Tag

The UN special rapporteur for cultural rights is concerned; a traditional Vietnamese drum is being exploited for touristic purposes. The fact that the oppressive Communist dictatorship routinely persecutes human rights defenders, tortures detainees and blatantly disregards freedom of religion apparently bears little mention. Pedro Pizano highlights the dangers of this worrying trajectory of human rights discourse.

In a paper published last week by Aarhus University, Christian Bjørnskov and FRP's Jacob Mchangama provide evidence of the effects of introducing social rights into constitutions. They find no robust evidence of positive outcomes of social rights, but do, however, document some negative effects.

FRP co-founder Jacob Mchangama discussed FRP's recent report on human rights proliferation on Central Time, Wisconsin Public Radio on Wednesday. Listen to the interview at 31 minutes.

In its latest issue, Norwegian magazine Minerva writes about Freedom Rights Project's new report on the inflation of human rights. In a lenghty interview, Jacob Mchangama, co-founder of FRP, is asked what governments in the West and in Scandinavia should do differently compared to today, in order to protect traditional human rights.

In a new report the Freedom Rights Project presents a snap shot of the body of human rights instruments that have appeared within the past few decades, totalling 667 individual provisions in the United Nations system and 710 in the Council of Europe. The result is not only needless complexity, but also real damage to the protection and credibility of human rights.

The size of the UN human rights treaty system has doubled in the past eight years. Member states complain of too many, and often overlapping reporting requirements, but the body of human rights law keeps growing. A treaty on the rights of seniors is under way.

In an attempt to improve relations with authoritarian states, President Obama has avoided association with traditional human-rights defenders, and Secretary of State Clinton openly downplayed the role of human rights in discussions with China, writes Jacob Mchangama in the National Review.

“Human rights is becoming something divisive, whereas human rights was envisioned by people like Eleanor Roosevelt as a big tent. Everybody has human rights," said Freedom Rights Project cofounder Aaron Rhodes at a briefing in Washington last week.

The UN promotes leftist economics under the banner of “human rights”, according to Jacob Mchangama and Aaron Rhodes of the Freedom Rights Project in National Review Online.

The so-called “right to food” allows even totalitarian regimes to present themselves as deeply committed to human rights–just not the ones that really matter. Read the whole piece by Jacob Mchangama and Aaron Rhodes of the Freedom Rights Project in the Commentator.