Human Rights Quote (78): Honor Killings

The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions. Hina Jilani, lawyer and human rights activist
An honor killing is a murder, carried out by a family to punish a female family member who has supposedly brought dishonor on the family. The acts which are the cause of [...]

Human Rights Facts (43): Genocide

(photo showing the excavation of mass graves in Srebrenica)
Genocide is the deliberate, systematic and violent destruction of a group (an ethnic, racial, religious, national or political group). This destruction can take many forms:

the outright murder of (the majority of) the members of the group
inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about destruction
measures intended to prevent [...]

Human Rights Facts (41): Xenophobia

(copyright http://www.davidlachapelle.com)
 
Xenophobia, the contempt or fear of strangers or foreign people, often people of a different race or ethnic group, is not considered to be a disease like other “phobias”. It is part of a political struggle against adversaries, much like racism is. (Whereas racism is certainly xenophobic, xenophibia doesn’t have to be racist; it [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (92): Public Opposition to Migration

(copyright http://www.claybennett.com/)
The public in most developed countries (or rich countries) is often opposed to immigration:

(source: http://pewresearch.org/)
There are two main reasons for this opposition. Opinions about immigration are closely linked to perceptions about threats to a country’s culture, for example the language. We see a lot of anxiety in the US about English as the first [...]

Human Rights Facts (37): Maternal Mortality

Maternal death, or maternal mortality, is the death of a woman during or shortly after a pregnancy. More than half a million women die during pregnancy or childbirth every year, and many millions suffer from inadequately treated complications. About half of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and about one third occur in South Asia [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (90): Tolerating Intolerance?

Some people urge us to accept and respect other cultures, other practices and beliefs unconditionally and without exceptions. Every cultural practice, whatever its content, is valuable and should be protected, even if this means giving up certain or all human rights. This means that rejecting intolerance in a certain culture is intolerant and rejecting discrimination [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (60): Culture and Diversity

Culture is something valuable. It gives people identity, a feeling of belonging, of tradition and history. The diversity of human cultures is also valuable because people detest uniformity. Respect of cultural diversity should indeed be the rule. Human rights proponents would betray their philosophy in any other case. The only exception to the rule being [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (58): Cultural Relativism

(by http://www.comics.com/editoons/lane/index.html)
Are human rights universal? Or is the worldwide application of human rights the imposition of the culture and norms of the West on other cultures? Universal human rights are said to imply the immoral destruction of other cultures, which in turn diminishes the well-being of the people of those cultures. Identity, especially cultural identity, [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (56): Prerequisites

(by http://www.wolvertoon.com/toons/)
People often oppose the universal application of democracy and human rights because they believe that in some places, some of the prerequisites are absent. Their point of view is not that democracy and human rights are in themselves objectionable or undesirable, but that some countries are not mature enough yet (as in the case [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (54): Imperialism

(artist unknown).
If it is wrong to give the culture of the West an absolute value and to impose it beyond its original territory, then it is equally wrong to give cultural relativism and diversity an absolute value. Cultures and cultural diversity are not the highest values. Other things count as well and may sometimes even [...]