Human Rights

This article argues that the connection between a person and their body provides the moral foundation for recognising a fundamental right to body integrity. I define body integrity as the ideal state of that connection and use it to ground a distinct normative basis for protecting claims concerning one’s own body. On this account, claims about one’s body are justified where (i) they genuinely pursue oneness between how one sees their body and how one experiences it, and (ii) their realisation (...) respects bodily capacities and limits by avoiding unjustified or disproportionate damage to the body. Unlike the traditional right to bodily integrity, which primarily protects against non-consensual touch, the right to body integrity can support both entitlements to intervention and protection from intervention. Drawing on bodily awareness, personal identity, challenging requests for body-modifying interventions, and case law, the article shows how this framework clarifies adjudication and warrants fundamental-right status, restricted only in exceptional cases. (shrink)

This article interrogates the Westphalian requirement of territoriality as a prerequisite for statehood, proposing a reconstituted model of non-territorial legal personality to address the existential threat of climate-induced displacement. Utilizing a TWAIL-informed critique, the study identifies the geographic trap within the Montevideo Convention as a colonial artifact that facilitates the legal erasure of vanishing island nations and displaced polities. By decoupling legal subjectivity from physical soil, the research reinterprets Article 1 of the ICCPR to frame the continuity of the polity (...) as a functional necessity for the protection of collective human rights. Drawing on precedents from the ICJ and UNGA regarding governments-in-exile and observer status, the paper argues for the recognition of Necessary Subjects within international law. It provides a doctrinal blueprint for a post-territorial legal order, ensuring that the erosion of sovereign land does not result in the termination of the human rights regime for the dispossessed. (shrink)

A digital revolution is underway in which individuals on their computers, some working independently or in ad hoc collectives, and others as part of established organizations, are gathering and verifying information from online spaces that they believe contain evidence of human rights violations or international crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. Known commonly as digital investigators, citizen sleuths, or open source intelligence (OSI) researchers, this community of practice has expanded across major newspaper agencies (such as the (...) New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post), human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others), and national and international court systems (including United Nations Commissions of Inquiry and Fact-Finding Missions, and the International Criminal Court). In this article, we draw from our legal and sociological training to explore the role of power and humility in this quickly-emerging field of practice. Fundamentally, power and humility intersect with conceptions of ethics and responsibility but have too often been an afterthought to the intrigue of methodological possibilities and investigative outcomes. From who has access to digital open source investigative training to how investigations are designed to who are considered experts, this article posits that a failure to interrogate power asymmetries and an unwillingness to approach such research with appropriate humility can undermine the integrity and legitimacy of these investigations. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the spatio-temporal construction of human rights in Taiwan through the question of migrant labour. While Taiwan is often celebrated for its progressive human rights achievements after democratisation, the experiences of migrant workers, especially undocumented migrant workers (UMWs), reveal the limits of this celebrated framework. I argue that Taiwan’s human rights development has been shaped by the nation’s post-authoritarian political and economic transformations, producing a context-specific understanding of rights that both enables and constrains human rights protection. (...) Migrant labour exposes the paradox of Taiwan’s human rights trajectory: a linear narrative of democratic progress has made certain rights claims recognisable while leaving others marginal or unintelligible. By interrogating this assumption of linear progress, I challenge the view that human rights will naturally expand to protect all individuals equally. I instead call for a rethinking of human rights grounded in the lived experiences of those excluded from the current framework. Ultimately, I seek to open a more inclusive human rights futurity by examining the spatio-temporal limits through which human rights are constructed, recognised, and denied. (shrink)

This article argues that human rights theory faces pressure from scholarship on animals. Because grounding human rights in bare species membership seems implausible, most theories ground such rights in species neutral criteria. These criteria may be naturalistic (based on sentience or autonomy, for example) or functionalist (based on the socio-political role of rights). Standard theories of human rights have not adequately addressed that many animals appear to meet these criteria, as we show that they do across a range of arguments. (...) However, consistency demands that if a being meets the criteria a theory stipulates for the possession of human rights, they should be recognised as possessing such rights. This leaves human rights theory with three options: it must either explain why these criteria are not met by animals after all, offer alternate criteria—or recognise many animals as bearers of ‘human’ rights. (shrink)

Este artículo parte de un experimento mental —imaginar un consenso internacional que declare la dignidad humana una mera convención revisable— para examinar las consecuencias prácticas de prescindir de un fundamento ontológico de los derechos humanos. A partir del pensamiento de Francisco Romero, se confronta la crítica relativista más fuerte a la universalidad de los derechos humanos, tanto en su versión histórica como cultural, y se muestra que el individualismo extremo y el relativismo cultural comparten una misma raíz: la negación de (...) que exista, en el ser humano, algo que trascienda lo puramente fáctico. Se examina también la objeción de que el propio argumento ontológico de Romero sería, él mismo, una imposición cultural occidental, y se responde apelando al carácter experiencial y no dogmático de su propuesta. El artículo concluye que, históricamente, son las minorías sin voz ni representación quienes primero pagan el precio cuando la dignidad humana se trata como una convención revocable. (shrink)

There is a fundamental link between education about human rights and their realization; but mobilizing change-makers requires more than exposure to human rights standards and the institutions that support them. A human rights advocacy course has the potential to be a toolkit for advocates-in-the-making. It can challenge students to consider how human rights apply to their own lives, empower them to be changemakers in their own communities, and equips them with tools and tactics to promote them. When combined with experiential (...) learning, a human rights advocacy course becomes a powerful vehicle for training future human rights scholars and practitioners. This article explores the merits of teaching human rights advocacy consistent with the core components of human rights education: education about human rights, education through human rights, and education for human rights. (shrink)

In Book II, Chapter 20 of The Rights of War and Peace, the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius presents the idea that punishment is a legitimate cause of war. In making this claim, he builds upon the long-standing Christian just war tradition, stretching back through Augustine and Aquinas up to the early modern period. Grotius’ justification for punitive war relies on his natural law reasoning, and the bulk of the chapter (one of the longest in the entire three volume text) relies (...) on the idea that a wrong committed can be punished by any member of a society, i.e., there is not a necessity for an authority to engage in punishment only the existence of the wrong. But Grotius cautions his argument in a few ways, such as the dangers of vengeance and the hubris of leaders. While there has been a resurgence in recent years to justify war as punishment, both in theory and practice, less attention has been paid to the obligation to be merciful, other than in post-conflict situations. In this Article, I explore the relationship between punishment and mercy in Grotius’ work but also more widely. I suggest that Grotius’ natural law arguments both for punishment and mercy can still help us think critically about war. I argue that while punitive war remains a legitimate practice, we need to think more carefully about Grotius’ calls for mercy and charity. This can be found prior to war, during war, and after war. I conclude that both punishment and forgiveness merit equal attention in the just war tradition. (shrink)

