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Robert Araujo reflects on the role of the Natural Law in both the American experience of Catholicism and in the global experience of human rights. To do this, Araujo turns to the sixteenth-century philosopher and legal theorist Francisco de Vitoria, O.P., who was a strong proponent of both the Natural Law and human rights. Seen most clearly in his De Indis, de Vitoria offers an argument in favor of the inherent dignity and inviolable rights of the inhabitants of the New World, whom he identifies as human persons with equal dignity and rights to their European counterparts. This argument put de Vitoria at odds with many of his contemporaries, yet it remained influential as a line of Natural Law thinking in the Catholic Church, finding its way into both the contemporary discourse of human rights and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). De Vitoria’s influence stretches beyond the borders of the United States. He has made formidable contributions to the discourse of human rights, the separation of Church and State, and the religious freedoms many people share today.

This chapter offers a short overview of international human rights law that relates generally to mental disability law. It begins with a short background of early UN documents and conventions, discusses more specialized civil rights documents, and explores some of the conceptual dichotomies. It sets the stage for the consideration of the mental disability law–specific questions that follow; the CRPD must be seen in the context of prior UN conventions, covenants, and declarations, and the application of rights to persons with disabilities must be seen in the context of the application of rights to other often-disenfranchised minorities. As ratified, the CRPD calls for “respect for inherent dignity.” The final subsection of this chapter further discusses this. This chapter also explores two concepts central to the understanding of mental disability law: “sanism” and “pretextuality.” “Sanism” is an irrational prejudice of the same quality and character of other irrational prejudices that cause (and are reflected in) prevailing social attitudes of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnic bigotry. It permeates all aspects of mental disability law and affects all participants in the mental disability law system: litigants, fact finders, counsel, and expert and lay witnesses. “Pretextuality” defines the ways in which courts accept (either implicitly or explicitly) testimonial dishonesty and engage similarly in dishonest (and frequently meretricious) decision making. All of the topics discussed in subsequent chapters are tainted by the pervasive corruption of sanism, and each reflects the blinding pretextuality that contaminates legal practice in this area.

This introductory chapter presents a text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which allows states not to commit to a hard and fast legal apparatus in enforcing human rights. The lack of thr consensus of states regarding human rights has led nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to make substantial contributions to human rights politics, in terms of definition, spread, and applicability across different contexts. In relation to this context, the book focuses on the political salience of NGOs and ideas in international politics. It also explains why some NGOs have developed as focal points in international human rights politics, and similarly, how ideas become politically salient.

This chapter moves to extend the testing of the Sceptical Tradition’s objections to natural rights from the pre-modern or early modern periods to classic modern affirmations. It begins with the American and French declarations of the late eighteenth century, before proceeding to two famous treatises of the same period, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and then ending with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants of the mid-twentieth century. The chapter concludes that its scrutiny of modern affirmations has found ample evidence to substantiate many of the sceptics’ charges: some of the rights asserted are truistic or merely aspirational; others are ludicrously or dangerously abstract, licensing unrealistic hopes and political recklessness; yet others conflate conditional positive rights justified by natural morality with natural rights, misleadingly endowing the former with the universality and inviolability of the latter. Further, David Ritchie’s claim has been substantiated: the content of certain rights cannot be determined by a sheer appeal to ‘nature’, and apart from consideration of the common good in the relevant circumstances. On the other hand, the critical survey of modern natural rights-talk also shows that it can acknowledge the insufficiency of rights for overall political well-being, talk of duties too, and recognise the need for virtue and a cultural matrix that generates it.

The translation of legal protection offered to undocumented children in Europe into effective child rights policies is examined in the chapter. Standards and treaties, including the International Bill of Rights, consisting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESR), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which offer protection for undocumented children, are discussed. The Rights of the Child (CRC), along with the Treaty of Lisbon, which are used as protective measures for undocumented children, are explored. Human rights, legal statelessness, and nationality issues of the undocumented children are also discussed.

This chapter develops an integrative view of children's rights based upon the natural law tradition in Christian thought. It reconstructs this tradition to address two questions: How should we ground the rights of children, especially in light of the rights of parents? What can Christianity contribute to answering that question? It argues that the natural law tradition emphasizes the biological relatedness and marriage of a child's parents as central to the rights of children, both legal and religious. It further contends that law and religion should cooperate in maximizing the possibility that the reproductive rights of adults are realized in ways that protect the rights of children to be raised by the parents who conceived them and to ensure that this happens within legally institutionalized marriage. The chapter shows the prominence of this view in major international human rights documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It also criticizes family law's move away from this natural law tradition and toward a diversity model.

The American and French Declarations, the UDHR, and the ECHR all reflect English law. The UK in adhering to them to bind other countries to rights, not to reform British law. UDHR rights are against other individuals as well as against the state (but are unenforceable). ECHR rights are binding under international law,only against states. Natural rights were used to justify rebellions., eg by the barons against King John (Magna Carta) by the Dutch against Spain in 1581, by the English against kings in 1642 and 1688 (fundamental rights), and the French and Americans in 1776 and 1789 (rights of mankind). In England equality before the law, an independent judiciary and other human rights were protected in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. English laws recognize more rights than are set out in Declarations of Rights. ‘Human rights’ is a term used from about 1780 as a synonym for natural rights.

