The most recommended human rights books

This book questions orthodoxies that need questioning. Shue argues that rights to the goods one needs to survive (like food, potable water, and clean air) are just as morally urgent and just as important to protect as rights to bodily security.

He offers a bold defense of the moral imperative to ensure everyone in the world has their most important rights, including rights to subsistence goods, protected. This, in turn, has significant implications for US foreign policy. It shows the status quo—in which states like the US retain massive amounts of wealth, safeguarding their own citizens’ pursuit of even their most trivial preferences while people elsewhere in the world starve—to be morally indefensible.

In 1991, Dworkin taught at Oxford a seminar titled “Abortion, Euthanasia and Dementia”.

Until then, I never paid too much attention to these subjects, not more than any lay person with general knowledge. I attended the seminar simply because Dworkin delivered it.

This was the most interesting and thought-provoking seminar I have ever attended in my life. It opened my interest in medical ethics, a field that is still one of my preoccupations.

Dworkin was writing at that time Life’s Dominion. Each week he would circulate a chapter of his book, to be discussed in the following week.

We were some twelve students in class; each of us read and commented on the chapters. There was a very lively exchange and fierce debates.

Again, while I disagreed with some of Dworkin’s arguments, I could not but appreciate the force of his reasoning. After that seminar, I decided to embark… show more.

Five women find salvation in each other in a beachside hamlet on Uruguay’s eastern coast. With no running water or electricity, the isolated Cabo Polonio becomes their sanctuary, a place where these cantoras (women who "sing”) can exercise their voice – something denied them as queer women under the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1970s and 80s.

The book follows the friends over the span of 35 years as they continue to return to this family home of theirs, sometimes together, sometimes with new lovers. Beautifully written, the book is brimming with heart and is a testament to the power of activism and solidarity. 

The author provides evidence that treating one another with dignity, encourages people to become more connected and more capable of creating meaningful and collaborative relationships. Drawing on her extensive experience in international conflict resolution along with insights from evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience, she explains what the elements of dignity are and how violating them triggers defensiveness. Defensiveness makes cooperation and collaboration unlikely in any situation often leading to resistance, aggression, sabotage and even violence.

Too often, books on human rights assume that human rights are natural or progressive. They seem unaware that around the world we cannot even agree on the fundamentals of life and death; think of abortion, women’s rights, homosexuality, and the death sentence. This is one of the few books that examine how human rights charters come about. 

In this case, the origins are not what we imagine them to be and should encourage us to question whether human rights are, in fact, universal. As the title hints, the origins of the European human rights charter were far from being as progressive as they are assumed to have been today. This book should be required reading for all who are interested in human rights.

I love Anderson’s narrative about the formation of nations in the 19th Century and what he calls print capitalism, promoted through books and newspapers. A market organised around the same language fosters both the economy and the very much-needed feeling of community required to organise the state and foster industrial capitalism.

More than four decades after its publication, the book remains thought-provoking as it makes me ask whether a single language suffices to hold nations and markets together.

The book is long but it is worth the effort because it is the most comprehensive and approachable book about the origins of our notion of individual autonomy and identity. We take this idea for granted now but Taylor shows how it came about over the centuries in the West. Taylor is a philosopher but he is also alert to the effects of political upheaval and social change. And he is a very important commentator on our current dilemmas, including about human rights, the rights of the community, and the importance of religion.

Evan Stark’s book introduced me to the concept of  ‘coercive control’.

It is a continued and malevolent pattern of domination and entrapment that makes family violence a human rights crime. He also noted that the perpetrator, often a man, uses gendered stereotypes to control the woman, to convince her that it is she who is at fault.

Evan Stark’s insights helped me connect the gendered cultural practices of money with family violence. When these cultural ways of dealing with money were used for entrapment and abuse, money as a medium of care became a medium of coercive control.

My final choice is a scintillating work of scholarship by Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Entitled Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, it draws upon a range of reportage, political theory, poetry, and other texts to ask challenging questions about the stance that modern states and citizens in Western societies adopt towards refugees who are sometimes described as distant strangers. By engaging with authors who are relatively well known, such as George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, and with those who may be less familiar, such as the American journalist Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) and the contemporary Palestinian Lebanese-born poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Stonebridge insists that it is essential to portray refugees as deserving and demanding something other than charity or humanitarian concern no matter how well-intentioned. Instead, the appropriate response is to demand… show more.

The concept of human rights will seem to many at first sight a powerful, positive, and relatively uncontroversial idea. However, the concept is both historically and philosophically bound up with the political theory of liberalism which is very controversial. Many people praise or condemn liberalism without a clear idea of what it is, how it developed historically, or its diverse forms. Helena Rosenblatt’s valuable history tells the story of liberalism from ancient times to the present, showing us the various forms it can take and has taken.

Contrary to widely held beliefs liberalism has been concerned not only with individual rights but with individual duties and the common good. Thus liberalism is not simply opposed to conservatism or socialism but has complex relationships with these rival philosophies. All contemporary debates about liberalism are likely to remain confused if they fail to take account of Rosenblatt’s history.