When and why do states define and prosecute harmful conduct as criminal, and when as war or terror? What political and instrumental considerations inform these choices, how and why do they change over time, and with what outcomes? The pressure to avert future atrocities not only informs preventive laws and measures but also impels states to identify and tackle extremist ideologies “further up the field.” There is no internationally agreed legal definition of extremism. Whereas most countries target “violent extremism,” violence (...) is not a requirement of the UK non-statutory definition, which targets ideology over conduct. Eluding law, extremism is not prosecuted through courts or military tribunals but pursued in communities and public institutions. This exploration of the UK’s struggle to define and tackle the growing threat posed by extremism reveals difficult legal and political challenges, as well as costs for democratic participation and rights. (shrink)

Conventional legal thought classifies state violence into two distinct categories: punishment and war. Each is governed by a separate legal regime – criminal law and the law of armed conflict – marked by divergent rationales, doctrines, and institutional frameworks. In recent years, however, scholarship has pointed to a certain convergence between these domains. This Article aims to map, assess, and critically examine this trend. It proposes to distinguish between three types of convergence: (1) hybrid legal tools introduced to address phenomena (...) that resist clear classification, such as terrorism; (2) appropriation and borrowing of language and concepts from one domain into the other; and (3) parallel trends unfolding within each regime separately, possibly shaped by shared political logics. For each of these types, the Article also critically assesses the limits of convergence and shows how criminal law and the law of armed conflict continue to preserve distinctive features and maintain the boundaries between them. It concludes by suggesting that the degree of separation and distinction between these domains is historically contingent and depends on the perceived rigidity of the boundaries between communities. When such boundaries are viewed as fixed and impermeable, such as in a world order governed by nation-states, a clear division between punishment and war tends to hold. Conversely, when those boundaries are blurred, the two domains increasingly merge. (shrink)

This Article is concerned with the symbolic narratives that have historically been used to justify punitive war, defined as the use of force to punish the violation of international norms, justified on behalf of the international community. Ostensibly, punishment as a legitimate cause for war has been proscribed in the modern international legal order, yet punitive violence has not been excised from international politics. This Article builds on the authors’ recent works on domestic legal-rational myths of the carceral state and (...) international legal myths concerning the foundations of international law to argue that just war, and its corollary, punitive war, remains a feature of global politics. What has changed are the discourses that justify the use of force; reasons that have developed in dialog with domestic discourses of punishment because they share similar origins: the medieval natural law doctrines of desert and debt. Over the centuries, developments in state institutions of the carceral state, and the myths that provide them a “taken for granted” legitimacy, have been expressed in the structures of international law and global governance through a mutually constitutive dialectic – sometimes the domestic informs the international, sometimes the obverse, and sometimes innovation occurs in tandem. These mutually-informed myths take different institutional expressions in domestic and international spheres, but they bear strong resemblances to the canonical purposes of punishment in the Western tradition: retribution, deterrence, reform, and incapacitation. This Article identifies five legal-rational myths that justify war as punishment, and relates them to their domestic-law counterparts, emphasizing both their common bases in the vocabularies and theories of punishment, and their diverse institutional expressions. These myths emerged in specific historical conditions, but have become a lasting and malleable suite of tools available to states to justify armed intervention. Their durability is demonstrated through an examination of the recent war in Gaza, wherein claims of desert saturate all sides of the conflict. (shrink)

This Article examines the relation between law, politics, and history in the initial phase of the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It analyzes how both parties invoked and mobilized the past within their legal strategies. While the proceedings centered on the pressing issue of applying the legal category of “genocide” to the devastating reality in Gaza, they also involved a turn to history. Both parties extended the trial’s temporal framework to (...) advance rival historical narratives, reaching into the distant past and turning the trial into a contested site of confrontation between competing global memories: South Africa through the paradigm of settler colonialism, and Israel through the narrative of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. By analyzing South Africa’s and Israel’s claims, and the public debate surrounding the case, the Article seeks to explore how legal discourse mobilizes history and what this reveals about the role of international law in clarifying the past and shaping historical memory. Building on Judith Shklar’s framework in her 1964 Legalism, the Article develops the concept of “neo-legalism” to capture a dual movement: a forward-looking appeal to law as a tool of political transformation, coupled with a backward-looking effort to reframe contested histories through legal categories. While engagement with history is essential for promoting a democratic future and for illuminating long-overlooked and marginalized historical experiences, Shklar warns that stretching the temporal frame of a trial too far into the remote past runs the hazard of flattening the complexity and contingency of long-term historical processes. This risks not only producing oversimplified narratives but also undermining the political judgment essential for shaping a shared future. (shrink)

This paper explores the often-overlooked issue of non-employment-based domestic labour rights. Existing frameworks for labour rights primarily address employment-based work, leaving a gap for those who perform domestic tasks not on an employment basis, such as family caregivers. This paper develops a framework of moral labour rights for non-employment-based domestic labour by adapting articles 23 and 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to this context. It proposes the right to material support and unionisation for these people and advocates (...) state-supported resources to uphold their right to rest and leisure. By extending moral labour rights to non-employment-based domestic labour, this paper calls for a societal shift to recognise and support the vital contributions of these people. (shrink)

The recent wave of human rights-based climate litigation has raised the question of whether states can be held responsible for the impact of their greenhouse gas emissions on human rights outside their territory. Given the lack of legal consensus, this paper examines this question in light of philosophical theories of human rights. I argue that if the “humanist” conception of human rights holds, then states must bear extraterritorial obligations in the context of climate change. Most opponents of these obligations rely (...) on alternative “practical” conceptions. However, I defend that even if we follow the practice of human rights, as these conceptions insist, its internal norms require the allocation of extraterritorial climate obligations. Thus, I aim not only to give normative support to climate advocates, but also, to contribute to the development of a practice-based approach to the philosophy of human rights which goes beyond the borders of the state. (shrink)

