Human Rights in History, Philosophy and Politics

Knowledge

After having completed this course the student will have acquired detailed knowledge about:

• the basic features and the historical evolution of the modern human rights system
• the most important debates about the legitimacy of human rights, including philosophical positions and political debates about human rights
• the status, functions and uses of human rights in international relations
• the implementation and promotion of human rights in today¿s nation-states
  

Skills

After having completed this course the student will be able to:

• assess and analyse the human rights situation in a given country or region, as well as in terms of one or more particular rights in selected countries
• evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different theories of human rights
• identify relevant resources for performing a human rights analysis
• analyse and understand the variation in human rights compliance across the world
• identify the main challenges in promoting and implementing human rights in different countries and regions as well as in different societal sectors
• understand the strong and weak sides of solving societal problems through human rights analysis and implementation
  

General competence

Having completed this course the student will have the competence to:

• Analyse a political situation in terms of human rights and elaborate a strategy for improving it
• Assess the validity and usefulness of different approaches to improving a difficult human rights situation
• Understand resistance to human rights and evaluate the weight of arguments in favour of as well as against human rights policy initiatives
• Identify key players and resource bases for promoting and implementing human rights

Students with no background in human rights studies are strongly advised to prepare in advance the recommended readings.

Students at UiO must apply for courses in StudentWeb.

International applicants, if you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures for international applicants.

You may register for this course if you have admission to a Master's programme at UiO. All applicants must fill the formal prerequisites.
Priority is given to students on the Master of Philosophy programme in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights.

Lectures and seminars with active student participation.

Students are graded on the basis of a 7 days written home exam and an oral exam (20 min) that will take place after the home exam assignment.

The oral exam is primarily a conversation about the candidate's assignment. The oral examination will also verify that the student has written the assignment. See more information about the oral exam.

You submit your answer in the exam system Inspera. Read about how to submit your answer.

Mandatory requirements must be approved before one can sit for an exam.

Maximum length for written home exam is 4000 words. Front page, contents page (optional) and bibliography are not included. If footnotes are used in the text (at the bottom of each page), they are included in the word limits.

Papers that exceed the the word limit may be rejected.

You must familiarize yourself with the rules that apply to exam support materials, and the use of sources and citations. If you violate these rules, you may be suspected of cheating or attempted cheating. You can read about what the university considers cheating, and the consequences of cheating here.

All exam resources allowed

Previous exam papers

You can usually resit an exam, but the conditions depend on whether you had a valid reason for absence from the regular exam. Read more about resitting an exam.

If a student has submitted a written assignment a second time in the same course s/he can only submit it in a new version. This means that there must be another title and theme, or that the new version must be considerably changed from the first version.

Students who wish to retake the exam in a later semester must also deliver and pass the mid-term essay, even if they have submitted and passed the mid-term essay earlier. Students who wish to retake the exam in a later semester are not guaranteed that the course is ever repeated with a similar reading list, nor that the exam arrangement will be the same.

Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail. Read more about the grading system.

English.

You may request an explanation of your grades, and you may also appeal against your grades or make a complaint about formal examination errors. Read more about explanations and appeals.

Evaluation

Feedback from our students is essential to us in our efforts to ensure and further improve the high quality of our programmes and courses. All courses are subject to continuous evaluation. At regular intervals we also ask students on a particular course to participate in a more comprehensive, periodic evaluation of this course.

Overlapping courses

Articles and extraits from books marked with an asterisk (*) are available in a compilation of texts (kompendium) which can be purchased from Gnist Akademika bookstore at the Law Faculty (Domus Nova building).

Required reading

Main books:

Nickel, James, Making Sense of Human Rights, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, ch 1-10, pp 7-167 (160 pp).

Forsythe, David P., Human Rights in International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (3rd edition), ch 3 (pp 71-116) & 5-7 (pp 155-276) (166 pp).

Book chapters and articles in compendium:

*Epp, Charles R., The Rights Revolution. Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, ch 2-4, pp 11-70 (69 pp).

*Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007, ch 3, pp 113-145 (33 pp).

*Iriye, Akira, et.al., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, ch 2-3, pp 53-92 (39 pp).

*Risse, Thomas, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink (eds), The Power of Human Rights. International Norms and Domestic Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, ch 1, pp 1-38 (37 pp).

*Waldron, J., (ed.), Nonsense upon Stilts. Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man, New York: Taylor and Francis, 1987, ch 3 (pp 22-76), ch 5 (pp 119-150) (78 pp).

*Corradetti, Claudio, What does cultural difference require of human rights, in C. Holder and D. Reidy (eds.), Human Rights. The Hard Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp 136-149 (13 pp).

Articles online (available in form of E-book or E-Journal):

Students gain access to the articles below by using their usual UiO password and username. Read more about how to connect to the UiO network from home or away: http://www.uio.no/english/services/it/network/

Ekern, Stener. "Visions of the Right Order. Contrasts between Mayan Communitarian Law in Guatemala and Internationa

If you have a disability or a health problem that entails significant inconvenience in an examination situation, you may be considered for special examination arrangements. Mothers who are breastfeeding may apply for extra time to complete the exam.

Please se Detailed regulations for the Faculty of Law, Chapter 3 regarding application, responsibilities and special measures.

A student can sit for this exam up to 3 times. If a student wishes to withdraw from the exam, s/he must do this in StudentWeb at least two weeks prior to the first day of the exam. Failure to do so will be counted as one of the three opportunities to sit for the exam. A study programme may have rules that further limit the number of times a student may re-take this exam. In such instances the rules of the study programme will have priority.