Elaine Webster

Humiliation, degradation, dehumanization : human dignity violated

Manfred Nowak - Preface Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhauser and Elaine Webster - Human Dignity Violated: A Negative Approach Ralf Stoecker - Three Crucial Turns on the Road to an Adequate Understanding of Human Dignity Part 1: Conceptions and Theories 1. Christian Neuhauser - Humiliation: The Collective Dimension 2. Hannes Kuch - The Rituality of Humiliation: Exploring Symbolic Vulnerability 3. Paulus Kaufmann - Instrumentalization: What does it Mean to Use a Person? 4. Elaine Webster - Degradation: A Human Rights Law Perspective 5. Sophie Oliver - Dehumanization: Perceiving the Body as (In)Human Part 2: Practices of Violating Human Dignity 6. Andreas Maier - Torture: How Denying Moral Standing Violates Human Dignity 7. Ivana Radacic - Rape: Does International Human Rights Law Adequately Protect the Dignity of Women? 8. Steffen K. Herrmann - Social Exclusion: Practices of Misrecognition 9. Peter Schaber - Absolute Poverty: Human Dignity, Self-Respect, and Dependency 10. Julia Muller and Christian Neuhauser - Relative Poverty: On a Social Dimension of Dignity 11. Kirsteen Shields - Trade Exploitation: Crossing the Threshold between Acceptable and Unacceptable Labor Conditions 12. Tamara Enhuber - Bonded Labour: Dynamics Between Bondage, Identity and Dignity Part 3: Conclusions for a Positive Account of Human Dignity 13. Marcus Duwell - Human Dignity and Human Rights 14. Samuel Kerstein - Dignity and Preservation of Personhood 15. Arndt Pollmann - Embodied Self-Respect and the Fragility of Human Dignity: A Human Rights Approach

Teaching human rights? 'All hell will break loose!'

Human rights education is a prominent concern of a number of international organisations and has been dominant on the United Nations’ agenda for the past 20 years. The UN Decade for Human Rights Education (1995–2004) has been followed by the World Programme for Human Rights Education (2005–ongoing) and the recently adopted UN Declaration on Human Rights Education and Training. This article shares findings from a project that aimed to gauge the knowledge of human rights education of students undertaking initial teacher education and childhood practice programmes at one university in Scotland. Students were invited to share their experiences of and attitudes towards human rights education. While some students were confident in their approach to human rights education, others identified barriers, including their own knowledge and the structures acting upon them as teachers. Initial conclusions suggest that education students feel ill-equipped to engage with human rights education and that this issue must be addressed in initial teacher education courses.

Revealing student nurses' perceptions of human dignity through curriculum co-design

Dignity is a slippery concept to define - yet it has been at the heart of media and policy debates around the provision of health and social care in recent years; particularly in the United Kingdom following the Mid-Staffordshire scandal and subsequent Francis Inquiry. This paper considers the concept of dignity in care from the perspective of student nurses. Thus, it allows us to discuss how professional nurses-to-be conceptualise dignity and also how they consider it should/could be taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels of training, and as part of their Continuing Professional Development. It is only through understanding how student nurses conceptualise and experience human dignity, and the giving and receiving of dignity in care, that it will be possible to support its facilitation in the preparation of practitioners. This paper reports on findings from a series of participatory research workshops held with undergraduate nursing students in Scotland in 2013-14 that were designed to engage the students in the development of educational resources to support the teaching of dignity in care within the nursing curriculum. The outputs from each workshop, along with analysis of transcripts of the workshop discussions, demonstrate the value of co-design as a methodology for involving students in the development of interdisciplinary resources. We observed a desire from students to actively enhance their understandings of dignity - to be able to recognise it; to see dignity in care being practiced; to experience providing such care and to have the appropriate tools to reflect on their own experience. Overall, the research revealed a rich understanding of the ways in which human dignity is conceptualised by nursing students as an embodied practice, associated with memory and personal to an individual. It was understood by the students as shifting, experiential and fragile.

Human dignity violated: a negative approach - Introduction

The concept of human dignity is one of the few philosophical notions that has gained popular currency beyond specialist academic discourse. From the writings of Pico della Mirandola, Immanuel Kant and other philosophers it has found its way into our colloquial vocabulary. Appeals to human dignity are an important part of ethical, legal and political discourse nowadays and appear frequently in national constitutions and UN documents, in newspapers, NGO publications and in human rights discourse. But what is it that motivates all this talk about human dignity?

Degradation: A Human Rights Law Perspective

This chapter focuses on a number of common questions relating to the concept of degradation, against the backdrop of that concept as it has developed in the jurisprudence of the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically in relation to the prohibition of degrading treatment within Article 3. The prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is commonly understood, and is expressed in case-law, as having an intimate connection with the concept of human dignity, the language of which underpins the modern human rights regime. The basic structure of the Article 3 understanding of degradation is outlined, alongside examples of its practical application, in order to highlight significant conceptual relationships. Questions concerning the significance of the individual emotion of degradation, the relevance of autonomy in understanding degradation, and the relevance of the idea of social dignity can be illuminated by a contextualized discussion of the jurisprudence. It is suggested in this respect that the scope of what can be understood as degradation is not limited primarily by the victim’s emotional experience, that the jurisprudence draws our attention to one particular facet of autonomy, and that the essence of the concept of degradation is helpfully captured in the idea of abuse of equal rank.