Desde las perspectivas de las Investigaciones para la Paz realizamos un breve análisis de las principales manifestaciones de violencia cultural o simbólica sufridas por los estudiantes. Con la mirada puesta en la transformación de conflictos, este trabajo cualitativo se apoya principalmente en la revisión de libros y artículos científicos, además de la casuística; con el fin de promover la detección, reflexión y proposición sobre problemas manifestados en el ambiente escolar. Para el efecto, luego de una breve exposición acerca de la (...) «violencia cultural» como concepto galtungiano, clasificamos y enumeramos ‒de la manera más completa posible‒ a las distintas expresiones de discriminación existentes en las instituciones educativas paraguayas, pero cuya realidad es muy similar a las demás de la región y del mundo. Finalmente, esbozamos recomendaciones para la comprensión y el trabajo para la paz con los miembros de las comunidades educativas. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law and politics are interwoven. This paper focuses on a specific aspect of this connection: states using human rights discourse to justify their actions while simultaneously shaping the very frameworks meant to hold them accountable. We argue that this creates a circular self-legitimation where states determine their own grounds of justification. Unlike critics who call into question the human rights project entirely, we acknowledge this flaw without abandoning the framework. We introduce radical realist (...) social analysis as a novel jurisprudential instrument for studying and critiquing how states deploy human rights law. This instrument demonstrates how most state applications of human rights justifications are epistemically flawed, thereby failing in their justifying function. Meanwhile, our proposal avoids outright rejection of the human rights framework while strengthening material human rights against political exploitation. (shrink)

Volume 1 of The International Law Fallacy Trilogy -/- This work presents a forensic audit of international legal systems, examining the divergence between formal legal structures and their operational enforcement across multiple domains. It introduces the Soltani Order framework and diagnoses Statutory Inactivity: the condition in which legal frameworks remain formally valid while enforcement is applied selectively based on geopolitical and economic priority rather than universal human need. -/- Using case studies including maritime corridor risk, international tribunal proceedings, domestic regulatory (...) classification, and the 2026 comparative analysis of institutional responses to water deprivation in Mexico and disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, the work argues that international law operates through conditional activation rather than uniform enforcement. -/- Full paper access via Dawn of Verity Strategic Intelligence Bureau. (shrink)

This volume delivers the final judgment of The International Law Fallacy trilogy. Volume I carried out the audit of the international legal order on the terms it claimed for itself. Volume II entered and closed the evidentiary record. This final volume does not reopen that record but delivers judgment on what has already been proved. -/- The central finding is that international law does not exist as a materially universal law. Not as a weak law, a corrupted law, or a (...) law unevenly kept. What exists under its name is an instrument: vocabulary, institutional form, ceremony, and force calibrated to power. The volume distinguishes law from the instrument, procedure from protection, coordination from legal authority, and diplomatic management from the material protection of defenseless life. -/- Using the 22 May 2026 failure of the Eleventh Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a contemporary confirmation rather than the foundation of the argument, the volume names the Kairos of the international disorder: the moment at which one of the coverings that kept the instrument legible as law ceased, in public view, to perform that function. The verdict is final: what exists under the name of international law is not law, but the instrument. The word remains. The substance has not appeared. (shrink)

The imago Dei is routinely invoked to ground human dignity, moral equality, human rights, stewardship, rationality, relationality, vocation, and Christian anthropology. Its rhetorical power depends on appearing clear enough to support public conclusions while remaining flexible enough to absorb competing theological uses. This paper argues that the diversity of imago Dei interpretations is not automatically a virtue. When a phrase can mean rational capacity, relationality, royal function, vocation, embodied representation, Christological destiny, moral agency, or eschatological restoration depending on the argumentative (...) need, it risks becoming semantically inert. The problem is not that theological concepts must have only one dimension. Rich concepts can sustain multiple legitimate applications. The problem is that Christian argument often moves from interpretive plurality to public certainty without supplying a rule that selects among meanings. The same phrase is preached as the clear Word of God on Sunday, then defended in scholarship as a complex polyvalent construct on Monday. That oscillation creates a hermeneutical credibility problem. I engage major treatments of the image of God, including Middleton's functional-royal reading and Kilner's dignity-focused account. I then develop a semantic test: a concept used as a public premise must constrain inference. If the imago Dei can underwrite incompatible or weakly related conclusions without a stable selection rule, it does not function as a determinate premise. It functions as a prestige marker attached to conclusions already preferred. (shrink)

This paper points out the problems of radical rights activities in the present day and shows that they cannot achieve their "themes". First, it points out that radical actions are exercised without being in a valid context. Explanation is indispensable for that. But in many cases, sufficient explanation is not provided. In comparison with successful rights activities, the absence of negotiators can be pointed out. This shows a contradiction in achieving the purpose of rights activities. Actions by non-parties tend toward (...) restricting the rights of the parties. The claims themselves are also often self-righteous. Radical activists contribute greatly to the maintenance of power. It suggests that many radical activists do not achieve their "themes", but they achieve radical actions, which are their original purpose. Environmental policies also fall under radical rights activities. They are harmful to the expansion of rights. The reason they exist fundamentally lies in the lack of logical thinking. (shrink)

This meta-paper consolidates and systematizes a series of legal and interdisciplinary works concerned with the relationship between neurodivergence, welfare state structures, the justice system, and state coercive power. Its point of departure is the observation that core legal and administrative structures—particularly in social law, administrative law, and criminal law—implicitly operate on neurotypical assumptions of existence and consequently pathologize, functionalize, or individualize neurodivergent forms of existence. The text develops the thesis that wherever subsistence-securing benefits, legal recognition, or criminal assessment are coupled (...) to neurotypical standards of reasonableness, adaptation, and performance, a structural incompatibility emerges that has predictably harmful effects on neurodivergent persons. This harm is neither accidental nor a by-product of faulty case-by-case decision-making, but a necessary consequence of the underlying normative architecture of state systems. On the basis of the consolidated individual papers, a unified analytical and evaluative framework is elaborated: where (1) structural incompatibility between a form of existence and the normative order is present, (2) the resulting harms are foreseeable and known, and (3) existential dependency leaves no realistic option of withdrawal, state action can no longer be qualified as legitimate social or regulatory policy, but must be understood as a form of structural violence. This violence does not manifest primarily as discrete events, but architecturally—through attribution logics, fictions of reasonableness, the individualization of systemic harm, and institutional escalation mechanisms. The meta-paper demonstrates that classical legal instruments such as proportionality analysis, individualized case correction, or medical assessment systematically fail under these conditions, because they themselves form part of the structure of violence. At the same time, it is shown that an autistic epistemic position—particularly the perception of structural invariances across time, institutions, and fields of law—does not constitute a subjective bias, but rather an analytical resource for identifying institutional violence. The contribution positions itself as a foundational legal text at the intersection of social law, criminal law, disability law, and human rights. It aims to establish a new legal evaluative standard under conditions of real ontological diversity and to render visible state responsibility where it has hitherto been obscured by individualization, pathologization, and formal assumptions of neutrality. (shrink)