The UDHR was drafted on the basis of little consultation with non-European peoples. From its very inception, the Declaration has been criticized as parochial. Some interpret this criticism as a wholesale rejection of human rights. But, as Peetush and Drydyk argue, the charge of parochialism is often a demand for basic equality: to be an equal participant in drafting an agreement to which one is expected to conform. It is a demand for the power to define, interpret, balance, and prioritize the basic ethical values that underlie the UDHR within the contested and developing contexts, histories, power-struggles, philosophies, legal traditions, and social, economic, and political frameworks of one’s self-understandings, something which Western nations arrogate for themselves as a natural birth right. If self-determination of formerly colonized peoples or svarāj in the Indian context does not enable them to achieve this freedom, then it has been a vacuous victory.

This chapter examines the human rights system and the way it deals with human creations and innovations that are the traditional core subject matter of intellectual property (IP) rights. It begins by reviewing the scope for protection under Article 27 (2) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and Article 15 (1) (c) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The chapter moves on to the protection of property in human rights law, especially on the regional, European level. It examines how IP can be protected as property under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU Charter). Finally, the chapter looks at some of the overlaps with international IP rules and the conflict norms in the human rights system to address such overlaps.

This chapter examines the historical origins of human rights as a basis for public health. Tracing the idea of rights from philosophical notions of natural rights to human rights under international law, the normative foundations underlying rights have long been seen as central to health and well-being—from the political engagement with underlying determinants of health in 1848 to the international codification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. The modern human rights system that frames public health arose in response to the deprivations and atrocities of World War II. Giving rise to the notion of human rights under international law, the postwar creation of the United Nations (UN) provided the structure for a new legal regime under which individuals were seen as having certain rights by virtue of their humanity, ensuring a foundation for the evolution of rights to advance health.

Chapter 4 argues for the critical importance of understanding a human rights-based approach to health and how it may relate to perspectives of religious faith as they address poverty, need, and social justice. The chapter offers a basic primer on health and human rights and why they matter. It focuses on economic, social, and cultural (ESC) rights, how they were shaped in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 25, the presence of these concepts in religious and ethical texts from antiquity to the present, and their influence and codification in global human rights law today as well as modern controversies over their relevance for persons of faith. The chapter concludes with a consideration of ESC rights as a moral concept present in patristic authors from Late Antiquity, looking particularly at Lactantius and Gregory of Nazianzus.

The purpose of this chapter is to challenge some deep-seated assumptions concerning how the freedom of religion or belief might be engaged with by the international community. It highlights and reinforces the need for a reappraisal of current thinking. It also surveys the arguments often given in favour of or against the development of an international human rights convention on the freedom of religion or belief. One of these arguments is then considered in greater detail: that of the relative ineffectiveness of human rights instruments and the emergent trend towards the adoption of preventive approaches to rights protection. What might the adoption of such an approach might mean in the context of freedom of religion or belief?

This chapter focuses on legal protections for human rights in Indonesia, many of which developed after the fall of Soeharto in response to abuses committed during his rule. It begins with an account of international human rights instruments ratified in Indonesia, before providing an overview of domestic Indonesian regulation, and national human rights commissions: Komnas HAM, the Child Protection Commission, and the National Commission on Violence Against Women (KOMNAS Perempuan). It also deals with the largely ineffectual permanent and ad hoc human rights courts and the now-defunct Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The chapter concludes with case studies of legal responses to controversial cases of human rights abuse, including East Timor, Tanjung Priok, Trisakti, and the two Semanggi incidents.

This chapter introduces the foundational importance of human rights for global health, providing a theoretical basis for the edited volume by laying out the role of human rights under international law as a normative basis for public health. By addressing public health harms as human rights violations, international law has offered global standards by which to frame government responsibilities and evaluate health practices, providing legal accountability in global health policy. The authors trace the historical foundations for understanding the development of human rights and the role of human rights in protecting and promoting health since the end of World War II and the birth of the United Nations. Examining the development of human rights under international law, the authors introduce the right to health as an encompassing right to health care and underlying determinants of health, exploring this right alongside other “health-related human rights.”

With both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the World Health Organization (WHO) coming into existence in 1948, there was great postwar promise that these two institutions would complement each other, with WHO serving to support human rights in its health policies, programs, and practices. Yet WHO’s support for human rights would vary dramatically in the decades that followed: neglecting human rights law during crucial years in the development of health-related rights, implementing human rights as a foundation for its “Health for All” campaign, and operationalizing rights-based standards in the international response to HIV/AIDS. This chapter examines WHO’s evolving contributions to (and, in some cases, negligence of) the rights-based approach to health, with this history framing WHO’s enduring challenges in exercising its international legal authorities, collaborating with the United Nations human rights system, and mainstreaming human rights in the WHO Secretariat.