international human rights

As kids, we all heard someone tell us that it's wrong to lie...but as we grew older, we realized that people lie all the time. Politicians, presidents, and even executives at corporations tell lies—big and small. As citizens, there are obvious exceptions where lying is wrong, for instance; perjury, lying on your employment application, or lying to get a bank loan. But do we have a right to lie? And if so, what are the boundaries?

On this episode, we speak with UCLA Professor of Philosophy and Law Seana Shiffrin and George Washington University Professor of Law Catherine Ross. They discuss both the philosophical arguments against lying and the legal arguments against notorious lies made by President Trump and former Congressman George Santos.

How do you stop a government from continuing to commit human rights abuses? You could take them to an international court of justice, or file a complaint at the UN. But none of those bodies have any enforcement power. Short of going to war, the only option on the table in most international situations is to name and shame. But is that strategy effective?

In her new book, “The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works and When It Backfires,” University of Chicago political scientist Rochelle Terman argues that there is a real dilemma to international human rights pressure: Shaming is most common in situations where it is least likely to be effective; and, most troublingly, it can often make human rights abuses worse.

Link to the advertised Chicago Booth Review Podcast:  https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/podcast?source=cbr-sn-bbr-camp:podcast24-20240222

We speak with historian Dirk Moses about the origins of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: the lawyer behind it (Raphael Lemkin), its influence on the public understanding of genocide, how it has been used, and how political the process of accountability has become. 

For further reading: The Problems of Genocide, by Dirk Moses and the Genocide Convention.

This episode is supported by Indiana University's Presidential Arts and Humanities Program, the Tobias Center, the African Studies Program, the Center for the Study of the Middle East, and the Huh Jum Ok Human Rights Foundation.

Sound editing by James Dorton and Emily Leisz Carr, mixing by Seth Olansky, music "Souffle Nocturne" by Ben Cohen.

Production by Shilla Kim and Clémence Pinaud.

For the first time in decades, the future of abortion rights in the US is uncertain. With the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, The Supreme Court has forced Americans to reconsider and fight for a new vision of a right to abortion should be.

But it’s important to remember that debates about abortion don’t end at our borders. The end of Roe will have global ramifications for how other countries think about abortion rights but, as the US re-enters this international debate, are their lessons we can learn from how other countries have constituted, or failed to constitute, a right to abortion?

To find some answers we spoke with Julie Suk, a Professor of Law at Fordham University, Catalina Martinez Coral, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Paola Bergallo, Professor of Law at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.

It seems obvious that war harms civilian populations, not least children. But research can reveal much more about the nature and scale of those harms and perhaps also about what can be done about them.

This week we’re focusing on a new study of the impact of war upon rates of infant mortality. The study is by Rod Abouharb, Associate Professor of International Relations here in the UCL Department of Political Science.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Abouharb, M.R. 'War and infant mortality rates.' Journal of Human Rights.

UCL’s Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy offers a uniquely stimulating environment for the study of all fields of politics, including international relations, political theory, human rights, public policy-making and administration. The Department is recognised for its world-class research and policy impact, ranking among the top departments in the UK on both the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the latest Guardian rankings.