Rhoda Howard-Hassmann

• PhD McGill Sociology1976
• Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University

This article investigates the debate in the province of Quebec, Canada in 2013 over the Charter of Quebec Values introduced by the separatist ruling party, the Parti Québécois. It relies in particular on government documents, debates in Quebec’s National Assembly, and editorials in the French-language press. It relates the Charter to the preceding...

Some states deny their own citizens one of the most fundamental human rights: the right to food. Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, a leading scholar of human rights, discusses state food crimes, demonstrating how governments have introduced policies that cause malnutrition or starvation among their citizens and others for whom they are responsible. The boo...

This article investigates the right to food in Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez (1999-2013). Although Chavez respected Venezuelans' right to food, he failed to protect it. In the short term, he fulfilled the right to food by establishing state-run stores where food was sold cheaply, and by imposing price controls. At the same time, he reduced...

The Human Right to Citizenship provides an accessible overview of citizenship regimes around the globe, focusing on empirical cases of denied or weakened legal rights. Exploring the legal and social implications of specific national contexts, contributors examine the status of labor migrants in the United States and Canada, the changing definition...

This book is extremely personal. Susan Slyomovics, an anthropologist of the Middle East, reveals her own Jewish family’s reactions to German reparations in order to analyze the meaning of reparations in the overall context of mourning for the dead. Full disclosure requires me to say that I may have been more interested in this book than other poten...

This article discusses several problematic aspects of the call for reparations to Africa for the slave trade. The call for reparations is based on questionable interpretations of international law, and questionable interpretations of history. There are debates regarding both the numbers of slaves, and the characteristics of slavery, in the Americas...

This article considers whether there should be a separate international Covenant to elaborate on the human right to own property. Citing two contemporary cases—namely, the semi-starvation faced by many citizens of Zimbabwe and the shortage of food in Venezuela—I argue that a human right to own property protects the economic human rights to adequate...

This article discusses North Korea as a case of state-induced famine, or faminogenesis. A famine from 1994 to 2000 killed 3–5% of North Korea’s population, and mass hunger reappeared in 2010–2012, despite reforms meant to address the shortage of food. In addition, a prison population of about 200,000 people is systematically deprived of food; this...

This article discusses North Korea as a case of state-induced famine, or faminogenesis. A famine from 1994 to 2000 killed 3–5% of North Korea’s population, and mass hunger reappeared in 2010–2012, despite reforms meant to address the shortage of food. In addition, a prison population of about 200,000 people is systematically deprived of food; this...

Abstract will be provided by author.

This article warns that the human security discourse and agenda could inadvertently undermine the international human rights regime. Insofar as human security identifies new threats to well-being, new victims of those threats, new duties of states, or new mechanisms for dealing with threats at the inter-state level, it adds to the established human...

In favour of official apologies for past wrongs, one can argue that while guilt, or fault, is an attribute held by an individual only if she has actually committed a harmful act, responsibility is another matter. Membership in a corporate entity means the individual shares in the entity’s responsibility to ameliorate the consequences of injustices...

This article reviews the development of universal women's human rights since 1970. It begins by discussing how the international feminist movement influenced the development of women's legal human rights, and continues by reviewing three debates in the literature on women's rights. The first debate is whether human rights as originally formulated w...

The Yellow Sweatshirt. Some years ago on a Saturday morning, I stopped downtown in my economically depressed city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, to give a couple of dollars to a youngish man with dirty-blond hair who was asking for money. I noticed that he was wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt and I complimented him on it. He replied that he had re...

Civilising Globalisation: Human Rights and the Global Economy. By Kinley David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 256p. $39.99. - Volume 8 Issue 4 - Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

This article reviews human rights violations in Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2009, under the rule of Robert Mugabe. It argues that these violations, including state-induced famine, illegal mass expulsions, and systemic rape, constituted crimes against humanity. This article considers what African regional organizations, including the African Union and the...

Readers in Western developed countries are most familiar with abuses of political and civil rights, but the international human rights regime also embraces a set of laws regarding economic rights. These rights include the right to work and to just and favorable working conditions; the right to join and form trade unions; the right to social securit...

Globalization has affected everyone's lives, and the reactions to it have been mixed. Legal scholars and political scientists tend to emphasize its harmful aspects, while economists tend to emphasize its benefits. Those concerned about human rights have more often been among the critics than among the supporters of globalization. In Can Globalizati...

In 1910, the novelist Anatole France wrote of his country, "We in France are⋯ citizens. Our citizenship is [an]⋯ occasion for pride! For the poor it consists in supporting and maintaining the rich in their power and their idleness. At this task they must labor in the face of the majestic equality of the laws, which forbid rich and poor alike to sle...

This chapter advocates more serious attention by human rights scholars to macro-economic reform. Macroeconomic reform in some poor countries, including the two on which this chapter focuses, has been necessary during the last twenty-five years for economic growth. In turn, economic growth is necessary, but not sufficient, for economic rights. Many...

Victor Le Vine asks whether, in our interviews, we prompted reference to Holocaust reparations. We asked an open-ended question: namely, whether our respondents knew of any precedents for reparations to Africa. The answer most frequently offered was reparations to Jews, followed by reparations to African Americans and Japanese Americans. Occasional...

