Assessing National Human Rights Performance: A Theoretical Framework

Comparative quantitative assessment of human rights is hampered by the length of the list of internationally recognized rights. Not only is the list so long that it is hard to imagine gathering adequate data without an army of researchers (the International Human Rights Covenants contain more than thirty substantive articles, encompassing at least twice as many separate rights), but the results of such a comprehensive effort would almost certainly be overwhelming and bewildering in their complexity. In this article we try to narrow the list of rights concerning which it is necessary to gather data by establishing a theoretical framework for assessing a state’s human rights performance. We identify a relatively small set of ten essential rights that separately are intrinsically essential and together provide good proxies for almost all other rights. An assessment of national performance on these ten rights, we argue, will approximate a comprehensive assessment of a country’s overall human rights record

Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Political Regimes

It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of “liberal” regime. This conclusion is reached through a comparison of the social structures of ideal type liberal, minimal, traditional, communist, corporatist and developmental regimes and their impact on autonomy, equality, privacy, social conflict, and the definition of societal membership

Anarchy is not an Ordering Principle, Anarchy Has No Effects: Rethinking the Elements of International Structures

Donnelly presents a multidimensional framework of the elements of social and political structures that dispenses with anarchy – which he shows was in fact the norm in International Relations prior to the 1970s. Structural theory in International Relations has become largely a matter of elaborating "the effects of anarchy." Simple hunter-gatherer band societies, however, perfectly fit the Waltzian model of anarchic orders but do not experience security dilemmas or warfare, pursue relative gains, or practice self-help balancing. They thus demonstrate that anarchy is not, in any plausible sense of the term, an ordering principle and that "the effects of anarchy," where they exist, are not effects of anarchy – undermining mainstream structural international theory as it has been practiced for the past three decades.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies.Event Web page, MP4 video, event photo

State Sovereignty and Human Rights

Sovereignty and human rights typically are seen as fundamentally opposed: the rights of states pitted against the rights of individuals; 1648 (the Peace of Westphalia) versus 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). This paper may be freely circulated in electronic or hard copy provided it is not modified in any way, the rights of the author not infringed, and the paper is not quoted or cited without express permission of the author. The editors cannot guarantee a stable URL for any paper posted here, nor will they be responsible for notifying others if the URL is changed or the paper is taken off the site. Electronic copies of this paper may not be posted on any other website without express permission of the author

Human Rights and the War on Terror: Introduction

War rarely is good for human rights. The decision of the United States to launch a “global war on terror” in response to the suicide airplane bombings in New York and Washington has had predictably negative human rights consequences. In combating a tiny network of violent political extremists, human rights have in various ways, both intentional and unintentional, been restricted, infringed, violated, ignored, and trampled in many countries, sometimes severely

The Relative Universality of Human Rights (Revised)

© Jack Donnelly. All rights reserved. This article is forthcoming in Human Rights Quarterly. This paper may be freely circulated in electronic or hard copy provided it is not modified in any way, the rights of the author not infringed, and the paper is not quoted or cited without express permission of the author. The editors cannot guarantee a stable URL for any paper posted here, nor will they be responsible for notifying others if the URL is changed or the paper is taken off the site. Electronic copies of this paper may not be posted on any other website without express permission of the author

Human Rights and the War on Terror Second Edition: Introduction

“9/11 changed everything.” Not really. In fact, there has been far more continuity than change over the past six years in both international and domestic politics. Nonetheless, human rights often have been harmed—although not by terrorism but by “the war on terror.

Human Rights

Human rights are, literally, the rights we have simply because we are human. They are equal rights: one either is or is not a human being, and thus has exactly the same human rights as every other human being. They are inalienable rights: one cannot stop being a human being, and therefore cannot lose one\u27s human rights, no matter how horribly one behaves nor how barbarously one is treated. Human rights are also universal rights, held by every human being, everywhere. This chapter offers a conceptual analysis of human rights, a brief account of their historical evolution, and an introduction to some leading theoretical controversies. This paper may be freely circulated in electronic or hard copy provided it is not modified in any way, the rights of the author not infringed, and the paper is not quoted or cited without express permission of the author. The editors cannot guarantee a stable URL for any paper posted here, nor will they be responsible for notifying others if the URL is changed or the paper is taken off the site. Electronic copies of this paper may not be posted on any other website without express permission of the author

Liberalism, Human Rights, and Human Dignity

Do international standards regarding human rights require the existence of a liberal regime? This was the thrust of Rhoda Howard and Jack Donnelly’s essay in the September 1986 issue of this Review. Neil Mitchell takes vigorous issue with this contention, arguing first and foremost that Howard and Donnelly have not defined liberalism satisfactorily. Howard and Donnelly present a spirited rejoinder

In The Valley Where The Blue Grass Grows : A Home Ballad

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