Books in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series

"Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand why human rights advocacy has failed in international relations."-Asia and Pacific

Human Rights as Human Independence offers a comprehensive, systematic, and complete account of the nature, sources, and scope of human rights that can be used to interpret international documents and make informed decisions about how human rights practice must be continued in the years to come.

Freedom from Poverty examines how today's non-governmental organizations are modifying human rights practices and reshaping the political landscape by taking up the cause of subsistence rights. Rights are being used as legal, moral, and political tools in the struggle to provide food, housing, and healthcare to those in need.

Based on exclusive interviews with the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, this book tells the story of a man who began as an idealistic freedom fighter and wound up involved in one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, Cambodia's Killing Fields.

Daniel Whelan illustrates how the rhetoric of indivisibility has frequently been used to further political ends that have little to do with protecting the rights of the individual. Drawing on scores of original documents, he reveals the conflicts and compromises behind a half century of human rights discourse.

Constitutionalism is becoming the prevalent form of governance in Africa. But how does constitutionalism deal with the lingering effects of colonialism? And how does constitutional law deal with Islamic principles in the region? African Constitutionalism and the Role of Islam seeks to answer these questions.

The Witnesses presents findings from the first study of victim-witnesses who have testified before an international war crimes tribunal. Witnesses describe their family tragedies, their moral duty to testify on behalf of the dead, their courtroom encounters with the accused, their aspirations for justice, and their disappointments.

Female Circumcision brings together African activists to examine the issue within its various cultural and historical contexts, the debates on circumcision regarding African refugee and immigrant populations in the U.S. and the human rights efforts to eradicate the practice.

Since its founding in 1952, the International Commission of Jurists has inspired the international human rights movement with persistent demands that governments obey the rule of law.

Women's Human Rights studies the deprivation and violence women suffer due to discriminatory laws, religions, and customs and demonstrates how international human rights treaties can be used to develop new laws and court decisions that protect women against discrimination, subordination, and violence.

Presenting detailed portraits by leading authorities of the politics of human rights across the major regions of the globe, this book reveals human rights to be a force as powerful as capitalist markets and technological innovation in shaping global governance.

Universal jurisdiction is becoming a potent instrument of international law, but it is poorly understood by legal experts and remains a mystery to most public officials and citizens.

The first major comparative study of the way human rights south of the Sahara have been revolutionized by NGOs, which have become the most effective detectives in discovering abuses and the most active advocates in seeking solutions.

"This vivid and moving book will help shape the emerging form of truth commissions in many places around the world."-James Boyd White, author of The Edge of Meaning

In The Age of Apology twenty-two law, politics, and human rights scholars explore the legal, political, social, historical, moral, religious, and anthropological aspects of Western apologies.

Offering a distinctive and subtle analysis of tensions between government policies on religious matters and feminism, Halperin-Kaddari shows how women in Israel indeed have a state of their own-in the sense not of liberating refuge but of unfair marginalization.

"The book's embrace is gigantic... Not only will Human Rights of Women appeal to a wide audience, it should be read by everyone who has any interest in human rights."-Gender and Development

Morsink asserts that all people have human rights simply by virtue of being born into the human family and that we can know these rights without the aid of experts. He shows how the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights grew out of Enlightenment principles honed by a shared revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust.

This volume makes a significant contribution to the debate about the connections between the protection of human rights and the pursuit of economic development in Africa.

"A significant contribution to current legal, political, and economic discourse on workers in the global economy."-International and Comparative Law Quarterly

International Human Rights Law is a comprehensive introductory treatise, intended for all concerned about this critical area of international law, including students, lawyers, other advocates, teachers, and academics.

Reza Afshari reveals Iran's attempt to hide human rights abuses by labeling oppression as an authentic cultural practice.

How do nongovernmental organizations affect the world of human rights?

The first in-depth study of a novel women's refugee movement and its challenge, as an international trigger case, to traditional conceptions of human rights. It illuminates keys to the movement's success, including, paradoxically, noncitizen politics, and uncovers critical implications for theories of human rights change.

Selected by Choice magazine as a Outstanding Academic Book for 2000Nelson Mandela once said, "Human rights have become the focal point of international relations." This has certainly become true in American relations with the People''s Republic of China. Ann Kent''s book documents China''s compliance with the norms and rules of international treaties, and serves as a case study of the effectiveness of the international human rights regime, that network of international consensual agreements concerning acceptable treatment of individuals at the hands of nation-states.Since the early 1980s, and particularly since 1989, by means of vigorous monitoring and the strict maintenance of standards, United Nations human rights organizations have encouraged China to move away from its insistence on the principle of noninterference, to take part in resolutions critical of human rights conditions in other nations, and to accept the applicability to itself of human rights norms and UN procedures. Even though China has continued to suppress political dissidents at home, and appears at times resolutely defiant of outside pressure to reform, Ann Kent argues that it has gradually begun to implement some international human rights standards.