COMPARING COMPARISONS: HUMAN RIGHTS · 2019-05-23 · COMPARING COMPARISONS: HUMAN RIGHTS With Muhammad Qobidl ‘Ainul Arif, M.A. Few Country Studies While similar research questions

COMPARING COMPARISONS:

HUMAN RIGHTSWith Muhammad Qobidl ‘Ainul Arif, M.A.

Session #13

Introduction

The defeat of fascism in Europe ushered in a new period of international concern and awareness that a global system of institutions, legal guarantees and mechanisms should be established to promote and protect individual and collective rights.

These desires found expression in the creation of the United Nations system and its key documents for the promotion and protection of human rights: the 1945 United Nations Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

These two documents were soon followed by two more legally binding instruments, promulgated in 1966 and entered into force in 1976: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (IESCR).

These two international legal instruments and those that followed have set an ideal standard of achievement for the promotion and protection of human rights. Countries that sign and ratify these instruments are legally obliged to uphold their commitment to protect human rights as set out in the instruments.

As of 2000, there were between 122 and 190 countries that were signatories to these various instruments.

THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS



The Research Questions

▪ What are human rights? Why do countries violate human rights? How can human rights

be better promoted and protected?

▪ These three inter-related questions have motivated scholars from many disciplines in the

field of human rights, while there has been renewed attention to them in political

science.

▪ Rights and rights discourse have long been a concern of political theory and political

science, but attention to human rights has increased since the advent of the ‘third wave’

of democratization and the end of the Cold War.

▪ Normative political theory has struggled to find the foundations that justify the existence

of human rights, while empirical political science has sought to define, measure,

compare, and improve their protection worldwide.

▪ There remain unresolved problems with the ontological and epistemological status of

human rights that transcend political theory, philosophy, and anthropology.

Human Rights Categories

Many scholars argue for minimal and pragmatic understandings of human rights as the respect for human dignity and protection from the permanent threat of abuse, whether that understanding is in terms of Western-derived concepts of rights or their ‘homeomorphic’ equivalents.

Today, there are three broad categories of human rights, including :

1) civil and political rights,

2) economic, social and cultural rights, and

3) solidarity rights

MANY COUNTRY STUDIES



Many Country Studies

▪ Human rights research in this area begins by measuring the protection of human rights

in a way that is comparable across a global selection of countries and then examines

the explanatory factors that account for its cross-national variation.

▪ While the reporting of human rights violations in various parts of the world suggests

which areas may have the most problems, establishing equivalent measures is often

problematic for ethical, methodological, and political reasons.

▪ The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) came under strong political

criticism for its 1991 Human Development Report,which used a measure of human rights

that ranked all UN member states.

▪ One popular measure is known as the ‘political terror scale’ (see Gastil 1980; Gibney and

Dalton 1996), which scores a country according to the frequency of these violations, and

ranks countries from low protection of rights (i.e. frequent violations) to high protection

of rights (no violations).

FEW COUNTRY STUDIES



Few Country Studies

▪ While similar research questions are posed to those in the global comparisons, the

smaller number of cases allows deeper investigation into the similarities and

differences that are observed.

▪ The smaller selection of cases also allows human rights research to move beyond

the questions posed by the global comparative studies and examine key questions

that are more intimately linked to the cultural and political specificities of the

countries under comparison.

▪ Samples: a collection of analyses on the diffusion of international human rights

norms (Risse et al. 1999), a comparison of truth commissions (TCs) in fifteen

countries (Hayner 1994), and a further comparison of TCs in Uruguay and Chile (de

Brito 1997).

The Power of Human Rights (Few Country Studies)

SINGLE COUNTRY STUDIES



Single Country Studies

▪ The field of human rights research is full of single-country studies that serve the

different comparative functions.

▪ By definition, they focus on countries with particularly problematic human rights

records and include official reports from international governmental and non-

governmental organizations, domestic commissions and NGOs, journalistic and

descriptive accounts, and research monographs.

▪ The Nunca Más (CONADEP 1984) report from Argentina and the Nunca Mais (Dassin

1986) report from Brazil are classic examples of such descriptive accounts of human

rights abuse under conditions of authoritarianism.

COMPARING COMPARISONS: HUMAN RIGHTS · 2019-05-23 · COMPARING COMPARISONS: HUMAN RIGHTS With Muhammad Qobidl ‘Ainul Arif, M.A. Few Country Studies While similar research questions

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