This paper states the irrationality of the category of ``antisemitism.'' This concept originated from the Western history of persecution of Jews. It is treated as a category separate from racial discrimination. There is a historical background of judging criticism of Jewish actions as a denial of their existence. Using this for criticism renders it powerless outside the West and leads to the condoning of racism against Jews. Moreover, unreasonable preferential treatment is also a great loss for Jewish people. And presenting (...) a solution that does not address the cause persecution is an expression of contempt, showing that the West does not look history in the eye and thinks Jews will be satisfied with this level of child's play. It is undeniably irrational for them to be subjected to such treatment by an ideology they did not even create. (shrink)

The present volume brings together three contributions that pursue a shared theoretical question: what is work under conditions in which technical systems are increasingly able to simulate human performance, and what constitutes the specifically human form of work that structurally resists such simulation. The starting point is the observation that modern societies predominantly define work through output, employment status, or market value. This definition, however, enters into crisis once artificial intelligence becomes capable of formally reproducing ever larger portions of this (...) output. -/- Against this background, the contributions in this volume develop an ontological redefinition of work. Work is not understood primarily as the production of goods or services, but as a form of embodied, self-determined interaction with the world through which social and ecological reality is stabilized. Central to this perspective is the concept of relational agency: work appears as a practice in which action, responsibility, and world-reference are inseparably intertwined, enabling the emergence of new forms of meaning, knowledge, and social order. -/- From this standpoint, artificial intelligence is not interpreted as a competitor to human labour in the conventional labour-market sense, but as a structural test case. AI makes visible which aspects of human activity are functionally reproducible and which are not. While many forms of output, decision-making, or innovation can be algorithmically simulated, the form of work that arises from situational responsibility, irreversible temporality, and concrete world-binding remains in principle non-delegable. In this context, particular attention is given to the concept of Eigenzeit, which designates the non-externalizable temporal dimension of human action in which decisions, responsibility, and consequences become irreversibly effective. -/- The volume connects this ontological analysis with an examination of the social conflicts that arise from it. If work is not primarily output production but reality-maintenance and world-binding, those forms of labour that frequently remain invisible within contemporary labour regimes come into focus: artistic practice, care work, activism, critical research, and other forms of self-determined, relational activity. At the same time, these forms of work often encounter institutional resistance, delegitimization, or economic pressure, since they can only partially be integrated into market-based or algorithmically governed models of labour. -/- The contributions therefore argue that the current transformation of work cannot be understood solely as an economic or technological issue. It concerns the more fundamental question of how societies organize their relationship to reality. If work is defined primarily through simulation, metrics, and interchangeable functions, there is a growing risk that social systems lose their capacity to recognize and correct real problems. In this sense, self-determined relational work appears not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a central condition for societal learning, democratic reflexivity, and the long-term stability of complex systems. (shrink)

This volume forms the starting point of Section V – Work and Emergence Economy, which examines work not primarily as an economic category, but as a structural condition of world-formation. The contributions assembled here investigate the relation between the emergence of new realities and the conditions under which these realities become socially stabilised as value. In doing so, they shift the analytical focus from questions of distribution and productivity toward the deeper mechanisms that determine which forms of work are able (...) to appear, persist, and shape the world. -/- The present volume brings together five contributions that pursue a shared theoretical question: under what conditions do new forms of reality emerge, and under what conditions can these forms become stabilised as socially recognised value. The point of departure is the observation that modern societies, despite high levels of productivity, innovation, and complexity, increasingly confront phenomena of structural invisibility. Forms of work, knowledge, care, ecological regeneration, and social stabilisation exert real and system-sustaining effects, yet often fail to appear as economic value. -/- To analyse this problem, the contributions develop a threshold model of social reality. At the centre of this model stand two interrelated concepts: the Diversity Threshold (D) as the threshold of forced emergence and the Value Threshold (T) as the threshold of societal stabilisation and visibility. While the Diversity Threshold designates the point at which systems must generate new forms due to increasing incommensurability, the Value Threshold describes the conditions under which these emergent forms can appear as durable and socially stabilised realities. -/- The difference between these two thresholds leads to a structural diagnosis of contemporary societies. Many forms of real and effective work—such as care work, ecological regeneration, cultural practice, artistic research, or neurodivergent modes of problem-processing—frequently operate above the threshold of emergence, yet remain below the threshold of societal stabilisation. The result is a condition in which reality is continuously produced without becoming durably recognised as value. -/- On this basis, the contributions develop an alternative perspective on economy and social value formation. Economy appears not primarily as a system of resource allocation, but as a threshold regime that determines which forms of emergent reality are stabilised and which remain invisible. The distinction between primary economy (world-sustaining work) and secondary economy (value-extractive organisation), together with the concept of the Unfolding Gap, describes concrete mechanisms through which this structural asymmetry manifests itself in everyday social life. -/- The volume therefore does not present a programme of economic reform, but contributes to an ontologically grounded theory of work, value, and social reality. It proposes a research programme in which emergence, stabilisation, and visibility are not treated as separate phenomena, but as interrelated transitions within complex social systems. (shrink)

Though sanctions on family members of primary targets have become increasingly popular coercive instruments, we know very little about their use, effectiveness, and major legal and human rights consequences. Drawing insight from several targeted sanctions directed at family members of the Russian elite in recent years, this article offers a detailed analysis of (1) why sanctioning states have increasingly opted for family member sanctions, (2) whether targeting family members increases the efficacy of sanctions regimes, (3) to what extent such targeted (...) sanctions are legally and ethically defensible, and (4) whether they undermine human rights of targeted individuals. Our analysis suggests that family member sanctions have limited utility as they are mostly ineffective tools. They could also cause major human rights issues and legal challenges for the sanctioned individuals. Hence, family member sanctions appear to be ethically problematic tools that warrant careful reconsideration. (shrink)

Adopted in February 2025, the African Union’s Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (CEVAWG) is the first binding continental treaty dedicated exclusively to eradicating gender-based violence. Its adoption coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Beijing + 30), offering an opportunity to evaluate Africa’s role in shaping global feminist governance. This article situates CEVAWG within the genealogy of international and regional women’s rights instruments, including CEDAW (1979), the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), (...) and the Maputo Protocol (2003). It argues that while earlier frameworks universalized women’s rights or contextualized them in partial ways, CEVAWG advances a distinctly decolonial feminist approach. Its expansive definition of violence, intersectional protections, integration of African epistemologies, and recognition of grassroots women’s movements mark an epistemic shift. Africa emerges not as a passive recipient of global feminist norms but as an active producer of feminist international law. At the same time, the article critiques CEVAWG’s heavy reliance on state institutions and punitive justice mechanisms, warning that such state-centrism risks reproducing structural and carceral violence rather than dismantling it. Drawing on decolonial theory, the article contends that CEVAWG’s significance lies in both its promise and its tensions: it represents a transformative feminist intervention into global norm-making,yet its emancipatory potential will depend on implementation, the centering of grassroots practices, and resistance to state capture. CEVAWG, I argue, is Africa’s Beijing + 30 response; an attempt to provincialize universalist feminism and anchor gender justice in the continent’s own histories, struggles, and epistemologies. (shrink)

