. It argues that these violations, including state-induced famine, illegal mass expulsions, and systemic rape, constituted crimes against humanity. This article considers what African regional organizations, including the African Union and the Southern African Development Community, and various organs of the international community did, and might have done, to restrain Mugabe and his inner circle from committing these violations. It concludes that the lack of forceful action by African and international organizations constituted a failure to protect the people of Zimbabwe

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

The Second Great Transformation: Human Rights Leapfrogging in the Era of Globalization

Whether globalization improves or undermines human rights is not a matter that can be observed in the short term. Globalization is the second “great transformation” spreading capitalism over the entire world. Many of its short-term effects will be negative. Nevertheless, its medium and long-term effects may well be positive, as it impels social changes that will result in greater moves to democracy, economic redistribution, the rule of law, and promotion of civil and political rights. Capitalism is a necessary, though hardly sufficient condition for democracy: democracy is the best political system to protect human rights. This does not mean that the non-Western world will follow the exact same path to protection of human rights that the Western world followed. No international law obliged the West to protect human rights during its own era of economic expansion. Thus, the West could practice slavery, expel surplus populations, and colonize other parts of the world. Genocide and ethnic cleaning were not prohibited