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    Rights and Responsibilities in the Coronavirus Pandemic
    Kathryn Sikkink. 3/16/2020. “Rights and Responsibilities in the Coronavirus Pandemic.” OpenGlobalRights. See full text.Abstract
    Touching on points from her newly published book, The Hidden Face of Rights: Towards a Politics of Responsibilities, Kathryn Sikkink urges the global community to place responsibility on all actors to uphold human rights during the Coronavirus pandemic. 

    Building on the work of Iris Marion Young in her posthumous book, Responsibility for Justice, in The Hidden Face of Rights, I argue that all actors socially connected to structural injustice and able to act, need to take action to address the injustice. One problem with the word responsibility is that people often use it in the common legal meaning focused on who is to blame or liable. This is what Iris Young has called backward-looking responsibility or the “liability model.” She focused on political responsibility that is forward-looking. This kind of responsibility asks not “who is to blame,” but “what should we do?” Forward-looking responsibility is necessary to address the Coronavirus pandemic and to think about what we should do in the world after the pandemic. I also draw on Max Weber’s idea of an ethic of responsibility in Politics as a Vocation to stress that it is not enough to act with good intentions. We also need to have done our research about the most effective way to act so that our actions have the impact we seek.


    This framework is useful in the context of the Coronavirus crisis because it involves both a range of rights and responsibilities of many actors. Our right to health, but also rights to liberty, freedom of movement, to education, to information, to food and shelter are all at stake. As countries ramp up exclusionary travel and border policies, some of these rights may be imperiled, and governments need to strike a balance between protecting the health and respecting human rights, as the WHO Secretary General recognized in his briefing on March 12. A quarantine is a legitimate state policy in times of health emergencies, but the state must attend to the rights of individuals caught in the quarantine to adequate health care, food, and shelter. 

    2020 Oct 08

    Resisting Police Violence in the Americas: Mothers on the Front Lines

    4:00pm to 5:00pm

    Location: 

    Virtual Event (Registration Required)

    Join us for a conversation with mothers from across the Americas who, after losing children to police and state violence, have become powerful activists fighting for justice and institutional changes to end state violence affecting Black, indigenous, and low-income youth. 

    Speakers:

    • Dorothy Holmes, Ronnieman Foundation and Justice for Families, Chicago, US 
    • Débora Maria da Silva, Mothers of May, Brazil
    • Rute Fiuza, Mothers of May of the Northeast,...
    Read more about Resisting Police Violence in the Americas: Mothers on the Front Lines

    Resistance Atlas

    In early 2021, the Lab expects to launch an interactive dashboard that will allow users to explore historical and contemporary cases of nonviolent resistance around the world.
    2020 Sep 16

    Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society

    Registration Closed 11:00am to 12:00pm

    Location: 

    Virtual Event (Registration Required)

    Towards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology in the 21st Century is a talk series organized by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy featuring prominent scholars, business and technology leaders, public interest technologists, and activists who address the ethical and rights implications of the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society and human life. The title of the series draws inspiration from the title of Max Tegmark’s book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

    Speaker:

    ... Read more about Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society

    Registration: 

    2020 Nov 19

    Reparations and Economic Justice

    Registration Closed 1:30pm to 2:30pm

    Location: 

    Virtual Event (Registration Required)

    Please join the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for its signature weekly series this fall, The Fierce Urgency of Now, featuring Black, Indigenous, People of Color scholars, activists, and community leaders, and experts from the Global South. Hosted and facilitated by Sushma Raman and Mathias Risse, the series also aligns with a course they will co-teach this fall at the Harvard Kennedy School on Economic Justice: Theory and Practice. 

    Panelists:

    • Dr. Raymond Arnold Winbush | Research Professor, Director...
    Read more about Reparations and Economic Justice

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    Remarks Before the Commission on Unalienable Rights
    Martha Minow. 3/17/2020. “Remarks Before the Commission on Unalienable Rights.” Carr Center Discussion Paper Series, 2020-003. See full text.Abstract
    In her address to the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights, Martha Minow discusses the meaning and implications of human rights. 

    "Please accept my thanks for the invitation to speak with you and for your service on this important effort. Grappling with the meaning and implications of human rights is a task that no one generation can complete; comprehension, validation, and commitment require investment of renewing thought and action even though human rights are described as self-evident and eternal. In fact, the reasons why individual nations and even individual people subscribe to notions of human rights vary enormously—and range from idealism to realpolitik—as do their justifications and rationales, which sound in such competing registers as religion, social contract, nature, utility, and game theory.  As I will explain, respect for the dignity of each person offers a core basis for human rights in both substance and in attitudes of respect and civility even when we disagree. Your admirable effort to trace ideas about human rights to deep histories and understandings of eternal truths should underscore the importance of engagement with other nations and multinational convenings as we all face unprecedented challenges to human dignity."

     

    Read full address, here. 

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