Human Rights Advocacy and the History of International Human Rights Standards Logo
  • Recognizing Problems
  • Accountability
  • Research & Advocacy
  • Policy Decisions
  • The Future

  • ABOUT THE PROJECT
    • Introducing “Human Rights Advocacy and the History of Human Rights Standards”
    • What Is International Human Rights Policy?
    • Your Questions
  • USING THE SITE
  • Instructors
  • Students
  • Advocates
  • Researchers
  • Contact


Recognizing Human Rights Problems

Who determines what should be considered a human rights issue?

What is required to place an issue on the human rights agenda?

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helped set in motion the processes that led to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and since the birth of the contemporary human rights movement in the early 1960s they have been influential in the conception and negotiation of international human rights norms and treaties.  As recounted by practitioners, however, the development of human rights norms has not been a linear or uncontested process.  Human rights practitioners rarely started out with the intention of building normative standards or legal instruments.  In many cases, activists became involved in such processes only as an extension of their advocacy work.  And there has been an extended conversation about questions that may seem very basic, including:

  • How do we know the difference between a human rights violation and other egregious harms?
  • How far can the idea of human rights be expanded without diluting the power of the human rights movement?
  • Does growing the content of human rights reduce the the cohesion of existing norms?

In this section of the website we introduce several issues that lend themselves to consideration of the internal processes by which human rights practitioners helped develop new human rights norms. These case narratives illustrate how the substantive content of human rights has evolved over time and how the role and importance of human rights NGOs have similarly expanded.

TORTURE

ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES

INVOKING STANDARDS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW

THE INDIVISIBILITY OF ALL RIGHTS

All Topics

  • RECOGNIZING PROBLEMS
    • Recognizing Human Rights Problems
    • Torture
    • Enforced Disappearances
    • Invoking Standards of International Humanitarian Law
    • Interdependence and Indivisibility of Economic and Political Rights
  • ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ABUSE
    • Establishing Accountability for Human Rights Abuse
    • Government Obligations
    • Armed Insurgent Groups and Other Non-State Actors
    • Individual Criminal Accountability
    • Corporate Accountability
    • Women’s Rights: Due Diligence, Private Actors, and Domestic Violence
  • RESEARCH FOR ADVOCACY
    • Methods of Research and Advocacy
    • A Basic Approach to Human Rights Research
    • Forensic Evidence and Human Rights Reporting
    • Research in Conflict Zones and Military Forensics
  • MAKING POLICY DECISIONS
    • Making international Human Rights Policy Decisions
    • The UN and Human Rights Policy
    • The Human Rights Movement – Advocacy for Policy Change
  • THE FUTURE
    • The Future: Frontiers in Human Rights Policy

Human Rights Glossary

International Criminal Court (ICC)

ICC – International Criminal Court. A permanent international court established in 2002 to prosecute individual perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community, including genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Not to be confused with the International Court of Justice, an organ of the UN that has a broader mandate to hear cases between states.

See more human rights glossary terms…

Human Rights Policy Resources

  • Core Human Rights Treaties and Monitoring Bodies
  • UN Special Procedures
  • UN Treaty Collection
  • Universal Human Rights Instruments

Human Rights: From Practice to Policy

Download the 2010 Conference Proceedings

Human Rights: From Practice to Policy Cover


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