Human Rights and Democracy

This paper evaluates the impact of competing “democratic”
discourses on human rights protection in Southeast Asia. The authors identify three key discourses emanating from a set of national governmental policies, advocacy positions promoted by both global and local civil society and international standards and procedures adopted by members of inter-governmental organisations. These discourses, the authors argue, are collectively shaping the emerging ASEAN inter-governmental human rights regime. The political impact of these competing “democratic” discourses and their complex interactions bring a cultural dimension to regional human rights. The authors argue that observers seeking to understand the emergence of norms, the establishment of institutions and their capacity to collectively protect regional human rights, need to understand these competing discourses.

Liberální demokracie je na počátku 21. stoletá údajně v krizi – politické, hospodářské, krizi důvěry, krizi reprezentace, krizi konstitucionalismu, krizi sebedůvěry. Existuje nějaká cesta ven? Nebo kam to vlastně liberální demokracie míří? Političtí filosofové a filosofky se domnívají, že právě jejich disciplína dokáže nejen formulovat patřičné správné otázky, ale také nabídnout konstruktivní odpovědi – i proto, že období závažných proměn a krizí byla v lidských dějinách vždy doprovázena vrcholnými výkony politického filosofování. Na tomto pozadí autorský tým z Katedry politologie FSS MU v Brně prozkoumává některé nejvýznamnější odborné diskuse, které v soudobé politické filosofii probíhají a které se týkají životaschopnosti liberální demokracie jakožto doposud dominantního modelu vládnutí. Kniha jako celek i jednotlivé kapitoly přitom oslovují jak širší odbornou veřejnost, pro niž může sloužit jako podnět k výzkumným snahám. Neméně významnou skupinu adresátů však tvoří i studenti a studentky politických věd, filosofie a dalších společenskovědních a humanitních oborů, jimž kniha nabízí pokročilý úvod do klíčových problémů současné politické filosofie.

[The book deals with the announced crisis of liberal democracy as perceived from within contemporary political philosophy – a discipline which is often considered by its practitioners to be especially qualified to not only pose the right questions, but also provide constructive answers. Against this background, the authors explore some core scholarly debates which address the viability of liberal democracy as the heretofore dominant model of political rule. By providing an advanced discussion of a number of central concerns of contemporary political philosophy, the book aims to apppeal both to broader scholarly audience and to students of political science, philosophy, and related fields of social sciences and humanities.]

El restablecimiento de la democracia en Argentina, hacia fines de 1983, movilizó a diversos sectores de la opinión pública. La revisión de lo sucedido durante el régimen dictatorial, así como los debates en torno a los problemas que la apertura política debería resolver, constituyeron un horizonte de interpelación entre diversos actores. En particular, aquellos que se identificaron con el espectro heterogéneo de instituciones y organizaciones ligadas al ámbito judío produjeron una serie de narrativas y experiencias que permiten reconocer el modo singular en que se revisó lo sucedido durante la dictadura, y el lugar que ocuparía la agenda de los derechos humanos en un clima de reconstrucción democrática. El presente trabajo se propone recomponer las posiciones en torno a cómo se constituyó tempranamente una representación sobre el carácter antisemita del régimen dictatorial y cómo esa imagen posicionó a los diversos actores de la comunidad judía como víctimas –o no– del régimen dictatorial y, por tanto, con legitimidad para operar sobre la recuperación democrática.

In the wake of high profile and recent events of blatant privacy violations, which also raise issues of democratic accountability as well as, at least potentially, undermining the legitimacy of current local and international governance arrangements, a rethinking of the justification of the right to privacy is proposed. In this paper, the case of the violation of the privacy of a bullied autistic youngster and the consequent prosecution of 3 Google executives will be discussed first. We will then analyse the arguments made by both academic experts and pundits who agree with Google’s claim that if the first sentence had been left unchallenged, it would have opened the floodgates to several other jurisdictions that would as a consequence have used it as a pretext to increase control on the internet, jeopardising in such a way free speech, which has been seen so far as an inalienable right which should not be censored. Finally, by going beyond the sentences and their immediate contexts, we will propose a theoretical justification of our analysis. Our main claim is that the value of the right to privacy is based on the argument that its violation would undermine citizens’ capacity to participate effectively in democratic politics.