درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Many contemporary authors fear that the proliferation of rights-claims may cause human rights to fall victim to their own popularity. If every good that is desired by one or another group of people is cloaked in the venerable garbs of a human right, and there is no way to tell ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights, this may generate scepticism towards the concept of human rights in general. However deplorable this situation may be, for moral philosophers it may be thought to involve an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of their discipline. After all, how else could we distinguish genuine from imaginary human rights than by building a theory about the subject? The aim of my paper is to show that this idea is exactly wrong — that the proliferation of human rights claims cannot be stopped even in theory. It is a mistake to think that the proliferation of rights claims results from a lack of awareness of the proper theoretical foundation of human rights. On the contrary, I will argue that the proliferation of rights mirrors a deep problem in secular theories of human rights, that these theories do not have the conceptual resources to limit ever larger rights claims. I will suggest that to understand the present situation, we need to look into the religious presuppositions of the culture in which natural rights to subsistence were first proclaimed. Specifically, I will argue that contemporary theories of human rights are secularized versions of a religious precursor.

The emerging right to democracy (e.g. Franck, T) within international law favors a liberal, democratic packaging. Yet as Abedolkarim Sourash argues, there has been a conflation of liberalism and democracy, which must be decoupled.  It is from this point of departure that this paper will examine the international legality of militant democracy and interrogate when and how a constitutional democracy can legally act in an anti-democratic manner to combat threats to its democratic existence.  Militant democracy was a term introduced in 1937 by Karl Lowenstein. It refers to a form of constitutional democracy authorized to protect civil and political freedom by pre-emptively restricting its exercise. Lowenstein’s writings, at the time, were concerned with the limitations of democratic institutions in containing fascism. Militant democracies stand in contrast with the principles of legal pluralism, but the extent to which international law authorizes transformative political agendas that seek to implement forms of religious, cultural, or national autonomy is unclear.

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. Martin Luther King, Jr. Abstract The following paper will present the theory and possibilities of implication of the phenomenon of civil disobedience understood as one of the most powerful and most effective tools of democratic society when it comes to implementing the necessary and indispensable changes required for the improvement of the political domain and the social public sphere.   In the first part I will present the narrow but orthodox and widely discussed definition of civil disobedience presented by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice (1971). Given such a definition, as well as the major conditions under which the actions undertaken in the name of civil disobedience can be justified, I will focus my analysis on two major aspects of the discussed notion.   Firstly, I will discuss civil disobedience, which is in its essense an unlawful act, paradoxically expresses the highest respect for the positive law by the person performing the civilly disobedient act through one’s submission to the judgment of the law which is an object of one’s protest. This way, civil disobedience presents itself as the phenomenon which, not having a legal recognition (not being legalized), holds super-legal force required to impose the changes on the unjust legal system or on the particular unjust regulation.   Secondly, I will point out that civil disobedience, as a public act performed by the people (the subjects of the particular law), expresses the will of the people and, therefore, it can not be used (by themselves) in the ways contradictory to their best self-interest but always supported by the “the commonly shared sense of justice” (Rawls). From this premise I conclude that the universal human rights, as thier supporters claim, are one of the main ends of the political activism in the recent decade and should be advocated in the civilly disobedient manner.   In the last part I will contrast the Rawlsean definition with a much broader and more relevant understanding of civil disobedience when it concerns today’s globalizing world. In this world, the nation-states cease to be the only political actors when confronted with the transnational public sphere, and, therefore, the understanding of civil disobedience as a transversal arena of public dissent presented by Roland Bleiker (2000) is more appropriate. In this definition civil disobedience becomes, not only a political instrument of particular subjects of a particular society, but it also becomes a tool for the international mobilization of means and of people in the name of presenting and imposing the respect for the universal human rights despite the national borders and societal paradigms.