Mark Gibney

All the News That's Fit to Print? New York Times Coverage of Human-Rights Violations

The so-called CNN effect suggests that the American public has quick access to more information about world events than ever before.To test the prevalence of the effect, this study examines New York Times stories on fifty countries that human-rights researchers list among the top violators. Results show that although there is a moderate correlation between the magnitude of political terror and the number of human-rights stories from a given country, the Timess overall coverage of human rights is seriously lacking. Attention to abuses occurs primarily in countries that were strategically instrumental during the cold war and in countries where there is clear U.S. involvement.

Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations

Introduction -Sigrun Skogly and Mark Gibney Chapter 1. Obligations of States to Prevent and Prohibit Torture in an Extraterritorial Perspective -Manfred Nowak Chapter 2. Obligations to Protect the Right to Life: Constructing a Rule of Transfer Regarding Small Arms and Light Weapons -Barbara Frey Chapter 3. Growing Barriers: International Refugee Law -Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen Chapter 4. Diagonal Environmental Rights -John H. Knox Chapter 5. The Human Rights Responsibility of International Assistance and Cooperation in Health -Judith Bueno de Mesquita, Paul Hunt, and Rajat Khosla Chapter 6. The World Food Crisis and the Right to Adequate Food -Michael Windfuhr Chapter 7. Labor Standards and Extraterritoriality: Cambodian Textile Exports and the International Labour Organization -Virginia A. Leary Chapter 8. A Sort of Homecoming: The Right to Housing -Malcolm Langford Chapter 9. Protecting Rights in the Face of Scarcity: The Right to Water -Amanda Cahill Notes Bibliography List of Contributors Index

Strangers or Friends: Principles for a New Alien Admission Policy

The immigration problem, which has been debated in the United States for over a century, is not likely to go away--least of all with the numbers of refugees and displaced and impoverished workers continuing to mount worldwide. The current bitterness and legislative stalemate over immigration policy are indications that new approaches to the issue need to be found. Removing himself from the specifics of the current congressional debate, Mark Gibney asks whether we are addressing the right questions and employing the correct criteria under our present admission practices. From a political-philosophical standpoint, the author looks at the fundamental social and moral questions that should be at the basis of any immigration policy: how do we distinguish between members and strangers, and do some strangers have more compelling claims than others for admission to this country?

Universal Duties: The Responsibility to Protect, the Duty to Prevent (Genocide) and Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations

Human rights are (universally) declared to be universal, yet under the dominant interpretation the responsibility to protect these rights have been severely restricted by territorial considerations. In that way, while a state has human rights obligations within its own territory, these obligations either change or else disappear altogether when it is acting outside those borders. This article examines three recent challenges to the territorial approach to human rights. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) initiative to prevent widespread human suffering involves domestic obligations, but it is also premised on states having certain international obligations as well. In Bosnia v. Serbia (2007), the International Court of Justice interpreted the Genocide Convention as establishing a duty to prevent genocide – in other lands. Finally, the newly created Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) Consortium is presently in the process of drafting principles that would set forth the extraterritorial obligations of state parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Can A Film End A War

Finally, it is obvious that torture experimentation could provide useful data. Unless we are prepared to say that torture is never acceptable or that torture of the innocent is never acceptable (a view Bagaric and Clarke explicitly reject), then it seems that the experimental torture of innocent persons as a means to less painfully and more effectively torture future terrorists is a logical conclusion of the authors’ views. I, for one, like Ivan and Alyosha in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov, am not willing to accept the torture of the innocent—even if it means creating paradise. We thus have, as I see it, a contradiction at the very heart of this book’s hardline utilitarian defense (though certainly not of every kind of utilitarian defense). Bagaric and Clarke are committed to two incompatible views: that experimental torture should not be seriously considered by anyone and that experimental torture is morally required, given the torture proposal they advocate. There are other serious flaws with the arguments presented by Bagaric and Clarke—in particular with the truncated, even somewhat glib, responses they give to objections that deserve more careful consideration. I must leave these worries for another occasion. In my view, the fact that the Bagaric and Clarke proposal regarding torture commits us to experimental torture is sufficient to demonstrate its implausibility—even if we share the authors’ intuitions.

