Responses to Human Rights Abuses: Democracies, Marginalized Groups, and Justice

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

One of the core tenets of liberal democracy is the guaranteed protection of human rights, including minority rights, and yet both consolidated and emerging democracies often have difficulties ensuring this protection and remedying instances where this key democratic principle has been breached, whether those breaches are recent, historical, or both. The papers on this panel address this common shortcoming of democracies (and would-be democracies) worldwide by looking at how governments and the most vulnerable and marginalized citizens ignore or attain human rights in the aftermath of conflict, government repression, and state-sanctioned violence. Each of the papers shows how governments struggle to fulfill the human rights expectations associated with being a democratic or democratizing state, firstly by examining how governments and citizens respond to severe, state-sanctioned human rights abuses, and secondly by exploring how these varying responses are influenced by the active engagement of affected individuals, by coalitions of local pro-justice groups, and by expanding global human rights norms. By studying the responses, tools, strategies and alliances that have been crafted by marginalized groups in the United States, Peru, Nepal and the European Union in order for these disadvantaged citizens to have a voice in both emerging and long-established democratic contexts, the papers on this panel offer strategies for how, when individuals have seen their democratic rights eroded, they can begin reclaiming their right to equity and inclusion in a heterogeneous society. The papers also show how even solidly democratic governments are often reluctant to admit to past human rights abuses, to respond to citizens’ demands for change, and to implement policies that would better protect citizens’ human rights. The papers on this panel provide a multi-faceted, global, methodologically diverse look at these issues, as they use original data from interviews, focus groups, and surveys, as well as content analysis, to analyze the demand for democratic reforms after police brutality in Baltimore, the implementation of post-conflict reparations across regions in Peru, the difficulty of crafting a “fair” response to human rights abuses in Nepal, and the unequal human rights protection standards in Western and Eastern European Union member states. Thus, this panel raises pointed and pertinent questions about the extent to which democracies fulfill their promise to protect the human rights of all citizens and how democratic rights can be eroded and ignored when marginalized and victimized groups are not actively working to hold their government accountable.

Sub Unit

• Division 45: Human Rights

Cosponsor

• Division 32: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Individual Presentations

• Community Justice and Change: Residents’ Perceptions of Baltimore Police Reforms - Moira K. Lynch, University of Wisconsin - River Falls

• Grassroots Reparative Justice: Local Victim Participation in Post-conflict Peru - Fiorella Patricia Vera-Adrianzen, University of New Mexico

• Public Opinion and Domestic Reputation of Post-Conflict Peace Process in Nepal - Prakash Adhikari, Central Michigan University

• Just as Unjust? Transitional Justice Policies in Old vs. New EU Member States - Claire Greenstein, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Chair

• Risa Kitagawa Northeastern University

Discussant

• Kathy L. Powers University of New Mexico