The repeal of the Human Rights Act is one of the major political questions of our day. In an engaging insight into the fantasies and myths driving the case for repeal, Conor Gearty defends the importance of the HRA and debunks the arguments that would see a UK Bill of Rights. An essential book for all readers who want to be informed on the debate.

Monograph on human rights from the viewpoint of the Church - deals with nationalism, democracy, ethics, community relations, etc., and includes cases of violated human rights. Bibliography pp. 187 and 188, and illustrations.

Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh inform the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recent initiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination with a consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rogers argues that the modes of fascination and excitement that accompany scenes of torture and female circumcision betray the fantasy of a political condition against which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivity in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration. To support the fantasy of this subject, the mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

What's Wrong with Rights? argues that contemporary rights-talk obscures the importance civic virtue, military effectiveness and the democratic law legitimacy. It draws upon legal and moral philosophy, moral theology, and court judgments. It spans discussions from medieval Christendom to contemporary debates about justified killing.

This book explores how the notion of human identity informs the ethical goal of justice in human rights. Within the modern discourse of human rights, the issue of identity has been largely neglected. However, within this discourse lies a conceptualisation of identity that was derived from a particular liberal philosophy about the ‘true nature’ of the isolated, self-determining and rational individual. Rights are thus conceived as something that are owned by each independent self, and that guarantee the exercise of its autonomy. Critically engaging this subject of rights, this book considers how recent shifts in the concept of identity and, more specifically, the critical humanist notion of ‘the other’, provides a basis for re-imagining the foundation of contemporary human rights. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, an inter-subjectivity between self and other ‘always already’ marks human identity with an ethical openness. And, this book argues, it is in the shift away from the human self as a ‘sovereign individual’ that human rights have come to reflect a self-identity that is grounded in the potential of an irreducible concern for the other.

A stimulating, theoretically driven examination of the relationship between human rights and the globalizing process. In scrutinising the impacts of different aspects of globalization on the language and structure of human rights, the book gives readers a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the issues and questions key to the topic.