Eric Heinze

Of Innocence and Autonomy: Children, sex and human rights

Part 1 Constructing childhood - theory and history: the universal child? historical constructions of childhood innocence - removing sexuality. Part 2 Legislating childhood - international and comparative perspectives: sexuality and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and British legislation on child abuse and sexuality Russian children - the obscenity of political fantasy. Part 3 Abusing childhood - critical dimensions and practical consequences: punishing children and pleasuring adults - one, both or neither? Lolita at the interface of obscenity - children and the right to free expression childhood sexual abuse as a predictor of substance use and HIV/AIDS risk behaviour among women at admission to prison. Part 4 Empowering childhood - awareness, development and education: sex education - childs right, parents choice or states obligation? health and education - conflicting programmes for sex education seeking a gendered adolescence - legal and ethical problems of puberty suppression among adolescents with gender dysphoria.

Public Awareness of Human Rights: Distortions in the Mass Media

The mass media decisively shape global perceptions about human rights, yet fail to reflect the realities of global violations. Situations of egregious abuse are often overshadowed by those which receive attention for reasons extraneous to any specific concern for human rights. Distortions in established media sources arise not necessarily from deliberate misrepresentation, but from the inevitable disparities that arise when human rights abuses are reported as by-products of military, economic, or other interests. This study examines day-by-day coverage of global human rights, during the three-month period from October to December 2006, in two American and two British broadsheets: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Financial Times. The aim is to understand the kinds of factors which, albeit tangential to violations of fundamental human rights, nevertheless influence both the quantity and the quality of reporting. While various editorial pressures, such as the need to focus on topical stories, are not denied, it is argued that the news media must make greater efforts to achieve proportionality between the gravity of human rights situations and the degree of coverage those situations receive.

Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship

Most modern democracies punish hate speech. Less freedom for some, they claim, guarantees greater freedom for others. This book rejects that approach, arguing that democracies have better ways of combating violence and discrimination against vulnerable groups without having to censor speakers. Critiquing dominant free speech theories, the book explains that free expression must be safeguarded not just as an individual right, but as an essential attribute of democratic citizenship. The book challenges contemporary state regulation of public discourse by promoting a stronger theory of what democracy is and what it demands. Examining US, European and international approaches, this book offers a new vision of free speech within Western democracies.

Hate Speech and the Normative Foundations of Regulation

Most democracies currently prohibit various forms of racist, sexist, anti-religious, negationist, homophobic, or other intolerant speech (the US being a notorious, and oft criticised, exception). Governments often describe their hate speech bans as means of defending both the safety and the equality of all of their citizens. Democracies must certainly be expected to promote tolerance by adopting and enforcing comprehensive non-discrimination policies, by promoting values of equal citizenship in primary and public education, and by supporting models of best practice within the mass media. It is legitimate, moreover, for states to punish hate speech promulgated outside of public discourse, e.g., in situations of employment or primary education, or in situations involving harassment, stalking, or so-called ‘fighting words’. (Not all speech in public places necessarily counts as public discourse, nor does all public discourse necessarily occur in public places.) Contrary to the prevailing Council of Europe and EU positions, however, it is questionable whether citizens ought to be punished solely for undesirable viewpoints which are expressed in altogether general terms, and squarely within the bounds of democratic public discourse. Such sweeping bans may be legitimate in situations of exceptional violence (as found, for example, in India, Israel, or Northern Ireland into the 1990s), or even as transitional measures for emerging democracies, but ought never to be considered optimal. Once states are able to promote tolerance in ‘non-viewpoint-punitive ways’, and are able to protect victims without punishing speakers, every effort must be made to protect prerogatives of equal access of all citizens to public discourse.

Cumulative Jurisprudence and Human Rights: The Example of Sexual Minorities and Hate Speech

Leading non-discrimination norms in post-1945 human rights instruments have generally enumerated specified categories for protection, such as race, ethnicity, sex, and religion. They have often omitted express reference to sexual minorities. However, through ‘such as’ or ‘other status’ clauses, or otherwise open-ended phrasing or interpretation, such instruments have generated a ‘cumulative jurisprudence’, whereby sexual minorities subsequently become incorporated through analogical reasoning. That cumulative jurisprudence has yielded protections for sexual minorities through norms governing, e.g., privacy, employment, age of consent, and freedoms of speech and association. Hate speech bans, too, have often been formulated with reference only to more traditionally recognised categories, particularly race and religion, rarely making express reference to sexual minorities. It might therefore be expected that the same cumulative jurisprudence should be applied, such that their scope might be extended to encompass sexual minorities. In this paper, however, that approach is challenged. It is argued that hate speech bans suffer in themselves from deep flaws. Either they promote discrimination by limiting the number of protected categories, or, by including all meritorious categories, they would dramatically limit free speech. While sexual minorities within longstanding, stable and prosperous democracies should generally enjoy all human rights, it is argued that they should not seek the protection of hate speech bans, which run real risks of betraying fundamental principles of human rights law.

