3. The United Nations:

The question of the universality and relativity of human rights and the relationships between human rights, humanitarian law and refugee protection are the subject of theoretical debates that concern international lawyers, academics, and international organizations. But, most importantly, it should be stressed that these debates are among people who are trying to understand ways of constructing strategies for dealing with the fundamental issue: helping people who are victims of abuse. This volume, which has emerged from a colloquium organised by the Graduate Institute of International Studies and its Program for the Study of International Organization(s), attempts to project an integrated approach for helping those who are in need and to discuss ways of guaranteeing greater protection of certain universal values that underlie such help. It is the result of ideas shared between the major three organizations in this field, the UN Center for Human Rights, The International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and outside experts on the relationship between the different protection regimes.

The citations listed in this bibliography were published between 1975 and mid-1993. Substantial legal developments have occurred since 1975 and the vast bulk of materials on the subject has been produced since that time. The citations are grouped under 53 different subject headings. Some subjects are further divided into subcategories. Audience: Lawyers, legal scholars, social scientists and civil servants involved in development issues.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996 Since the 1950s, sub-Saharan Africa has been the site of profound political changes initiated by ascendant nationalism and rapid decolonization. With this new beginning came fresh challenges involving many crucial aspects of human rights: self-determination; civil and political rights, including government legitimacy; military involvement in African politics; and unfulfilled basic needs that have cried out for economic and social development. Protecting Human Rights in Africa is the first major comparative study of the way human rights NGOs have brought revolutionary change south of the Sahara. Governments are both the most important protectors and abusers of human rights, while NGOs have become the most effective detectives in discovering abuses and the most active advocates in seeking solutions.

This book develops an analysis of the historical, political and legal contexts behind current demands by NGOs and the United Nations Human Rights Council to hold corporations accountable for their human rights violations. Based on an analysis of the range of mechanisms of accountability that currently exist, it argues that that those demands are a response to the failure of neo-liberal policies that have dominated the practice of politics and law since the emergence of this debate in its current form in the 1970s. Offering a new approach to understanding how struggles for hegemony are refracted through a range of legal challenges to corporate human rights violations, the book offers a fresh perspective for understanding how those struggles are played out in the global sphere. In order to analyse the prospects for using human rights law to challenge the right of corporations to author human rights violations, the book explores the development of a range of political initiatives in the UN, the uses of tort law in domestic courts, and the uses of human rights law at the European Court of Human Rights and at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in how international institutions and NGOs are both shaping and being shaped by global struggles against corporate power.

The UN System in general:.

Much has been written on the human rights relevance and impacts of the policies and activities of the World Bank and IMF --or International Financial Institutions (IFIs). However while many of the human rights-based critiques of the Bank and Fund purport to link broadly defined reforms with obligations under international human rights law,rarely has this been carried out through a rigorous and in-depth application of international legal rules governing the proper interpretation of the institutions' mandates, and rarely have the policy consequences and practical possibilities for human rights integration been explored in any detail. These are the principal gaps that the present book aims to fill, by reference to a sample of the IFIs' most important and controversial contemporary activities.

Using econometric analysis, the author examines factors that determine patterns of aid giving including aggregate aid flows, aid from multilateral organisations and aid from bilateral donors such as Germany, Japan, the US and Arabia.

This book offers a critical reappraisal of the project for universal human rights. The twentieth, thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were all marked by the publication of volumes that celebrated achievements in the field of human rights. Many of these took a self-congratulatory line that emphasized progress on the protection of human rights, ignoring the facts of torture, genocide, structural deprivation and the routine exclusion of some groups from political, economic and social participation. This book brings together some of the leading critics of the current project for universal human rights, including Noam Chomsky and Johan Galtung, as a counterweight to triumphalist approaches on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration.

Presenting reflections on the historical perspectives and philosophical foundations of human rights, this book provides a detailed analysis of civil and political rights, as well as the rights of persons belonging to such vulnerable groups as women, children and minorities, indigenous people, refugees, displaced persons and migrant workers.