Human Rights Rights – New Publications

Human Rights Watch World Report

The following publications have recently been published by Human Rights Watch:

Human Rights Watch World Report 2012: Events of 2011.
This is the flagship annual report produced by Human Rights Watch.  “This 22nd annual World Report summarizes human rights conditions in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide in 2011. “

Human Rights Watch state that:

The introductory essay examines the Arab Spring, which has created an extraordinary opportunity for change. The global community has a responsibility to help the long suppressed people of the region seize control of their destiny from often-brutal authoritarian rulers. Standing firmly with people as they demand their legitimate rights is the best way to stop the bloodshed, while principled insistence on respect for rights is the best way to help these popular movements avoid intolerance, lawlessness, and summary revenge once in power.

[Download Full Report]
Human Rights Watch Press Release.
(Source: Human Rights Watch).

The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead: A Human Rights Agenda for Egypt’s New Parliament

This 45-page report sets out nine areas of Egyptian law that the newly elected parliament must urgently reform if the law is to become an instrument that protects Egyptians’ rights rather than represses them. Egypt’s existing laws – the penal code, associations law, assembly law, and emergency law – limit public freedoms necessary for a democratic transition, challenge respect for the rule of law, and impede accountability for abuses by the police and the military.

[Download Full Report]
(Source: Human Rights Watch).

Justice for Serious Crimes before National Courts

Justice for Serious Crimes before National Courts: Uganda’s International Crimes Division

This 29-page briefing paper provides a snapshot of progress from Uganda’s complementarity-related initiative: the International Crimes Division (ICD). The ICD is a division of the High Court with a mandate to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, in addition to crimes such as terrorism. Based on research by Human Rights Watch in Uganda in September 2011, this briefing paper analyzes the ICD’s work to date, the obstacles it has encountered, and challenges both for the future work of the ICD and for national accountability efforts more broadly.

[Download Full Report]
(Source: Human Rights Watch).

“They Hunt Us Down for Fun”

“They Hunt Us Down for Fun”: Discrimination and Police Violence Against Transgender Women in Kuwait

This 63-page report documents the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and persecution that transgender women – individuals who are born male, but identify as female – have faced at the hands of police. The report also documents the discrimination that transgender women have faced on a daily basis – including by members of the public – as a result of the law, an amendment to penal code article 198. Based on interviews with 40 transgender women, as well as with ministry of interior officials, lawyers, doctors, and members of Kuwaiti civil society, the report found that the arbitrary, ill-defined provisions of the law has allowed for numerous abuses to take place.

[Download Full Report]
(Source: Human Rights Watch).

CMRB Events: Imaging Migrants Seminar Series 2012

CMRB

The following seminars have been planned as part of the UEL Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) Semester B seminar series 2012:

Imaging Migrants Seminar Series 2012

25th January 2012

Documentary: Calais: The Last Border and discussion

Marc Issacs (film-maker)

13th Februaury 2012 (Monday 5pm-7pm)

The Cleaners’ Voice

Luis C.Sotelo (film-maker)

Anna Lopes  (University of East London)

29th February 2012

Gevald and the role of truth in documentary

Yohai Hakak (University of Portsmouth)

28th April 2012

Evidence of the transformative moment of decision to migrate, explored through image as archive and memory as testimony.

March Helene Kazan (Goldsmith’s College)

25th April 2012

A Visual Journey through the Balkans: from Socialism to the UK.

Nela Milic (journalist and film-maker)

2nd May 2012

Imagined diasporas: domestic violence migrants within the UK

Janet Bowstead  (London Metropolitan University)

For more details on these seminars, click here.

Call For Papers: Migration Studies

Apologies for cross-posting.

CALL FOR PAPERS: MIGRATION STUDIES

Migration Studies is a new multi-disciplinary refereed journal from Oxford University Press. It will publish work that significantly advances our understanding of the determinants, processes and outcomes of human migration in all its manifestations.

Migration has always defined human populations, and today it is one of the most powerful currents shaping global society. In recent decades, the increasing scope, complexity and salience of human migration have inspired new conceptual and policy vocabularies, and stimulated ground-breaking research efforts across many different academic disciplines.