P. Capps, Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law. Oxford: Hart, 2009

Book review of PATRICK CAPPS, Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law. Oxford: Hart, 2009.For a book with the rousing title, Human Dignity and the Foundations of International Law, one would be forgiven for expecting a stirring and emotive appeal to the international community. Apart from one or two glimmers of emotion towards the end of the book, however, Capps’s approach is strictly rhetoric-free. It is an unrelentingly rationalist argument, which places human dignity on a thoroughly rational footing following the approach of Alan Gewirth, within a wider rationalist theory of international law. The author’s aim in this intricately argued monograph is to advance comprehensive foundations for international law within a Kantian philosophical tradition. Capps masterfully integrates discussion of the work of influential thinkers across the spectrum of political philosophy, legal philosophy and international law, including Kant, Weber, Hart, Finnis, Lauterpacht, Weil; the list is long. Capps’ intention is that his general concept of international law will provide a tool for critique and reform of the international legal order. It is a lofty ambition; to give international lawyers the authority to deprive practices of the label of international law when judged as contrary to respect for human dignity. The first part of the book addresses the question of whether it is possible to generate a general concept of international law. This ‘methodological problem’ also encompasses the international lawyer’s ‘ontological problem’ – does international law fall within a general concept of (national state) law? – to which Capps answers in the affirmative. The author makes the argument that a general concept of law, from which a concept of international law will derive, must be rooted in recognition of the function of law. The process of providing a response to the methodological problem seems at times to take ground-clearing to extremes (this issue must surely have been the bane of the author’s life); more than 100 pages in, the methodological problem is still to the forefront. This is due to the author’s painstakingly detailed construction of his argument. The second part of the book details Capps’s concept of international law. It is argued that it is rational to adopt a concept of law – international law included – that is based on respect for human dignity. A ‘moral concept of statehood’ (p. 265) is central, which, he argues, allows us to judge the success of the international legal order in respect of its (rational) operation in accordance with respect for human dignity. Crucially, the author addresses various forms of potential objection on the basis that his position fails to take seriously relevant differences between human actors and states, and arguments that the state itself is not an agent at all. In discussion of the desirable institutional design of the international order, Capps does not begin from an unrealistically optimistic view of international relations. He argues that what is necessary in this respect will depend upon one’s view of international relations (considered in terms of ideal and non-ideal theory), and he makes no suggestion that the current order should be fundamentally rethought. Capps suggests that the institutions we already have can be strengthened in effectiveness and legitimacy – in ways that will bring them closer to the concept of international law defended in the book. 396 Social & Legal Studies 19(3)

Localising human rights law: a case study of civil society interpretation of rights in Scotland

ABSTRACT Literature, most notably in anthropology and international law, has explored experiences and contributions of local-level actors in efforts to realise international human rights. This article contributes a new and complementary perspective to one aspect of this scholarship, on the localisation of international rights language. It focuses on the localisation of legal language in a European context. It explores claims by civil society actors about the applicability of legal human rights standards, drawing upon data generated during the participative mapping process that underpinned Scotlands first National Human Rights Action Plan. The article provides a qualitative case study of engagements with three particular rights – the right to life, the right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right to respect for private and family life. It finds significant evidence of civil society actors using the language of human rights law to anchor interpretive claims about how the rights should apply, in a way that is prescribed, but not defined by, authoritative institutional interpretations. The case study reveals how interpretive engagement with human rights law corresponds to a sense of entitlement to use the language of international human rights. It thereby contributes to a richer understanding of the drivers of, and risks to, local-level ownership of human rights language, highlighting insights for both scholarship and human rights advocacy.

Dignity, Degrading Treatment and Torture in Human Rights Law: The Ends of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights

Although scholars have shown longstanding interest in the boundaries of interpretation of the right not to be subjected to torture and other prohibited harm, the existing body of work does not sufficiently reflect the significance of the interpretive scope of degrading treatment. This book argues that the degrading treatment element of the right is a crucial site of analysis, in itself and for understanding the parameters of the right as a whole. It addresses how, methodologically, the scope of meaning and application of the right not to be subjected to degrading treatment should best be identified and considers the implications thereof. It systematically examines the diverse aspects of degrading treatment’s scope, from foundations of legal interpretation to the drivers of humiliation. It draws on wide-ranging literature and extensive analysis of more than fifteen hundred judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, which has pioneered the right’s interpretive growth. The book aims to explore how the interpretive possibilities, and limits, of the right not to be subjected to degrading treatment turn upon the axes of human dignity and state responsibility, and aims to show how this right’s protection can be achieved as well as limited through processes of interpretation. Dignity, Degrading Treatment and Torture in Human Rights Law provides interpreters with analytical tools to advance the application of the right not to be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in international, regional and domestic human rights law. It will appeal to all who have an interest in understanding the right’s meaning, development, and potential scope of application, as well as those with an interest in methodologies of human rights interpretation.

K. Roth and M. Worden (eds) Torture: a Human Rights Perspective. New York: The New Press, 2005

punishment would result in the deterrence of future violations—for victims of violence in Chile and beyond. But is this truly a revolution in accountability? The author’s own cautions and caveats remind the reader that we have yet to see whether this trend in prosecutions will really transform the structures of power that allow for these abuses. Still, this extremely valuable study, with its rich data and nuance-filled discussion, draws attention to the evolving arena of international justice. Yet on the all important question of whether accountability can replace impunity and deter future violations, the jury is still out.