The issue of inheritance distribution for transgender individuals in Muslim societies presents a legal and ethical dilemma that necessitates a multidisciplinary inquiry. This study explores the compatibility of Islamic inheritance law and international human rights standards, focusing on transgender rights, gender identity, and justice. The primary objective is to assess whether Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) can evolve to accommodate contemporary understandings of gender while preserving doctrinal integrity. Methodologically, the research employed a normative legal analysis combined with comparative case studies and fatwa (...) reviews from multiple Muslim-majority countries. It also utilized the maqashid al-shari’ah framework and human rights principles such as non-discrimination and the right to property. Key sources included classical and reformist Islamic scholarship, human rights declarations, national legal reforms, and court precedents. The findings reveal that classical fiqh lacks provisions for transgender inheritance but allows reform via maqashid al-shari’ah and legal maxims like al-‘adah muhakkamah. Human rights norms, notably those found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Yogyakarta Principles, advocate for equitable inheritance rights. Fatwas from institutions in Iran, Egypt, and Malaysia provide partial support for gender recognition post-transition, though inheritance rights remain inconsistently applied. National laws, such as Pakistan’s Transgender Act, signal a shift toward inclusivity. Reformist scholars propose contextual ijtihad and hybrid legal models as pathways to justice. This research concludes that the harmonization of Islamic inheritance law and human rights is not only possible but essential. It contributes to legal pluralism and highlights the potential of ijtihad to bridge doctrinal law and social realities, urging further empirical studies on transgender Muslims’ lived experiences. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between women’s objectification and patriarchal social structures. It argues that patriarchy reduces women to functions such as reproduction, caregiving, domestic labor, beauty, sexuality, and family honor rather than recognizing them as complete human beings. Women are often valued according to their obedience, fertility, marriageability, emotional labor, and ability to preserve lineage, caste, religion, property, or inherited identity. -/- The paper further argues that women’s objectification is not limited to sexualization. It also appears in motherhood, family (...) expectations, purity culture, beauty standards, domestic labor, and the pressure to preserve social hierarchy. Patriarchy survives not only through direct control but also through modern forms of approval, media, consumer culture, and social expectations. Even in the 21st century, women continue to inherit patriarchal systems in both traditional and modern forms. (shrink)

Freedom of thought is among the strongest human rights, yet it is largely devoid of practical legal application. This article operationalizes the right by distilling ten core aspects, mainly psychological capacities such as attention, meta-control over thought, and rational belief formation. It then examines how these aspects may be adversely affected by three digital technologies: neurotechnologies, virtual reality, and especially social media. The article addresses why the use of digital technologies might be a human rights issue at all and the (...) doctrinal challenge associated with it. People use these technologies voluntarily, and detrimental effects tend to arise from a multitude of diffuse stimuli rather than from discrete identifiable interventions by a specific human -rights-bound actor. This complicates, and often renders impossible, findings of conventional interferences with rights. But this may not exhaust the remit of human rights. Another human rights-based perspective is proposed: Detrimental effects on thought might be conceptualized as risks arising from a digital environment, which may prompt States’ obligations to fulfil the enjoyment of the right by securing its factual–in this case, psychological–preconditions. A prime measure to meet this obligation is the regulation of technology through innovative models such as a freedom-of-thought impact assessment, or freedom-of-thought-sensitive technology design, for which the ten aspects provide a workable foundation. (shrink)

Theorists have been reluctant to base human rights on purportedly universally valid claims about the bearers of these fundamental entitlements. However, it is hard to see how any justificatory strategy in this area could succeed without commitment to a normative conception of humanity. In attempting to work out such a conception, we can turn to philosophical anthropology, the subdiscipline investigating what is distinctive about humans in comparison with other living beings. After countering some widely endorsed arguments against such a turn, (...) the paper first sets out the requirements facing a philosophical anthropology that might plausibly underwrite human rights. I argue that our account should be unencumbered by metaphysical assumptions and avoid the pitfalls of formalism, dualism, and scientism; take its point of departure from the normative self-understanding constitutive of our form of biological life; and define humanity in non-speciesist, generic terms, as a categorially distinct life-form whose integrity requires protection by legal norms applying universally to all of its bearers. In the next step, I identify key elements for such an account in the works of Aristotle and three modern thinkers who reworked the Aristotelian conception of rational animality in a post-Kantian spirit of commitment to human self-determination: namely, Hegel, Marx, and Plessner. In connection with each of these authors I address contemporary approaches to their arguments that bear on the justification and substantive content of human rights. (shrink)

This essay examines the European Union's regulatory response to the rise of artificial intelligence, centring on the AI Act as a landmark piece of legislation. Drawing on historical parallels—notably from Roman law—Junqueira argues that the challenges of attributing responsibility for AI-driven harm are not unprecedented, and that legal orders have traditionally addressed comparable problems through incremental, rather than abrupt, normative developments. The essay analyses the AI Act's architecture of responsibility, which distributes duties across a network of roles (providers, deployers, importers, (...) distributors) and attaches obligations to objective risk categories and use cases rather than to subjective intent. It highlights the Act's deliberate exclusion of systems used exclusively for military, defence, or national security purposes, whilst noting the dynamic character of this exclusion when systems are repurposed. The author situates the AI Act within the EU's broader constitutional identity and its aspiration to act as a normative power, arguing that the regulation reflects a commitment to democratic values, the rule of law, and fundamental rights. The essay further contends that the regulation of AI must be underpinned by a robust moral scaffolding that preserves the exclusively human nature of responsibility, particularly in judicial decision-making, where the irreducible singularity of human deliberation resists reduction to algorithmic pattern-matching. The text concludes by calling on the research community to develop principled doctrinal responses that prevent the EU's regulatory openness to moderation from becoming an unfruitful first step. (shrink)