Certain Violence, Uncertain Protection

Each February the US State Department publishes its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. This 1,300-plus page tome is a compendium of the human rights practices of the previous year for every country in the world — except, conveniently enough, the United States. Several months after this, Amnesty International publishes its own world human rights report for the previous year, covering much the same territory as the State Department does (but including the US). Both texts provide a full litany of much of what is wrong with the world. Even a quick glance at either volume provides stunning evidence that: torture is a common practice in a whole host of countries in the world; ‘summary executions’ and ‘disappearances’ are frequently employed to kill enemies of ruling governments; prison conditions in one country after the other are nothing short of barbaric as thousands of prisoners are left to literally rot to death; female genital mutilation continues unabated in a host of African countries; and tens of thousands of civilians are killed and brutalised in civil wars each year. This sickening evidence of our inhumanity to one another goes on and on, and, rather than seeing any kind of improvement, there are indications that human rights conditions throughout the Third World are only getting worse.

Human Rights Begins With Seeing: A Review of Human Rights Films

The philosopher Susanne Langer reminded us many years ago that “All thinking begins with seeing.”1 What Langer meant is that if a problem cannot be conceptualized in words, pictures, and through the senses (or what she called Gestalt—the untranslatable German word for total presence), then it is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp its true meaning. In other words, without seeing a problem there is no issue. Think about it: what is injustice, not being treated fairly? Now put a face on an abstract human right. What comes to mind: poverty, illegal extradition, and the denial of speech? Now “picture” that; that is exactly what the human rights films under review here do. They help give us an overall Gestalt of human rights as lived human experiences in real time and real places. Such films invite us to think critically about the human rights and wrongs they expose; they can be a call to action, especially if action takes the form and forum (for example a human rights film festival or classroom is the perfect place) of a thoughtful reconsideration and discussion of the law, politics, history, and cultural contexts in and out of which these issues are raised. As Jacques Ranciére argues, seeing and then thinking about what he calls “intolerable images” has the possibility to transform passive spectators “into active participants in a shared world.”2 Along with each film under review, a suggested reading is included to help further discuss the issues raised by these human rights films. From the Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival 2010–2011

Suing for Death, Suffering, and Peace

It is a cruel fact of international life that nations conduct wars and pursue other military and foreign policy objectives without generally having to attend to the human consequences of their actions. These consequences come in the form of civilians in other lands who are killed or severely harmed,2 or property and the means of livelihood that are destroyed. Yet, as is so often the case, those who have caused these evils are not held accountable for them. Instead, like Mother Courage, these individuals are left to make do in the maelstrom around them.3 This, unfortunately, is the international system as it exists today.4

Introduction to the societal violence scale : Physical integrity rights violations and nonstate actors

ABSTRACT: Measures of physical integrity rights violations typically focus on abuses by state actors. However, nonstate actors also represent a grave threat to personal security. This article introduces the Societal Violence Scale (SVS) which uses the US State Department Human Rights reports as a basis for developing a new scale of physical integrity rights abuses by nonstate actors to gain a more comprehensive, but at the same time disaggregated, picture of human security threats across the globe.

Beyond Individual Accountability: The Meaning of State Responsibility

The essence of human rights is to protect individuals, and two different approaches have evolved to accomplish this. The first involves holding individuals criminally accountable for directing and/or carrying out violations of international humanitarian law and human rights standards. Certainly, the Nuremberg and Tokyo proceedings against a select group of political, military, and economic leaders from Germany and Japan remain the high-water mark of establishing individual accountability, yet in the past decade or so the animating spirit of these trials has been revived. One of the most noteworthy achievements in this realm was the worldwide effort to extradite the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain so that he could face charges for international crimes committed under his rule. Beyond this, the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) have both made significant contributions in terms of prosecuting and punishing war criminals, as have the special UN tribunals in East Timor, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia. But certainly the most noteworthy institutional achievement has been the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). What explains this attention to individual accountability? Perhaps the best answer was provided by the Nuremberg court (1946) itself and repeated frequently since then: ‘Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.’