Category: english
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Response to the European Convention and the Case of Homosexuality
Monday, October 27. Group 8: AT, AW, Yongho Kim Response to the European Convention and the Case of Homosexuality The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms System constitutes a model and a standard of its own in terms of effectiveness in enforcing Human Rights among its members. The Convention was…
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Gender
Yongho Kim Anthropology (248) of Religion October 20, 2003 Almost everywhere, religious beliefs and rituals blend with/reflect cultural constructions of gender. Why is this the case? And why is it so widespread that women are most vulnerable to accusations of harming others via their access to supernatural power? Try to analyze these puzzling situations using…
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ICCPR Mechanism
CH, JM. Discussion Group 7 What kinds of complaints are brought before the ICCPR? How does it differ from other treaty regimes? One of the components of the ICCPR Human Rights Committee is an optional protocol (ratified by 95 of the 144 states as of March 2000), with a critical provision stating that communications must be…
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Thought piece on International Roundtable: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Yongho Kim INTL245 Introduction to Human Rights October 20, 2003 Thought piece on International Roundtable: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Ngugi asserts in his paper, When the Margin Becomes the Center: African Identities in a Global Context, that political and economic remedies are not enough in addressing the internal problems in African societies, and that linguistic and…
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ICCPR
CH, HM, AP. Group 6 Response The UN currently has 6 treaty organs, which are distinguished from Charter organs in that they are not created under the UN charter, but are mandated by the 6 universal human rights treaties. The ICCPR Human Rights Committee is a treaty organ created by Articles 28-45 of the International…
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Obituaries
Yongho Kim Anthropology (248) of Religion October 15, 2003 Choose any issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press or the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper and read the Obituary Section. Describe any consistencies/commonalities that you observe across the majority of the obituaries. If there are any significant differences in one or more of the obituaries, describe…
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UN Security Council
AG, RR, EO. Thematic Mechanisms Thematic Mechanisms have been in use since 1980. They were originally created in response to disappearances in Argentina. In order to preserve national integrity, avoid political embarrassment, and protect economic issues, they were created on an international level as opposed to an individual country level. The Commission used a ‘thematic’…
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Ethnographic Analysis: Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta
Yongho Kim Anthropology 258: African Societies October 13, 2003 Jomo Kenyatta was a Gikuyu anthropologist trained in London under Bronislav Malinowski. He was pointed by the British colonial administration as the organizer of the Independence movements in Kenya and imprisoned for eight years, but was eventually released and became the first president of Kenya in…
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United Nations
JH, NE, RN. Group 4 The reading begins by discussing the problematic topic of enforcement in the realm of human rights. Serious questions are raised about the feasibility of consistent enforcement of human rights norms. It is relatively clear that some international enforcement is inevitable, regardless of it’s agreed upon desirability. However, the reading asserts that…
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Ritual
Yongho Kim Anth248: Anthropology of Religion October 1, 2003 Boyer distinguishes ritual from other human action in that rituals follow a specific rule, and a performed in a specific manner and place, and with a specific instrumentation. (231) Failure to comply with scripts is believed to lead to a vague danger, and so practitioners follow…
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Multivocality
Yongho Kim October 8, 2003 Anthropology (248) of Religion Our author Hicks tells us that blood is a multivocal symbol, and this makes it particularly useful in ritual contexts. What IS a “multivocal symbol”? How have cultures used blood to transmit powerful religious concepts? (Use specific ethnographic examples to illustrate your discussion.) Can you think…
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Sovereignty
SP, JP. October 8: Sovereignty This section explores the development and role of international organizations, looking at the more developed and complex institutional arrangements between states than the treaty committees we have seen so far. It is argued that international organizations have become important actors in the international system of sovereign states and have changed…
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Proposal: Political torture in southeastern Perú during 1992-2000
Yongho Kim October 3, 2003 INTL245: Intro to International Human Rights Paper topic proposal: Political torture in southeastern Perú during 1992-2000 The initial motives for the internal conflict Peru has lived for two decades can be attributed to the PCP-SL (Peruvian Communist Party Shining Path), which started acting in the southeastern region of Peru, in…
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Asian Values
IC, CP, This section discusses the current human rights debate between a number of East Asian states intent on economic development and Western states’ views of basic human rights and universalism. A first perspective comes from Bilhari Kausikan. In his comment, Kausikan argues that human rights touch upon delicate matters of culture and values. In…
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Children’s Rights
AM, NA This reading reviews the development of the formation of universal children’s rights. The main document in question is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), ratified by 191 states excluding only Somalia and the United States. The convention includes articles concerning a variety of rights among them the preservation of…
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Children's Rights (Amy Margolies, Nate Andersen)
INTL254 Introduction to International Human Rights Professor Nadya Nedelsky reaction essays prepared by students AM, NA
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Universal Rights versus Cultural Relativism: A Continuing Debate
“Gender” JU, SL Part I: Feminism and Female Genital Mutilation This section begins by reformulating the conflict between the objectives of human rights treaties, on the one hand, and customary laws and practices as well as religious beliefs on the other within the context of gender-related issues. As a starting point for discussion, Tracy Higgins…
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Universalism and Cultural Relativism
Discussion Group 9 Reaction Paper: This section further discusses whether rights are universal or relative in character. Advocates of universality argue that certain rights such as equal protection, freedom of speech and religion are common and thus can transcend cultures. In opposition, cultural relativists argue that rights and rules of morality are encoded in a…
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Response to The Notion of “Rights”: Origins and Relations to Duties
Group 8: AT, AW, Yongho Kim Response to The Notion of “Rights”: Origins and Relations to Duties. Monday, September 22nd. Chapter 5 provides a close-up of the notion of rights and their historical evolution. The notion of rights emerged as a refining of the concept of ‘natural law’ coined in the 17th and 18th centuries…
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Film Review of Lumumba
Film Review of Lumumba Anthropology 258: African Societies Yongho Kim I have seen Lumumba as a traditional film containing the ten years before and immediately following the independence of DRC. In other words, the fact that the theme was based in Africa did not tweak the way in which the narrative itself was presented, as…