Many teachers of human rights at post-secondary institutions are aware of a creeping pessimism about the subject among students. Rising authoritarianism, climate catastrophe, grinding wars, mass involuntary migration, rampant misinformation and the unsettling possibilities of AI have made the world promised by the human rights project seem a distant prospect, and students express skepticism about its liberatory power or even more modest utility. Confronted with students more eager to critique rights than parse their form and content, the author turned this (...) critical impulse into the material for a course, “Beyond Human Rights Critique?” Taking this reflex for critique as a starting point, the course asked students to reflect on the stakes of such a sensibility, and to move beyond the satisfactions of critique to think about what comes after (and as a result) of such an orientation. Framed around the author’s experience teaching this course, the article asks: what is the value and function of critique in human rights pedagogy today? (shrink)

In this provocative book, Bartosz Biskup advocates for a reform of the right to marry, arguing that this right should extend beyond romantic or sexual couples to include any relationship that provides care and support. -/- Through philosophical and legal analysis of the European Convention on Human Rights, Biskup concludes that the right to marry is currently an empty status that neglects to explain why marriage deserves special protection. He adopts an ameliorative legal philosophy to illustrate how relationships should receive (...) legal recognition based on care and vulnerability rather than sexual intimacy. Biskup''s research encompasses various common situations including adult siblings sharing a home, friends who become primary caregivers and chosen families. Rather than abolishing marriage, Biskup outlines how the institution of marriage can be improved to create a more just family law system while still upholding the human right to marry. -/- Laws of Caring provides a novel ontological framework for understanding legal kinds and institutional change through social amendment, making it a valuable resource for scholars and students of legal philosophy, family law and social ontology. It is also highly relevant to human rights practitioners in NGOs and international organizations who focus on family diversity, especially the rights of LGBTQ+ and non-conjugal families. (shrink)

On its face, to disenfranchise another’s grief is to treat them unjustly — but how is this injustice best conceptualised? Here I situate this injustice within the claim that grief should be acknowledged as a human right. Traditionally, human rights have largely been understood in terms of protections related to the civil, political, legal, or economic spheres. Recently however, several human rights theorists (Brownlee etc.) have proposed that human rights should also reflect our fundamental interests in establishing and sustaining worthwhile (...) interpersonal relationships. I argue that the human right to grief is among these ‘social human rights’ because grieving is a manifestation of a number of valued capabilities, including our abilities to love and be loved, to be attached to things and people outside ourselves, and to reflect upon and cultivate our understandings of what is meaningful in our lives, especially in response to transitions in the interpersonal relations that form the basis of our practical identities. (shrink)

Human civilization often defines humanity through institutions such as religion, morality, law, or political systems. However, these structures frequently produce division rather than genuine understanding. This article argues that the true foundation of humanity lies in proper consciousness or proper awareness. In this framework, consciousness and awareness are treated as equivalent terms that represent a state of mind characterized by love, freedom, intelligence, questioning, and rational thinking. When individuals operate without this awareness, inherited beliefs and identities dominate their actions, producing (...) conflict and fragmentation. Drawing connections with thinkers such as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt, the article suggests that authentic humanity begins when individuals consciously examine inherited assumptions rather than unconsciously living through them. (shrink)

Radical Worker occupies a central position within the author’s long-term research program on work, value, neurodivergent epistemology, and systemic violence in contemporary capitalism. While earlier works such as Society Without Trust focus on societal structure and system creativity, this volume constitutes the first comprehensive articulation of the author’s theory of self-determined work as a distinct socio-economic and epistemic category. The book integrates artistic research, autoethnographic fieldwork, and theoretical analysis to examine how dominant labor systems systematically exclude neurodivergent modes of perception, (...) cognition, and contribution. Concepts that later become structurally formalized—such as the MNO model, value thresholds, diversity thresholds, submergence/indimergence/emergence cycles, and the notion of work as relational agency—are developed here in applied and experiential form. Radical Worker functions as a bridge between empirical intervention and theoretical consolidation. It documents long-term real-world experiments within corporations, welfare institutions, and media systems, treating these interventions not as illustrations but as epistemic instruments. In this sense, the work contributes simultaneously to Artistic Research, Critical Autism Studies, political economy, and labor theory. This Author Accepted Manuscript version is provided for scholarly and research purposes. It differs from the published book edition in layout and format and should be read as part of a larger, non-linear research corpus developed across subsequent books and papers, rather than as a standalone manifesto. About: Timothy Speed – neurodivergent artist, poverty theorist, and relentless disruptor – throws himself between assembly line, boardroom, and bureaucratic frontline. As a Radical Worker, he refuses the paycheck as measure of worth, working instead by moral coherence, ecological resonance, and existential sense. Whether infiltrating corporations undercover or applying to run Germany’s state TV, Speed exposes the deep protocols of a system that converts dignity into obedience and creativity into currency. For the Artistic Research movement, this book proves that art isn't commentary – it's infrastructure. Research happens in real-time, in real life. For Critical Autism Studies, it’s a rare inside-out account: autistic intensity, rule clarity and focused resistance sharpen into a tool that cuts through institutional myth. For anyone forced to work – or forced not to – this is a living roadmap: self-determined labour, basic income, and the politics of commoning are not just imagined here – they’re practiced, tested, lived. Speed flips the script: poverty is not a lack, but a refusal to play by a broken game. Forced labour is social exclusion. And the true metric of wealth? The time left untouched by the system’s noise. Radical Worker is manifesto, fieldwork, and survival guide – a call not to adapt, but to remake the world from the bottom up. (shrink)

Laura García-Portela argues that shifting from the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) to the Beneficiary Pays Principle (BPP) in order to rectify climate injustice is unjustified if based solely on the latter’s ability to address the causation and excusable ignorance objections more effectively. She contends that defenders of the BPP must demonstrate that the benefits used to address losses and damages originate from the same source as the harms to be rectified. However, she deems this requirement unwarranted due to the difficulty (...) of linking climate change to specific extreme weather events. Furthermore, she asserts that the excusable ignorance objection relates to the fairness of imposing unforeseen burdens on agents who emitted without knowledge of future responsibilities. Consequently, the BPP must address this issue in a manner similar to the PPP. Based on her insights, this paper argues that a shift to the BPP is nevertheless justified, especially if the Climate Enrichment Principle is adopted. (shrink)

