The book contains case studies that examine the coexistencw and clashes of different cultures as they impinge on human rights issues.

Human rights violations are perpetrated in all parts of the world, and the universal reaction to such atrocities is overwhelmingly one of horror and sadness. Yet, as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im and his contributors attest, our viewpoint is clouded and biased by the expectations native to our own culture. How do other cultures view human rights issues? Can an analysis of these issues through multiple viewpoints, both cross-cultural and indigenous, help us reinterpret and reconstruct prevailing theories of human rights?

This powerful volume challenges the conventional view that the concept of human rights is peculiar to the West and, therefore, inherently alien to the non-Western traditions of third world countries. This book demonstrates that there is a contextual legitimacy for the concept of human rights. Virginia A. Leary and Jack Donnelly discuss the Western cultural origins of international human rights; David Little, Bassam Tibi, and Ann Elizabeth Mayer explore Christian and Islamic perspectives on human rights; Rhoda E. Howard, Claude E. Welch, Jr., and James C. N. Paul examine human rights in the context of the African nation-state; Kwasi Wiredu, James Silk, and Francis M. Deng offer African cultural perspectives; and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im and Richard D. Schwartz discuss prospects for a cross-cultural approach to human rights.

This book presents the findings of the first comprehensive study on the most recent and most unique and innovative method of monitoring international human rights law at the United Nations. Since its existence, there has yet to be a complete and comprehensive book solely dedicated to exploring the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. Women and International Human Rights Law provides a much-needed insight to what the process is, how it operates in practice, and whether it meets its fundamental aim of promoting the universality of all human rights. The book addresses the topics with regard to international human rights law and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students interested in the monitoring and implementation of international human rights law at the United Nations. In addition, it will form supplementary reading for those students studying international human rights law on undergraduate programmes and will also appeal to academics and students with interests in political sciences and international relations.

The legal traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have contributed much to the cultivation and violation of religious human rights around the world. In this volume Desmond Tutu, Martin Marty, and twenty leading scholars offer an authoritative assessment of these contributions and challenge people of all faiths to adopt "golden rules of religious liberty."

In this `Dickensian century' of human rights, the world has cultivated the best of religious rights protections, but witnessed the worst of religious rights abuses. In this volume, Jimmy Carter, John T. Noonan, Jr., and a score of leading jurists assess critically and comparatively the religious rights laws and practices of the international community and of selected states in the Atlantic continents. This volume and its companion Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives are products of an ongoing project on religion, human rights and democracy undertaken by the Law and Religion Program at Emory University.

International law is a social construct crafted by human endeavour to achieve or at least contribute to the achievement of goals perceived to be valuable or necessary to effective social relations. In effect, international law is no more than a facilitative process and so cannot have answers and conclusions of its own other than what lies within the ambitions of those who define the limits of the process. The essays collected together here reveal how international law facilitates the achievement of the long standing ambition of turning human rights ideals and rhetoric into reality.

Regional inter-governmental human rights organizations have been in operation for sometime in Europe, the Americas and Africa. These regional human rights mechanisms have proven to be useful and effective in comparison to the global human rights mechanisms available at the United Nations. The purpose of this study, first published in 2004, is to investigate the possibility of establishing a regional inter-governmental human rights mechanism in East Asia, with a focus on the contributions of nongovernmental organizations' (NGOs) to such a development.

The Chinese Yearbook of Human Rights is co-sponsored by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, and three institutes under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences – the Institute of Law, the Centre for Human Rights Studies and the Centre for International Law Studies. The purpose of the Chinese Yearbook of Human Rights is to create a forum for the academic exchange between China and the international community in the field of human rights. Accordingly, the Yearbook will aim to publish high quality academic articles written by scholars from both China and other countries on human rights issues from perspectives of law, philosophy, political science, history, and international relations.

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements.