‘I Can't Go Back Because If I Go Back I Would Die’: How Asylum Seekers Manage Talk about Returning Home by Highlighting the Importance of Safety

Asylum seekers living in the UK have been shown to have fled danger in their countries of origin, only to face hardship and the threat of deportation once there. This paper draws on the discursive psychological approach to address the way in which asylum seekers in the UK manage questions about returning to their country of origin. Interviews were conducted with nine asylum seekers in a refugee support centre in the Midlands. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis. The analysis showed that participants drew on the notion of safety to counter suggestions that they should return to their country of origin and to manage their identity as legitimate asylum seekers in need of support. The use of this strategy and the use of interviews for discursive analysis are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How bad can a good enough parent be?

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest.     

Human dignity – the foundation of political human rights? Empirical research among youth in Germany

This article focuses on political human rights and on the empirically assessed legitimation of these rights. This research considers the rights of refugees, the active and passive right to vote, and the right of protest. Given that the research is empirical research, respondents are requested to express agreement, disagreement or neutrality. The assumption is that contextual factors influence people’s assessment of rights. One contextual factor is, firstly, the concept of human dignity. International human rights covenants regard human dignity as the very foundation of all rights. That said, the concept of human dignity is subject to different understandings and – certainly in the past – the understanding of what constitutes human dignity has varied. Dignity can be related to the appreciation of the person given by others, to the moral behaviour of a person, and it can be understood as inherently related to the individual as a human being. It is this last understanding that forms the basis of modern declarations of human rights. Furthermore, the respondents’ value orientations and religious beliefs, along with society’s socio-political perception, will be examined to ascertain whether these factors have any influence on respondents’ attitudes towards political rights. The key question is: does human dignity influence people’s view of the legitimacy of political rights and do other factors also count? The empirical analysis was undertaken done with German youth (N=2244). Findings show that the concept of inherent human dignity is a strong predictor for respondents’ attitudes towards political rights, but that it is not the unique predictor; relevant concepts are the value orientation of youth and their socio-political orientation. The significance of religious beliefs as a predictor is low.     

L’affaire Lambert et ses enjeux constitutionnels

Despite a great number of legal analyses concerning the Vincent Lambert Case, only few of them adopt a constitutional point of view. This lack questions the relevance of Constitutional Law to protect rights and liberties. That is particularly true concerning the matter of the end of life. The right to life and the patient's right to consent (and refuse) to a medical treatment are not specifically enshrined by French constitution, (set aside the simple right to live freely). Therefore, this legal vagueness may lead to various interpretations of the fundamental law, which could promote rights and liberties as a tool protecting one's life, as well as it may recognize a real right to die.     

Human rights and religious education in the contentious context of conflict-troubled societies: perspectives from human rights education

This article explores some of the tensions that are created from the entanglement of religion and human rights and offers a possible response to these tensions in the context of religious education in conflict-troubled societies. It is suggested that a historicised and politicised approach in religious education in conjunction with human rights education perspectives can promote three important aims: taking power relations between peoples, societies and cultures as sources of problematising the meaning(s) and consequences of both religion and human rights; developing a teaching and learning process in and through which the emphasis is not on identification with religious or cultural identity, but rather a process through which new and productive ways of relationality with the ‘other’ are developed; and, encouraging students to interrogate moralistic discourses of religion or human rights that often prevent the enactment of friendship, compassion and shared fate.     

Asynchrony in Attitudes Toward Abortion and Gay Rights: The Challenge to Values Alignment

Political commentators tend to assume that Americans who share a particular religious affiliation think similarly about values issues and that values questions are aligned. Although religious affiliation is a strong predictor of attitudes toward abortion and gay rights, there is differentiation within denominational subgroups with respect to both; for example, while majorities of mainline Protestants and Catholics favor gay marriage, many of their respective co‐religionists do not. Further, aggregate survey data shows asynchrony in within‐group attitudes on abortion and gay rights; for example, whereas Hispanic Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage than legal abortion, black Protestants are more likely to support legal abortion than gay marriage. Abortion and gay equality are discrete issues and give rise to divergent attitudes based on the lived reality of different ethnoreligious groups. These findings challenge the utility of the construct of the “values voter,” and underscore that abortion and gay rights should be recognized as separate public policy domains.     

The devil is in the local: provincial religious legislation in China, 2005–2012

Promulgated in the wake of the Regulations on Religious Affairs, the new set of 20 provincial regulations in China often adopt provisions in the central government statute, prescribing a more benign relationship between religion and the state, defining religious affairs narrowly to exclude internal administration issues of religious communities, stipulating protection of religious freedom before that of state authority, adopting a regulatory rather than administrative regime, removing the annual re-certification requirement of religious venues, increasing the institutional autonomy of religious communities in personnel matters and formation, and transferring the supervisory powers from state agencies to religious communities. At the same time, they also circumscribe the interventionist powers of the state, stipulating bureaucratic response time limits, publicising transparent procedures and specific norms for approving and disapproving religious activities, and not requiring religious communities to accept Party leadership. Despite their overall progressive direction, however, some benevolent central government regulations have not been incorporated by the new provincial regulations, notably those exempting religious communities from supporting state ideology, and those providing administrative appeal and judicial challenge for local government decisions on religious affairs.     

Victims,Their Stories,and Our Rights

Diana Meyers argues that breaking the silence of victims and attending to their stories are necessary steps towards realizing human rights. Yet using highly personal victims' stories to promote human rights raises significant moral concerns, hence Meyers suggests that before victims' stories can be accessed and used, it is morally imperative that requirements of informed consent and non‐retraumatization are secured. This article argues that while Meyers' proviso is important, and necessary, it may not be sufficient. First, one potential problem with seeking to secure “informed consent” is that one has to ask for the consent, and in the act of asking one is potentially retraumatizing the victim. Secondly, the assumption that victims have ownership right over their stories, which is a key premise in Meyers's argument, is much more problematic than may appear.     

Maya Moral and Ritual Discourse: Dialogical Groundings for Consuetudinary Law

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Highland Maya intellectuals and activists in Guatemala began to argue for the recognition of indigenous customary law, rooted in traditional Maya moral and ritual discourse. Such law is often in tension with the Western notion of rights (grounded in the idea of universal reason) that undergirds national and international treatises regarding indigenous peoples. This essay identifies three distinct but mutually engaged pairs of moral concepts—hot/cold, left/right (or positive/negative), and favorable/not favorable—articulated through K'iche' Maya quotidian and ceremonial practices and speech. It also identifies the extent to which they do not necessarily align with Western (Abrahamic and religious) notions of good and bad. These three pairs of moral terms, specifically as conserved through the high‐register of Maya discourse used by traditional ceremonial specialists, illustrate a normative means by which Highland Maya discern understandings of justice, and ground their advocacy for restorative (rather than retributive or punitive) justice.     

TRUTH TELLING AS REPARATIONS

Abstract: International instruments now defend a “right to the truth” for victims of political repression and violence and include truth telling about human rights violations as a kind of reparation as well as a form of redress. While truth telling about violations is obviously a condition of redress or repair for violations, it may not be clear how truth telling itself is a kind of reparations. By showing that concerted truth telling can satisfy four features of suitable reparations vehicles, I defend the idea that politically implemented modes of truth telling to, for, and by those who are victims of gross violation and injustice may with good reason be counted as a kind of reparations. Understanding the doubly symbolic character of reparations, however, makes clearer why truth telling is unlikely to be sufficient reparation for serious wrongs and is likely to be sensitive to the larger context of reparative activity and its social, political, and historical background.