The logic of equality : a formal analysis of non-discrimination law

Treatment: Preliminary concepts The basic treatment symbols Derivation of arguments Normative positions Theorems General schema of assertions Compound positions. Objective Status: Revised factual positions Revised normative positions Revised compound positions. Subjective Merit: Final normative positions Final factual positions Final compound positions. General Forms of Argument: The traditional model The impact model The accommodation model The non-recognition model. Appendices: symbols and formulas Works cited Index of cases, names and topics.

Epinomia: Plato and the First Legal Theory

In comparison to Aristotle, Platos general understanding of law receives little attention in legal theory, due in part to ongoing perceptions of him as a mystic or a totalitarian. However, some of the critical or communitarian themes that have guided theorists since Aristotle find strong expression in Platos work. More than any thinker until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Plato rejects the rank individualism and self-interest which, in his view, emerge from democratic legal culture. He rejects schisms between legal norms and community values, institutional separation of law from morals, intricate regimes of legislation and adjudication, and a culture of rampant litigation. He rejects the alienation of individuals, from each other and from their communities, that is so easily bred within highly complex political and legal systems. An understanding of his approach to some of the classic questions of legal theory provides insight not only into some central ideas of his own thought, but also into the roots of critical and communitarian critiques of law.

Humanitarian intervention: morality and international law on intolerable violations of human rights

Using the concept of ‘gross violations of human rights’ as a guiding principle for humanitarian intervention, this essay argues that a hierarchy of human rights is supported not only by moral reasoning, but by an overwhelming body of international law and jurisprudence. I first put forth a normative argument that suggests the violation of certain rights – and the extent to which these violations occur – are morally intolerable and grounds for the use of force to protect individuals from such abuses. I then argue that a commensurate hierarchy of rights (violations) can be distilled from an analysis of international crimes to which universal jurisdiction is attached. This essay concludes that the principle of universal jurisdiction provides a legal standard that suggests certain human rights violations are morally intolerable, thus subject to humanitarian intervention.

The Reality and Hyperreality of Human Rights: Public Consciousness and the Mass Media

Most human rights scholarship remains highly formalist, with a focus on norms and institutions. However, at least as powerful as, if not more powerful than, those norms and institutions, are the mass media. Consonant with David Kennedy’s concern that rights discourse can privilege some interests at the expense of others, the media must be seen as the force that overwhelmingly decides which norms and abuses count, and which are neglected. Public consciousness of human rights emerges not out of political reality, but out of a media-generated ‘hyper-reality’, impermeable to some of the world’s most heinous abuses. The media remain immune from the values of even-handedness that are conceptually presupposed by human rights law. In principle, human rights shun any zero-sum game, whereby the rights of one person or group may be traded off against those of another. The media not only plays that game, but must play it, as a matter of sheer time and resources. A ‘Hollywoodisation’ of rights still further contributes to forging a hyper-reality that remains at odds with the realities of global human rights.

'This Power Isn’t Power If It’s Shared': Law and Violence in Jean Racine’s 'La Thébaïde'

Abstract The seventeenth century witnesses the steady demise of the fragmented or overlapping power regimes that had been rooted in the European Middle Ages. Centralized control increasingly structures emerging states. Jean Racine’s La Thébaïde, recreating a chapter in the Oedipus myth, displays the Hobbesian drive for undivided sovereignty pushed to its logical conclusion: even two shareholders in power become one too many. Legal norms are constantly invoked to resolve a political and military power struggle, including discourses of absolute and shared sovereignty, separations of powers, popular consent, public welfare, national interest (raison d’état), natural law, and just war. Far from overcoming a brute power dynamic, those legal discourses show how the emerging modern state turns them into a tool of coercive power.