This research aims to chart a new horizon for human rights theory, centered on the "subject breathing here and now". First, following the historical development of rights such as the right to privacy, this study clarifies the philosophical prerequisites of personality rights. By conceptualizing the "Right of the Soul" within a secular framework of legal philosophy as the equivalent of a mathematical imaginary axis (i), it explores the possibility of representing the invisible "erosion of the soul" as a geometric area. (...) Furthermore, it cites suicide resulting from digital lynching as a case study and addresses the existence of "Information Pollution." This work is a deliberate attempt to construct a concrete and inviolable "bulwark" against the systematic, albeit unconscious, dismantling of personhood prevalent in modern society and legal philosophy. Within the history of philosophy, this study redefines the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of the "soul" as a secular structure through the lenses of phenomenology and neuroscience, presenting a synthetic theory—without ostensible novelty—that serves as a critical ontological foundation for personality rights. | 本研究は、「いま、ここで呼吸する主体」として尊重されるための、新たな人権論の地平を提示することを目指す。まず、プライバシー権などの発達に倣い、人格権の前提条件を法哲学的に明確化する。そして、世俗側の法 哲学の枠組み内における「魂の権利」を、数学的な虚数軸に相当する概念とすることで、目に見えない「魂の削り取られ」を面積として表現する可能性を模索する。また、適用例としてデジタルリンチによる自死を挙げ、情 報公害の存在に言及する。現代社会と法哲学において無自覚に、しかし組織的に行われてきたであろう人格の解体に対して、具体的かつ不可侵の「防壁」を築く試みである。なお、哲学史上においては、プラトン・アリスト テレス的魂概念を、現象学と神経科学を通じて世俗側の構造として再定義し、人格権の存在論的基礎として提示する、新規性のない統合理論である。. (shrink)

This Open Access book offers a philosophical exploration of eco-anxiety. As knowledge about the rapidly degrading living conditions on Earth becomes more accurate, the impacts of environmental problems become more visible, and Anthropocene scenarios proliferate in films, television series, and novels, eco-anxiety emerges as a global and socially widespread phenomenon. Given the scale and severity of planetary boundary transgressions, feeling anxious about the future of human and non-human life has become a fitting emotional response. But what exactly is eco-anxiety? And (...) how can we address its adverse effects on mental health and harness its constructive behavioural responses? This book answers these questions by developing an in-depth conceptual analysis of the notion of eco-anxiety and explaining how ecological citizenship, with its focus on hope, carbon sobriety, and courage, can help us live with eco-anxiety. (shrink)

This paper presents "Heliocentrism of Time" as an epistemological supplement to "The Theory of Absolute Breath." It defines the somatic-physiological preconditions of intellectual genesis as "genesis infrastructure" and proposes "genesis consistency" as a meta-normative criterion for epistemic validity. -/- Modern intellect has fallen into a "theoretical unconsciousness," forgetting its bodily foundation and leading to the systemic suffocation of life. By establishing "breath"—the intersection of consciousness (will) and life (unconsciousness)—as the epistemological zero point and vertically synchronizing past, present, and future through (...) "Temporal Alignment," this paper rejects "performative inconsistency" where intellectual enactment undermines its own respiratory bases. Finally, it argues for the legitimacy of "autonomous halt" (Void/空) as a logical limiter against civilizational self-destruction. -/- The core arguments are based on the author's own everyday physical observations since childhood. (shrink)

Contributing to the critical human rights education scholarship, this article explores how situated assessments such as the Critical Response Paper, Opinion Piece, Human Rights Report & Strategic Plan, Medea Mock Trial, and Human Rights Council Simulation center positionality to invite students to grapple with the potentialities and limits of human rights. Situated assessments first ask students to employ critical feeling and thinking and active reflexivity to make sense of how their lives are intertwined with broader political structures. Then, they guide (...) students to apply these dispositions to experience how different actors - individuals, activists, social movements, non-governmental organizations, states, and the United Nations, practice human rights globally. As a result, they foster knowledge from multiple perspectives about the ethos, mechanisms, processes, and institutions that circumscribe human rights, prompting students to consider power structures and historical contingencies while imagining radical futures. (shrink)

This paper advances the thesis that poverty is not a socio-economic condition but an ontological consequence: the result of systematically withdrawn Eigenzeit. Poverty emerges where the world can no longer be bound, where action is organized without bearing, responsibility without world, and time without irreversibility. The point of departure is the concept of Eigenzeit developed in earlier work as the non-delegable instantiation of world-time in action. Eigenzeit names the condition under which life becomes structurally viable at all, because decision irreversibly (...) binds world. The paper argues that modern systems of work, markets, and social security structurally undermine this condition. Wage labour replaces world-binding with procedural time; social security systems administer the loss of Eigenzeit without being able to remedy it. Poverty thus appears not as a lack of resources, but as a permanent impossibility of living Eigenzeit. This impossibility is conceptualized here as existential prohibition: not as repression or exclusion, but as the structural prevention of viable world-binding. Neurodivergent existences do not function as a special case in this analysis, but as early indicators. Through them, what applies more generally becomes visible: where Eigenzeit is systematically rendered impossible, it is not only individual biographies that collapse, but the ontological viability of societal orders themselves. The paper does not propose reforms; it marks a limit: poverty is not solvable as long as the world is merely administered. The analysis developed here does not arise from detached observation, but from long-term operatoric research in which Eigenzeit was systematically blocked under real institutional conditions. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of Eigenzeit as an analytical instrument for investigating neurodivergent life realities. Eigenzeit is neither a concept generated by nor specific to neurodivergence, but arises from prior boundary work on the ontology of decision, responsibility, and world-binding. Eigenzeit denotes the non-delegable instantiation of world-time in action: that form of time in which world is bound at all, carried, and irreversibly co-enacted. Time is not understood here as an ordering category or a logic of deadlines, but as (...) the temporal dimension of enacted world-binding—as the structural context of world-capability. On the basis of this general conception, the paper shows why autistic and ADHD biographies in particular are systematically pushed into overload, breakdown, and dependency within modern institutions. Central societal systems—administration, labour markets, education, social law—operate in time- and structure-administrative regimes that presuppose world-binding while simultaneously undermining it: through standardisation, fragmentation, the simulation of responsibility, and the replacement of real binding by procedures. Deadlines, pacing, and file-based formality are not the core problem here, but symptoms of a deeper deficit of world-capability. Neurodivergence is thus not treated as a deficit, but as a different cost and binding structure of world-relation, in which this structural inoperability becomes visible early and with particular sharpness. Autistic integrity is often characterised by high binding strictness and low capacity for simulation vis-à-vis externally imposed world-regimes; ADHD frequently exhibits a dynamic in which fragmented, externally steered contexts do not allow for stable world-binding. Many phenomena commonly read as “symptoms”—exhaustion, breakdown, avoidance, dysfunctional adaptation—can therefore be reconstructed as Eigenzeit collapse: as the temporal-structural consequence of a prior withdrawal of world-binding. In continuity with They Cannot Understand, Eigenzeit is understood as a specification of the concepts of incommensurability, inoperability, and non-translatability. The paper shifts the focus away from temporal adaptation and therapeutic normalisation toward the question of under what conditions world remains bindable at all—and why the systematic withdrawal of this capacity destabilises not only neurodivergent existences, but the ontological viability of social reality itself. (shrink)

