Cultural Rights of Native Majorities between Universalism and Minority Rights

Universalism and Civil Rights (with Notes on Voting Rights after Shelby)

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, voting rights activists proposed a variety of legislative responses. Some proposals sought to move beyond measures that targeted voting discrimination based on race or ethnicity. They instead sought to eliminate certain problematic practices that place too great a burden on voting generally. Responses like these are universalist, be...

Dynamic nature of human rights: Rawls’s critique of moral universalism

Human rights do not represent an absolute truth. Otherwise, they would represent ideology, which is contradictory to the basic idea of human rights itself. Consequently, there is a need for redefinition of the main presuppositions of modern conception of human rights represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This paper argues that Rawls’s conception of human rights is significan...

Multiculturalism and Minority Rights: West and East

Rearticulating the Case for Minority Language Rights

While advocacy of minority language rights (MLR) has become well established in sociolinguistics, language policy and planning and the wider human rights literature, it has also come under increased criticism in recent times for a number of key limitations. In this paper, I address directly three current key criticisms of theMLRmovement. The first is aperceived tendency towards essentialism in ...

Libraries and the Cultural Rights of Women

Migration and large movements of people are not a new phenomenon. Over the centuries people moved for many reasons. Some seek employment to secure a better life for themselves and their families. Others are forced to move to escape crimes, wars, persecution and instability. Between 2001 and 2015 the number of international migrants and refugees have increased dramatically worldwide. 244 million...