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1. Finding the “Humanity” in Human Rights: LGBT Activists and the Vernacularization of Human Rights in Hong Kong

   https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2021.24  

   Madson, Nathan H. (January 2022, Law & Social Inquiry)

   null (Ed.)

   Through an ethnographic analysis of Hong Kong LGBT activists’ fight for a gender recognition ordinance (GRO) that would simplify the process for transgender Hongkongers to change their legal gender, a paradox emerged: Why was a human rights framing of LGBT issues problematic when human rights were central to locals’ understanding of what it meant to be Hongkongers? Local LGBT activists’ vernacularization of human rights—or the process of localization of international human rights law into culturally relevant frameworks—hinged on reframing the need for a GRO as a matter of humanity, not human rights law. Relying on citations of human rights law among “ordinary citizens” violated the existing ways in which Hongkongers talked about human rights as a method of distinguishing Hong Kong from the rest of the People’s Republic of China. Furthermore, this need to differentiate emerged from the 2014 Umbrella Movement in which prodemocracy activists occupied various urban centers in Hong Kong for seventy-nine days. The Umbrella Movement caused a shift in which ordinary citizens became responsible for each other and defending what made Hong Kong unique. Ultimately, the vernacularization process requires closer attention to the ways in which human rights are being talked about on the ground. 

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2. International Human Rights Recommendations at Home: Introducing the Women’s Rights Compliance Database (WRCD)

   https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2022.2090935  

   Haglund, Jillienne; Hillebrecht, Courtney; Read, Hannah Roesch (April 2022, International Interactions)

   The legalization of international human rights has led to an explosion in the number of recommendations states receive each year regarding their domestic human rights practices. How do states respond to these recommendations, some of which may ask them to engage in significant domestic human rights reform? In this article, we introduce the Women’s Rights Compliance Database (WRCD), which allows scholars to answer this and a number of related questions. The WRCD provides compliance data on 2,558 recommendations across three institutions: CEDAW, the UPR, and the European Court of Human Rights. This article introduces the conceptual and empirical foundations of the WRCD and provides descriptive statistics of the data. Then, we situate the WRCD within the larger body of compliance data and illustrate how it not only fills a critical gap in the human rights compliance data landscape but also facilitates a robust future research agenda. 

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3. Overlapping international human rights institutions: Introducing the Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2)

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319897954  

   Haglund, Jillienne; Hillebrecht, Courtney (June 2020, Journal of peace research)

   With the proliferation of the international human rights regime, states confront a dense set of institutional commitments. Our knowledge of the influence of these commitments is limited for two reasons. First, scholars largely focus on the effect of treaty ratification on states’ human rights behavior, but states engage with these institutions after ratification via regional human rights court rulings and UN recommendations. Second, scholars often examine these institutions in isolation. The institutions do not operate in isolation, however, nor do states necessarily consider the requests they receive from these institutions independently. In this article, we introduce the Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2), which maps the various recommendations international women’s rights institutions make on European states. We begin by discussing the importance of recommendations from international institutions and their relationship with commitment and compliance. We then describe the data collection effort, including two dimensions on which recommendations made to European states vary – precision and action. Next, we report descriptive statistics from the dataset, including regional and temporal trends. We conclude with a discussion of the multifaceted research agenda that this new dataset can facilitate. 

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4. Human Rights are (Increasingly) Plural: Learning the Changing Taxonomy of Human Rights from Large-scale Text Reveals Information Effects

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055420000258  

   PARK, BAEKKWAN; GREENE, KEVIN; COLARESI, MICHAEL (August 2020, American Political Science Review)

   null (Ed.)

   This manuscript helps to resolve the ongoing debate concerning the effect of information communication technology on human rights monitoring. We reconceptualize human rights as a taxonomy of nested rights that are judged in textual reports and argue that the increasing density of available information should manifest in deeper taxonomies of human rights. With a new automated system, using supervised learning algorithms, we are able to extract the implicit taxonomies of rights that were judged in texts by the US State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch over time. Our analysis provides new, clear evidence of change in the structure of these taxonomies as well as in the attention to specific rights and the sharpness of distinctions between rights. Our findings bridge the natural language processing and human rights communities and allow a deeper understanding of how changes in technology have affected the recording of human rights over time. 

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5. Developmental Perspectives on Social Inequalities and Human Rights

   https://doi.org/10.1159/000526276  

   Killen, Melanie; Elenbaas, Laura; Ruck, Martin D. (July 2022, Human Development)

   Killen, Melanie; Elenbaas, Laura; Ruck, Martin D. (Ed.)

   Social inequalities and human rights are inevitably linked to children’s and adolescents’ healthy development. Children who experience structural and interpersonal inequalities in access to resources and opportunities based on their gender, race, ethnicity, or other group categories are denied the right to fair treatment. We assert that investigating the psychological perspectives that children hold regarding inequalities and human rights is necessary for creating fair and just societies. We take a constructivist approach to this topic which seeks to understand how individuals interpret and evaluate observed and experienced inequalities. Even young children think about these issues. Yet, throughout development, individuals must often weigh multiple, potentially conflicting considerations when interpreting, evaluating, and responding to social inequalities and rights violations. In these complex contexts, children and adolescents are neither fully “moral” nor fully “prejudiced.” Rather, critical questions for research in this area concern when, why, and for whom young people reject inequalities and support rights, and, by contrast, when, why, and for whom they accept that inequalities and rights violations should be allowed to persist. This paper provides a brief overview of how different conceptions of social inequalities and rights are intrinsically linked together. 

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