Human Rights Defenders and Global Justice

• In Event: Human Rights & Urban and Local Politics Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Human Rights on a National and International Scale Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

The human rights defender identity was established in 1998 by a UN “Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” It is commonly referred to as the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. Use of the defender as a global human rights category brings many kinds of issues under the global human rights “umbrella.” Using case study and process-tracing, this paper tests the hypothesis that, because human rights defenders come in many shapes and sizes related to differing local, national, and global contexts, global norms of protection for defenders effectively expands the scope of human rights to cover more locally defined social justice issues, thus making global human rights campaigning more inclusive of local concerns. By linking local advocates to claims of global human rights protection, the defender concept places the safety and political rights of defenders themselves in an equal-treatment or non-discrimination framework, on which there is a high degree of global legal consensus.

Author

• Ann Marie Clark, Purdue University