Why does the international human rights movement recognize certain issues, but not others, as rights violations? How do some aggrieved groups transform their troubles into internationally acknowledged human rights concerns, whereas other groups fail when they attempt to do so? Asking these questions has practical implications for victims of abuse, raises thorny policy questions for the rights movement, and opens new avenues of theoretical inquiry for scholars. In today’s world, “human rights” are a pervasive political ideal and a compelling call to action. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) monitor violations around the globe. International organizations hold countless meetings on rights issues. Democratic...

In November 2005, representatives of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) country offices and a variety of independent experts met at UNICEF Headquarters in New York to discuss and assess the protection needs of children born as a result of wartime rape in conflict zones. Such children, it was clear to humanitarian practitioners, were at particular risk of human rights abuses because of community perceptions about their origin as “children of the enemy.”¹ Case evidence from Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, and, most recently, Darfur has increasingly shown that such children are subject to stigma, discrimination, and even infanticide in postconflict...

This chapter explores recent mobilization by groups representing India’s Dalits (Untouchables) aimed at transforming age-old caste-based discrimination into an international human rights issue.¹ Until the late 1990s, the daily violence, exclusion, and humiliation suffered by millions of Dalits were not treated as human rights issues by UN organs or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Despite decades of overseas activism by Dalit organizations, recognition of the Untouchables’ plight remained minimal. No international conventions specifically covered problems of Untouchability, human rights treaty bodies did not recognize caste-based discrimination as a human rights violation, and major human rights NGOs had not taken up the issue....

In recent years, many groups representing people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) have framed their grievances as international human rights claims. In so doing, many of these advocates have fought to add their cause to the human rights movement and to place a new right to sexuality on the international agenda. This chapter explores application of the “gatekeeper thesis” to the LGBT case by examining the relationship of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to LGBT concerns. Discussing each organization in turn, the first half of the chapter shows how the organizations responded to both internal and...

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that 33 million people worldwide are HIV-positive.¹ The AIDS epidemic presents one of the greatest challenges to public health systems around the world, straining national budgets and medical expertise worldwide. Not only is AIDS incurable, but it also disproportionately afflicts people in their early adult years. The very people who should be contributing to the economic, political, and social development of the state are instead falling ill and dying. This has huge social and economic costs. It also harms governance and democratization.²

In response, states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and intergovernmental organizations...

In the 1970s, international human rights monitors loudly condemned the Soviet Union’s internment of political dissidents in “psychiatric hospitals.” Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Helsinki Watch and Amnesty International (AI), along with local activists such as Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov, publicized the horrors of these detentions: squalid living conditions, abusive guards, and cruel “treatments” such as forced electroshock and drugging. In some cases, the international pressure generated by these reports helped free political prisoners. But at the same time that human rights NGOs highlighted the political abuses of psychiatry, they ignored the plight of detainees with mental or physical...

International human rights conventions and foundational documents do not mention a number of long-standing cultural practices that affect the health of women and children, and mainstream human rights organizations have not typically included these issues in their international campaigns. In the past generation, however, a transnational coalition politicized a number of these traditional practices, including female genital “cutting” or “modification.” This practice has become increasingly contentious and is now widely referred to as female genital mutilation (FGM).

Particularly in African countries, women have organized against the practice primarily because of its significant health risks. Facing opposition within their own societies,...

Economic and social rights have long been part of the human rights movement. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) gives them equal status with civil and political rights.¹ In practice, however, for most of the period since the UDHR’s adoption by the UN General Assembly in 1948, economic and social rights have held a secondary place in the human rights movement. Most obviously, the international treaties deriving from the broad statements of the nonbinding UDHR divided sharply between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights, on the other. The International Covenant...

In recent years, conflicts over water have become increasingly common around the world. In many of these disputes, the “right to water” has been a central claim. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, activists invoked water rights in 2000 to oppose privatization of municipal water services, becoming a global cause célèbre. In India since the late 1990s, farmers and consumers have resisted Coca-Cola’s plans to use local water in soft drinks, winning support both at home and abroad. Transnational advocacy networks have also fought proposals by the World Bank and other international financial institutions to fund water privatization schemes. Finally, at the United...