Reproductive Health and Human Rights: The Way Forward critically reflects on the past fifteen years of international efforts aimed at improving health, alleviating poverty, diminishing gender inequality, and promoting human rights. The volume includes essays by leading scholars and practitioners that are centered on the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and its resulting Programme of Action. ICPD, an agreement among 179 governments, UN agencies, and NGOs, was intended to shape population and development policy--reinterpreted and...

Drawing on domestic and international law, as well as on judgments given by courts and human rights treaty bodies, "Gender Stereotyping" offers perspectives on ways gender stereotypes might be eliminated through the transnational legal process in order to ensure women's equality and the full exercise of their human rights.

A leading international framework for debates on the subject of stereotypes, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, was adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly and defines what constitutes discrimination against women. It...

What is the just measure of Western obligations to Africa? As Africans and their supporters mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States and Great Britain, the question becomes increasingly salient. Calls for reparations for the evils of slavery, as well as for past colonial and current economic and political abuses, can be heard across Africa and the African diaspora.

Human rights scholar Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann examines these calls for redress in "Reparations to Africa." Her study analyzes the reparations movement from the perspectives of law,...

Issues that mix science and politics present some of today's most daunting ethical questions. Did China violate the human rights of prisoners in 2001 by harvesting their kidneys and other organs without their formal consent? Do the victims of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa have the right to effective pharmaceutical treatments that are beyond their financial reach? Have incautious steps toward human cloning trodden dangerously close to the revival of eugenics? "Science in the Service of Human Rights" presents a new framework for debate on such controversial questions surrounding scientific...

An interdisciplinary collection, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights examines the potential and limitations of the "women's rights as human rights" framework as a strategy for seeking gender justice. Drawing on detailed case studies from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, contributors to the volume explore the specific social histories, political struggles, cultural assumptions, and gender ideologies that have produced certain rights or reframed long-standing debates in the language of rights.

The essays address the gender-specific ways in...

Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights--a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that "the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights." As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices "over there." By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human...

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations--from courts to NGOs to the UN--have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence.

Yet many millennia of conflict preceded these developments, and we know little about the longer-term history of...

Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion.

Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory gathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence,...

Over the last decade, public, political, and scholarly attention has focused on human trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery. Yet as human rights scholars Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick argue, most current work tends to be more descriptive and focused on trafficking for sexual exploitation.

In From Human Trafficking to Human Rights, Brysk, Choi-Fitzpatrick, and a cast of experts demonstrate that it is time to recognize human trafficking as more a matter of human rights and social justice, rooted in larger structural issues relating to the global economy, human...