HUMAN RIGHTS PROJECT- SELECT RESEARCH WEBSITES - VIRTUAL LIBRARY
General for background reading:
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Introducing Human Rights
The Concept of Human Rights is not a new one. World religions have constructed ideas around morality for at least 3000 years and in the late medieval period humanistic beliefs developed further. However, it was during the period of the 18th century Enlightenment that ideas of ‘Human’ or ‘Natural Rights’ developed and an explicit set of universal laws to protect the rights of individual people developed. The ideas of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophes found expression in the American and French Revolutions, firstly in the Declaration of Independence document (1776) and later in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). In these two documents we can see what later would be expressed in full as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) (1948). You will consider the course and evolution of human rights as an idea and how documents and institutions like the United Nations have been effective in protecting human rights.
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cHILDREN
Children are the most vulnerable members of society and their experiences of human rights abuse are numerous – who speaks for them? Childrens experiences provide a chilling insight into the development and execution of the Holocaust. From the Kinderstransport that left Germany in the 1930’s bringing refugees to Western Europe and the Americas, to the killing fields of the Einsatzgruppen and the death camps of Eastern Europe; children are victims of adult atrocities. You will also have an opportunity to learn how children were resistors, survivors and heroes in a world of adult inflicted violence. The development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was largely a response to the human rights abuses inflicted upon them in the 20th Century and through your research into the Holocaust and Darfur you will be able to evaluate the success of the Childrens Convention (UNCRC).
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Perpetrators
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” - Primo Levi. What made people commit atrocities during the Holocaust and Darfur? What is the importance of traditions, cultural stereotypes and prejudice and racism? How does a society become so corrupted that its government and people are capable of mass murder? What was the importance of war and conflict to the execution of the Holocaust and the crisis in Darfur and other genocides?
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Legal and civil rights
Laws and the rule of law are the foundation of a civilized society. In a democracy laws protect the individual from infringements of their human and civil rights and ensure individual freedoms and social justice. In the hands of authoritarian regimes laws are used arbitrarily to enforce the aims of the government and to suppress groups in society. What does it say about the nature of law and law makers that the Nazi program against the Jews and other groups was legally sanctioned? How are laws used in open societies to protect rights and advance social justice?
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