Human Rights, Women, and Third World Development

As part of the effort to inaugurate a new international socio-political order after World War II, international emphasis was given to certain moral and legal entitlements we have come to call human rights. That emphasis initially found its most forceful expression in the Charter of the United Nations, which not only asserts its members\u27 faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, as well as in the equal rights of men and women of all nations, but also recites its members\u27 commitment to employ international machinery for the promotion of the social and economic advancement of all peoples. Indeed, whille assigning the General Assembly of the U.N. the task of conducting studies and making recommendations pursuant to the realization its purposes, the Charter also commits the U.N. as a whole-- with a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations --to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedom. Specific organs are then called upon to tender advice on the mode as well as the means by which the promotion is to be effected, and pledges are secured from member states to take joint and separate action, in cooperation with the U.N. to create the sought-after conditions of social stability and well-being. It is in large measure due to the assumed international obligation to take joint and separate action that, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was proclaimed and adopted, followed by the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as that on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights--two international instruments that spell out specific human rights in accordance with the agreed-on, common standard represented by and elaborated in the UDHR. It is to that assumed obligation, too, that we owe certain regional, human rights instruments such as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950), the American Convention on Human Rights (1969), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples\u27 Rights, officially named after the Gambian city where it was completed, the Banjul Charter on Human and Peoples\u27 Rights (1981). Despite the preceding measures taken on the regional and global level to promote and encourage respect for human rights, hardly a day goes by without our hearing or reading news of their violation or otherwise gaining information raising questions about the commitment of some nation-state to them. One particular area of violation and questionable commitment on the part of states that is frequently overlooked, however, is an area intimately linked to the norm of equality and nondiscrimination--the very starting point of all our liberties. That area concerns women

The United Nations and the Magna Carta for Children

The impulse that invited the preparation of this book is one which is linked to the convergence of a number of factors bearing on my interest in human rights. First, the brutality visited on children during World War II has had an abiding negative effect on my sense of what is possible in human conduct. Second, I am persuaded that children are not simply the means by which human societies are continued, but, as well, the potential source of moral revitalization and transformation for those societies. Third, I recognize that the human rights movement, which followed World War II, holds in it a profound promise that of humanity consciously co-existing as a single people, indeed, as a single family within which children, who are most deserving of our reverence and tenderness, will not be desecrated by hatred. Fourth, my coming to understand that the emergence of the rights of children, as a major part of the human rights movement, carries with it a twin danger — that the rights of children might be interpreted as reduction of the power, authority, and rights of parents; and, as a reaction to that flawed interpretation, a parents-led backlash against children\u27s rights might develop. Fifth, the conviction I gradually gained as I reviewed the history of efforts to offer children protection and rights within the existing international system, that, despite all that has been said and written about children\u27s rights, not much has been done to help people really understand the singular nature of the development that took place in 1989, when the UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Principal aim of this work is to help judges, social workers, lawyers, physicians, police, parents, political leaders, children (especially those entering adolescence), teachers, guidance counselors, professors, journalists, and, certainly, the wider, lettered public understand the significance of this Magna Carta for Children. A secondary aim is to provide readers with a documentary source through which they can grapple with some of the conflicts, cultural blind-spots, moral ambiguities, and self-interests that accompanied and has followed, the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I hope the volume has achieved its aims

Foreword

Change is a fundamental feature of life and living; without it, few things would survive, and fewer, if any, would thrive. The New England Journal of Public Policy has undergone a change, having elected to assume an electronic form. Since coming into being in this form three months ago, the success it has realized with its earlier issues has been remarkable. It is as if it were being waited on. In the month of December 2012, for example, the journal was the second most popular publication series on ScholarWorks at the University of Massachusetts Boston, with a total of 2,783 downloads. To date, (just over three months), the 600 publications that make up the run of the NEJPP have been downloaded 17,116 times. And so it should be. The journal\u27s name, which represents the site from which it is published, is belied by the variety of issue areas it comprehends; the local, national, and international emphasis of its coverage, and the global character of its interests and concerns, as well as the global nature of the leadership the person who edited it for some 25 years, Padraig O\u27Malley, the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, has exhibited. It would be accurate to state that the journal is pan-human in its orientation and commitments

In Appreciation of Birago I. Diop: A Subtle Advocate of Négritude

The closing weeks of the last decade brought with them the death of three distinguished world figures: Samuel Beckett, the Irish-French playwright, novelist, and poet; Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist, human rights advocate, and leader in the international disarmament movement; and Birago I. Diop, the Senegalese poet, storyteller, and statesman. In the case of the former two, leading U.S. newspapers and other media paid merited tribute in the amplest of proportions; in case of the last, however, it was as if he had either never lived or had gained no standing of importance worthy of much attention. Diop was, it would appear from the behavior of the media, without presence; yet his work is no less significant to the world than that of the other two figures mentioned above. Ironically, he spent the greater part of his life seeking to establish the existence of a presence that the West had, for at least three hundred years, sought to deny. [To the Reader: Please note that a number of footnotes are missing or misplaced in this published version of Dr. Langley’s article, In Appreciation of Birago I. Diop: A Subtle Advocate of Négritude. You are invited to contact the author with questions related to the content or citations.

In Appreciation of Birago I. Diop: A Subtle Advocate of Négritude

The closing weeks of the last decade brought with them the death of three distinguished world figures: Samuel Beckett, the Irish-French playwright, novelist, and poet; Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist, human rights advocate, and leader in the international disarmament movement; and Birago I. Diop, the Senegalese poet, storyteller, and statesman. In the case of the former two, leading U.S. newspapers and other media paid merited tribute in the amplest of proportions; in case of the last, however, it was as if he had either never lived or had gained no standing of importance worthy of much attention. Diop was, it would appear from the behavior of the media, without presence; yet his work is no less significant to the world than that of the other two figures mentioned above. Ironically, he spent the greater part of his life seeking to establish the existence of a presence that the West had, for at least three hundred years, sought to deny. [To the Reader: Please note that a number of footnotes are missing or misplaced in this published version of Dr. Langley’s article, In Appreciation of Birago I. Diop: A Subtle Advocate of Négritude. You are invited to contact the author with questions related to the content or citations.

Foreword

Change is a fundamental feature of life and living; without it, few things would survive, and fewer, if any, would thrive. The New England Journal of Public Policy has undergone a change, having elected to assume an electronic form. Since coming into being in this form three months ago, the success it has realized with its earlier issues has been remarkable. It is as if it were being waited on. In the month of December 2012, for example, the journal was the second most popular publication series on ScholarWorks at the University of Massachusetts Boston, with a total of 2,783 downloads. To date, (just over three months), the 600 publications that make up the run of the NEJPP have been downloaded 17,116 times. And so it should be. The journal\u27s name, which represents the site from which it is published, is belied by the variety of issue areas it comprehends; the local, national, and international emphasis of its coverage, and the global character of its interests and concerns, as well as the global nature of the leadership the person who edited it for some 25 years, Padraig O\u27Malley, the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, has exhibited. It would be accurate to state that the journal is pan-human in its orientation and commitments