Human Rights Cartoon (96): Modern Slavery

(copyright Monte Wolverton)
Slavery was officially abolished worldwide at the 1927 Slavery Convention. Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:
“No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”.
Slavery is illegal everywhere and yet it still exists everywhere. Experts estimate that today [...]

Human Rights Facts (50): Poverty and Economic Growth

(source)
Economic growth is the increase in value of the goods and services produced by an economy or a country. It is the percent rate of increase from one year to the next in gross domestic product or GDP of an economy or a country. In order to correct for the population sizes of different economies [...]

Human Rights Facts (49): Poverty Trap

(source)
A poverty trap occurs when poverty has effects which act as causes of poverty, creating a vicious circle in which poverty engenders more poverty, a circle of cumulative causation leading to a downward spiral of ever more extreme poverty.
Poverty traps or poverty circles can be of different kinds: individual, social, national, international…
1. Individual poverty traps
A [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (94): Types of Equality

(copyright by Bill Mauldin)
Here’s a short overview of different types of equality (I’ll come back to this in future posts):
1. Equality before the law
This concept is linked to the concept of non-discrimination. Laws must be equal for everybody and should not discriminate between people. Everyone should be protected and punished by the law in the [...]

Human Rights Facts (45): Health

This post focuses on health and health care. I already wrote posts on the specific subjects of infant mortality, maternal mortality and life expectancy and will not come back to these in the current post. 
Health is a human rights issue in two respects.
First, people have a right to health care and health insurance. Article 25 of [...]

Human Rights Cartoon (93): Crimes Against Humanity

This is from the infamous Nazi newspaper of Julius Streicher, Der Sturmer, from 1934. The cartoon praises the Nazi Ministry of Culture for removing Jewish teachers from German classrooms. Streicher was convicted at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and hanged in 1946.
A crime against humanity is a large scale atrocity against a body of people, [...]

Human Rights Facts (42): Discrimination

I’ve written before on discrimination, especially gender discrimination (also here) and discrimination based on sexual orientation. This post tackles the subject more generally.
Discrimination, in its non-political and non-legal sense, simply means the recognition of differences. In the political and legal sense, it means unjustifiable differences in treatment between groups of people, most often the unjustifiable [...]

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 (40): Asylum

This post on asylum is a follow-up on a previous post on refugees, which was in itself a follow-up on a post about the broader topic of migration.
Asylum is a form of protection that allows individuals to remain in a country, provided that they meet the definition of a refugee. Eventually, they may become permanent [...]

Human Rights Quote (67): Economic Freedom

“Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world.” Kofi Annan

“Africa must be allowed to trade itself out of poverty.” Bob Geldof
Human rights do not include a right to have economic freedom or to have a free market. [...]