The current crises of modern societies—ranging from political incapacity to act, through the reproducibility crisis in science, to the simulation of responsibility in administration and AI—cannot be adequately understood as mere problems of programs, morality, or governance. They point to a deeper deficit: an inadequate ontology of time. Starting from the dominance of block-time models in physics, philosophy of science, and political practice, this paper develops the concept of Eigenzeit as a categorical alternative. Eigenzeit denotes the non-delegable instantiation of world-time (...) in human action, in which decision, responsibility, and irreversible world-binding are inseparably intertwined. Time thus appears not as a given dimension or measurable duration, but as the effect of irreversible closures in structurally incomplete worlds. In contrast to block time, probabilistic models of freedom, and information-ontological approaches (e.g., simulation, “It from Bit”), decision is not understood as a selective or aggregative act, but as an ontologically binding set-point. This entails fundamental consequences: reproducibility proves to be a criterion of closed world-forms; politics proves structurally incapable of deciding Eigenzeit collectively; and human and fundamental rights prove insufficient insofar as they implicitly address the human being without protected Eigenzeit as an object. Eigenzeit is thus not proposed as another model of time, but as a necessary ontological category for irreversible, non-simulable world-conditions, and as the foundation of a theory of societal reality formation beyond administration, simulation, and symbolic politics. (shrink)

This paper examines the failure of the global moral commitment embodied in the phrase “Never Again,” arguing that genocide persists not because its warning signs are misunderstood, but because responsibility is applied selectively. Situating genocide within international law, moral philosophy, and political practice, the analysis demonstrates how narrow legal definitions, institutional paralysis, and geopolitical convenience enable mass civilian harm to continue under conditions of visibility rather than ignorance. Through comparative examination of Rwanda, Sudan, and Gaza, the paper shows how recognition (...) often arrives only after abandonment, while ongoing atrocities are obscured through legal debate, linguistic dilution, and selective outrage. The study further interrogates the role of international institutions whose symbolic condemnation frequently substitutes for meaningful enforcement, producing moral injury and ethical exhaustion at a global scale. By reframing genocide as a problem of responsibility rather than memory, the paper argues that “Never Again” has failed not as a slogan, but as a practice—revealing a moral order in which some lives remain negotiable. The analysis concludes that ethical responsibility cannot be confined by borders, legality, or political alignment, and that moral refusal in the face of normalized atrocity constitutes an obligation rather than an option. (shrink)

This paper examines the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States as a manifestation of state power over bodily sovereignty rather than as a moral dispute over life. Situating the post–Roe v. Wade legal landscape within political philosophy, feminist ethics, and international human rights law, the analysis argues that abortion restrictions function as instruments of governance that discipline bodies, regulate gender, and reproduce structural inequality. The paper demonstrates how compelled pregnancy disproportionately burdens women, the poor, racialized communities, and those (...) already subject to social surveillance, while reframing autonomy as conditional rather than inherent. Drawing on global ethical frameworks and comparative religious traditions, it challenges the selective use of theology and morality in state legislation, highlighting the tension between moral pluralism and imposed belief. The analysis further situates U.S. reproductive policy within a broader international context, where forced continuation of pregnancy is increasingly recognized as a violation of human rights and bodily integrity. By treating the body as a political site, the paper argues that reproductive coercion represents a broader authoritarian drift in contemporary governance, revealing how rights once grounded in privacy and autonomy can be reconstituted as privileges subject to state control. (shrink)

Insert abstract text here. This paper examines discrimination in the United States in 2025 as a structurally normalized mode of governance rather than a residual failure of liberal democracy. It argues that contemporary hierarchies of race, religion, gender, class, age, and identity are increasingly produced through formally neutral legal regimes, administrative practices, and security logics that preserve the appearance of equality while generating substantive harm. Drawing on international human rights law, comparative political ethics, and global philosophical scholarship, the analysis situates (...) the United States within a widening international critique concerning its treatment of its own population. The paper foregrounds external perspectives—United Nations treaty bodies, special rapporteurs, regional human rights institutions, and non-U.S. scholars—to examine how racism, Islamophobia, immigration enforcement, gendered governance, and cultural marginalization are interpreted beyond the American moral frame. Particular attention is given to the racialized use of immigration enforcement, the persistence of racial terror and impunity in the southern United States, and the symbolic politics surrounding Puerto Rico and Latino representation, revealing how colonial residues and cultural hierarchy continue to structure inclusion and exclusion. The overturning of Roe v. Wade is analyzed as a critical inflection point, signaling the re-localization of bodily autonomy and the fragility of substantive rights under conditions of moral federalism. This development is treated not as an isolated legal event but as a precursor to broader contests over bodily sovereignty, gender regulation, and state authority. The paper further examines classism, ageism, and economic stratification as intersecting mechanisms of disposability, extending prior analyses of structural neglect into the terrain of discrimination. Finally, the paper addresses internal fractures within contemporary rights movements, including emerging separations between gay and transgender advocacy, framing these divisions as both governance dilemmas and ethical questions of pluralism rather than as disputes over legitimacy or identity. Drawing on secular moral philosophy and diverse religious ethical traditions, the paper argues that forced moral convergence can undermine democratic pluralism while simultaneously weakening collective resistance to structural injustice. By situating U.S. discrimination within international legal norms and moral theory, this paper contends that contemporary American inequality reflects not merely social division but an ethical misalignment between democratic ideals and institutional practice. Discrimination in 2025 is shown to function less as overt exclusion than as managed hierarchy—legible to global observers, normalized domestically, and increasingly resistant to redress through formal law alone. (shrink)

This paper examines aging in the United States as a condition shaped less by biology than by governance. It argues that abandonment, delay, and administrative erosion constitute a form of structural violence, in which harm is inflicted not through force but through neglect. By situating Social Security, healthcare access, and late-life insecurity within international ethical and human rights frameworks, the paper reframes aging as a political outcome rather than a natural inevitability. It demonstrates how lifelong inequality—across income, race, gender, and (...) place—determines who is permitted to grow old and with what dignity. Viewed from a global perspective, the United States’ approach to aging reveals a moral economy in which longevity is unevenly distributed and care is treated as conditional. The paper contends that when a state allows populations to fade away through policy design, it violates fundamental principles of democratic responsibility and human dignity. (shrink)