‘How Time Flies’: Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1960s

Recent histories of human rights have identified the 1970s as the most decisive epoch in the birth of the modern rights era. These works have tended toward a parenthetic dismissal of the period 1948–70 as years of interregnum, of marginal impact to the ‘breakthrough’ moment which followed. This article argues for a more complex periodisation, and reclaims the importance of the 1960s. Far from an undifferentiated abyss, the two decades between the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1968 International Human Rights Year held their own shifts, integral to the evolution of modern human rights. A crucial transition in the status of the UDHR occurred across the mid-1960s, roughly aligned with the terminal years of liberal post-colonialism. Through a comparison of two hitherto neglected events in the history of human rights, the fifteenth and twentieth anniversary commemorations of the UDHR, in December 1963 and 1968, this article traces the trajectory of that transition. These commemorations, concentrated moments of explicit reflection on the meaning of human rights, encapsulated the gulf between the early and the late 1960s. In the space of five years, any vestigial consensus on the vision enunciated in 1948 was obliterated.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

How Constitutional Concerns Framed the US Contribution to the International Human Rights Regime From Its Inception, 1947–53

The United States has been reluctant to agree to binding international human rights instruments ever since the very first meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1947. This article explores structural causes for that reluctance. Internal government papers show that US government officers worried that a human rights treaty might expand federal jurisdiction at the expense of the jurisdiction of the United States' constituent states and could provide an opening for judicial activism by the courts. These concerns made domestic political sensitivities more acute and raised principled questions about the desirability of pushing domestic reforms through international law-making. US representatives made repeated efforts to ensure that an international bill of rights was drafted as an aspirational declaration rather than a legally binding treaty. They also proposed clauses designed to delay or limit the domestic effects of any agreement, while reassuring the US Senate that domestic power balances would not be disturbed. Constitutional concerns thus framed the United States' contribution to the creation of an international human rights system from the very beginning.     

论21世纪中国发展的核心理念:权利本位

权利本位理念,是人的内在本性的要求,它既是人在现实生活中的基本价值追求,也是现代社会赖以存在和发展的实质性要素,是社会文明演进中不可缺少的力量和条件,是指导中国21世纪发展的核心理念。坚持权利本位理念,就是要树立以人为本的社会发展观,要以确认、保障社会成员基本权利为逻辑起点,并以此来构建和完善各项制度及相应的权利救济体系。     

"Colorblind" Policy in Black and White: Racial Consequences of Disenfranchisement Policy

Disenfranchisement policies were formulated with discriminatory intent in several states ( Behrens, Uggen, and Manza 2003 ; Mauer 2001 ; Preuhs 2001 ). Does such discrimination persist? Do disenfranchisement laws disparately impact black voters? I argue that disenfranchisement policies target black citizens and impact black voters disparately compared with white voters. I show that disenfranchisement laws have a disparate impact on the black community that becomes increasingly disproportionate as disenfranchisement laws increase in severity. I find that disenfranchisement policies have a significant independent effect on voting rights in the black community and do not have a similar effect on white voters. I conclude that the ability of the black community to achieve adequate representation is substantially diminished as fewer and fewer blacks qualify for voter registration.     

20世纪70年代以来美国新基督教右翼运动探析

新基督教右翼,是指美国宗教,特别是基督教新教中一些积极参与政治事务和社会事务的宗教保守派。20世纪70年代以来美国新基督教右翼组织主要派别有道德多数派、基督教联盟等。美国新基督教右翼势力的主要观点是：在国际问题上,主张强权政治,认为只有通过军事手段才能保证和平;认为以色列国是《新约圣经》启示的体现,美国应全力支持以色列。在意识形态上,坚决反对共产主义。在国内问题上,重视传统家庭价值,反对堕胎合法化,主张教育私有化和地方化;相信美国是一个被上帝“捡选”的国家,认为好政府应建立在《圣经》原则的基础之上。新基督教右翼对当今美国社会各个方面都起着不可忽视的作用。     

试析杜鲁门总统民权委员会的活动

为了回应“两难困境”的挑战,杜鲁门总统颁布行政命令,创立了总统民权委员会。委员会对美国的种族关系和民权问题进行了全面的调研和评估,向总统提交了《保障这些权利》的报告。报告体现了战后美国政府和人们对种族问题的反思,也是对解决种族问题的探索和尝试。报告的大量发行和人们的竞相阅读,对增进美国民众的种族正义观念产生了重要的影响。     

From Normative Debates to Comparative Methodology: The Three Waves of Post-Charter Supreme Court Scholarship in Canada

This article surveys the literature on the Supreme Court of Canada following the 1982 introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and argues it has taken place in three distinct “waves.” The first involved tentative, prospective, and normative arguments about the impact of the Charter on national unity and Canada’s political institutions. The second was characterized by the legitimacy debate, the dialogue debate, and qualitative examination of how other political actors responded to Supreme Court decisions. By contrast, the third wave, initiated by American scholars drawing from American research, has been less normative, more comparative, and methodologically rigorous. While this comparative shift has been beneficial, the retreat from normative questions contributes to a misplaced sense that important debates are now settled. We urge scholars to engage in intellectual cross-fertilization by drawing from third-wave contributions to address normative questions about the Supreme Court’s increasingly important role in Canadian politics.     

应当还历史的曾国藩以真相——谨与梁绍辉先生商榷

本文针对梁绍辉先生全盘否定曾国藩的观点,从三个方面提出了不同的看法：一是肯定曾国藩倡发的洋务运动,比镇压太平天国等农民起义更具积极意义。二是认为曾国藩及其子孙后代的言行,体现了关心国家、民族、社会前途命运的入世精神。三是肯定曾国藩是一位对近代中国社会起了推动作用的历史人物。     

Hobbes and Schmitt

Many commentators are unconvinced by Carl Schmitt's interpretation of Hobbes's political theory which, to their minds, remakes Hobbes in Schmitt's own authoritarian image. The argument advanced in this essay comprises three claims about Hobbes and Schmitt and the ways in which they are construed. The first claim is that certain commentators are bewitched by a picture of authority which biases their own claims about Hobbes, perhaps in ways that they may not fully appreciate. The second claim relates to Hobbes's individualism. On Schmitt's account, it was this individualism that opened the barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the state through which it was worm-eaten by liberalism. This essay argues that Hobbes's individualism is not what Schmitt or his critics take it to be. The individualism that figures in Hobbes's discussions of covenant and conscience, pace Schmitt, is an illusion, albeit one that lies at the very heart of his conception of the state and animates his understanding of the relationship between protection and obedience that sustains it. The essay concludes with some remarks about the wider implications of the argument it advances.