Migration Studies will contribute to the consolidation of this still-fragmented field of study, developing the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on migration, and bringing new voices into ongoing debates and discussions. Drawing on the expertise and networks of a Global Editorial Board of senior migration scholars, the journal will publish articles of exceptional quality and general interest from around the world.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Migration Studies invites papers that contribute substantively to a core scholarly discipline or sub-discipline, while engaging with migration research in other disciplines. Papers will be reviewed through a global editorial board including senior scholars in each of the following fields:

*Anthropology

*Demography

*Economics

*Forced Migration

*Geography

*History

*International Relations

*Sociology

*Political Science

The editorial team also welcomes book reviews, special issue proposals, and ideas for presenting content in new ways.

HOW TO SUBMIT A PAPER

Please send submissions or expressions of interest to migration.studies.oup@gmail.com.

Warm regards,

The Editorial Team: Alan Gamlen (Editor), Alexander Betts, Thomas  Lacroix, Emanuela Paoletti, Nando Sigona and Carlos Vargas-Silva (Associate Editors).

Event: Intersectionality and the Spaces of Belonging

CMRB

Details taken from the Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) website at the University of East London:

Intersectionality and the Spaces of Belonging

28-29 June 2012 Bangor University, UK

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Nira Yuval-Davis, Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK.   Nira Yuval-Davis will speak on the subject of her recent book, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations.
Prof. Jie-Hyun Lim, Director of the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea/ Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.  Jie-Hyun Lim will speak on his current research project, ‘A transnational history of victimhood nationalism: national mourning and global accountability’. Dr Gurminder K. Bhambra, Director of the Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick, UK .  Gurminder K. Bhambra will speak on her current research on early African-American sociologists and their conceptions of identity, inequality, and social theory.

Overview:
Current debates on gender, nation, sexuality, religion and other categories of social divisions and belonging often address the relations between these categories with the term ‘intersectionality’: intersecting in an infinite variety of ways, each of these categories helps construct all the others. What we are, what we suffer, what we belong to, or what we long to be, is multifaceted and contradictory. Our longings, or aversions, are related to our belongings in but complicated and ambiguous ways, and what social group or category we belong to does not determine our political or cultural values, goals or dreams. And yet: the former inform the latter, if only to the extent that we do not wish to remain tomorrow what we are today. Nor do our positionings, situatedness and belongings simply add up to an ‘identity’ (a being so and not other) – as if my hold of ‘ethnicity no. 7’ plus ‘gender no. 2’ plus ‘citizenship in state no. 11’ etcetera could ever equate to exactly what ‘I am’: ‘citizenship in state no. 11’ does not mean the same depending on whether I am of this or that sex, or sexuality, or age, or ethnicity. These intersections complicate, perhaps thwart, any efforts to ground the cultural and political projects, coalitions, emancipation that we long for in the spaces (physical, virtual, rhetorical) we belong to. The organisers welcome critical contributions on all aspects of ‘spaces of belonging’ under the perspective of the concept of intersectionality. Theoretically informed contributions from scholars in all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, broadly conceived, are invited, as well as from social and community activists or artists. Key themes of interest to the conference include, but are in no way limited to:

• Citizenship, cultural and state membership • Nation, race, ethnicity, nationality • Indigeneity •         Diasporas •  Religion •  Cosmopolitanism and human rights • Longing and the non-space of utopia • Majority-minority relations • Class and belonging •  Sex, gender and sexuality • Standpoints, dialogues and politics of recognition •   Virtual spaces of belonging • Belonging, feeling, intimacy •  Belonging and equality •   Age-spaces and ability-spaces

Abstract Submission:

Please submit, by January 22nd 2012, a proposal of between 300-500 words, including title and references, prepared for blind review, alongside a brief biographical note (max. 100 words), in separate electronic files to berg@bangor.ac.uk<mailto:berg@bangor.ac.uk>

Contacts for questions:

Prof. Howard Davis  h.h.davis@bangor.ac.uk

Dr. Sally Baker :s.baker@bangor.ac.uk

Dr. Marcel Stoetzler:m.stoetzler@bangor.ac.uk

Dr. Robin Mann:  r.mann@bangor.ac.uk

A conference website containing programme and registration details will be launched in January 2012. The conference is sponsored by the Belonging and Ethnicity Research Group (BERG), the Bangor University School of Social Sciences and the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research Data and Methods (WISERD).