This article considers Western responsibility for genocide and state-induced famine in Africa. It discusses colonial genocide in South-West Africa and Congo; post-colonial genocide in Rwanda and Darfur; and state-induced famine in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. The article differentiates core, contributory, and circumstantial responsibility for genocide an...

Demands for atonement for past wrongs to ethno-cultural groups have become popular in Canada. On November 12, 2005, the Government of Canada announced to the Italian–Canadian community a package to atone for wrongs to individuals of Italian origin unjustly interned as enemy aliens during World War II. This package was part of the government's Ackno...

Human Rights Quarterly 28.1 (2006) 277-278 In her commentary (August 2005) on my article, "The Second Great Transformation" (February 2005), Adamantia Pollis makes several factual errors. It is an exaggeration to say that "globalization . . . has no borders or boundaries." States still exist and still enjoy sovereignty, even if that sovereignty has...

In this chapter, I discuss the question of justice for Africa from my disciplinary point of view as a political sociologist who specializes in international human rights. My core question is, ‘How can we achieve an international society that is economically just, in the sense that no one is starving, or lacks decent housing, education or health car...

The literature on social movements shows why the Japanese American reparations movement was successful, while the African American reparations movement has had far less success. How the claim is framed is extremely important for a reparations movement. Even though treatment of African Americans in the past violated key contemporary precepts such as...

The case of Bariya Magazu In late 2000 a legal case in Northern Nigeria involving women's and children's rights attracted much Canadian attention. Bariya Magazu was sentenced to be flogged for having sexual relations outside marriage, and that sentence was carried out. Her case raises the issue of cultural imperialism in promoting supposedly intern...

This article begins with a discussion of the claims for reparations to Africa made at the United Nations-sponsored World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001. It then traces the claim back to the Eminent Persons Group established in the early 1990s by the Organization of African Unity to pursue reparations for sl...

In 1996-97 the author interviewed 73 civic leaders in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on their attitudes toward gay rights. Twelve respondents opposed gay rights, 40 were moderately favorable to gay rights, and 21 were strongly favorable. Almost all favored basic equality rights (education, housing, employment), and only 10 said they had difficulty with...

In 1996-97 the author interviewed 73 civic leaders in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on their attitudes toward gay rights. Twelve respondents opposed gay rights, 40 were moderately favorable to gay rights, and 21 were strongly favorable. Almost all favored basic equality rights (education, housing, employment), and only 10 said they had difficulty with...

Although the relationship among multiculturalism, human rights and cultural relativism is much discussed by academics, there is very little, if any, information on how ordinary citizens think through these concepts. This paper investigates the attitudes of 78 civic leaders in one multicultural society, Canada, to these concepts by asking them the q...

Freedom of speech as an individual right is often thought to interfere with the collective rights of vulnerable groups to protection against threats of violence and demeaning group insults. This study analyzes interviews with 78 Canadian civic leaders that probed their views on this possible rights conflict. For most respondents, freedom of speech...

Among English-speaking, non-aboriginal Canadians, there is such a thing as an ethnic Canadian identity. Frequently, biological ancestry is confused with social ethnicity, so that everyone's "true" identity is presumed to be rooted somewhere else. Yet most people who are born in Canada, or who immigrate to Canada at young ages, become ethnic Canadia...

The contemporary conflict between the province of Quebec and the federal government in Canada has recently been a focus of international attention. Quebec is inhabited by a majority group of French-speakers whose ancestry is rooted in Quebec, whose historical religion is Roman Catholicism, and who are known collectively (in French) as “Quebecois.”...

Comparative quantitative assessment of human rights is hampered by the length of the list of internationally recognized rights. Not only is the list so long that it is hard to imagine gathering adequate data without an army of researchers (the International Human Rights Covenants contain more than thirty substantive articles, encompassing at least...

Do international standards regarding human rights require the existence of a liberal regime? This was the thrust of Rhoda Howard and Jack Donnelly’s essay in the September 1986 issue of this Review. Neil Mitchell takes vigorous issue with this contention, arguing first and foremost that Howard and Donnelly have not defined liberalism satisfactorily...

It is often argued that internationally recognized human rights are common to all cultural traditions and adaptable to a great variety of social structures and political regimes. Such arguments confuse human rights with human dignity. All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international hu...

Since the 1970s, many humanistically minded academics have become concerned with the comparative measurement and analysis of human rights. The new concern is partly a result of the introduction of human rights as a subject of United Nations debates and foreign policy deliberations, especially in the United States during the Carter Administration (1...

This paper will discuss the relationship between civil/political and economic/social/cultural rights (as they are defined in the International Bill of Human Rights) in sub-Saharan Africa. There is an on-going debate, especially in United Nations circles and in non-governmental organizations, as to whether the separate sets of rights embodied in the...

In this paper I will discuss women’s rights regarding marriage, the family, and genital operations in the context of internationally accepted views of the individual rights of women. I focus upon these particular areas partly because the issue of female genital operations in Africa has been the subject of much popular attention in the last three ye...

Half title: Expatriate business in Ghana, 1886-1939. Includes abstracts in English and French. Thesis (Ph. D.)--McGill University, 1976. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 410-428). Microfiche of typescript.