Tom Lantos was a Hungarian-born U.S. Congressman remembered for raising awareness and respect for human rights around the world. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980 becoming the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the Congress. In 1983 he co-founded and chaired the Congressional Human Rights Caucus renamed in his honour as the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. With articles authored by leading academics this Festschrift remembers Tom Lantos’s extensive human rights activism on the human rights themes he was passionately involved with around the world. The essays offer new insights on a range of topical human rights issues, such as human rights education, religious freedom, post-conflict justice, minority rights and identity politics.

A radical vision for the future of human rights as a fundamentally reconfigured framework for global justice. Reinventing Human Rights offers a bold argument: that only a radically reformulated approach to human rights will prove adequate to confront and overcome the most consequential global problems. Charting a new path—away from either common critiques of the various incapacities of the international human rights system or advocacy for the status quo—Mark Goodale offers a new vision for human rights as a basis for collective action and moral renewal. Goodale's proposition to reinvent human rights begins with a deep unpacking of human rights institutionalism and political theory in order to give priority to the "practice of human rights." Rather than a priori claims to universality, he calls for a working theory of human rights defined by "translocality," a conceptual and ethical grounding that invites people to form alliances beyond established boundaries of community, nation, race, or religious identity. This book will serve as both a concrete blueprint and source of inspiration for those who want to preserve human rights as a key framework for confronting our manifold contemporary challenges, yet who agree—for many different reasons—that to do so requires radical reappraisal, imaginative reconceptualization, and a willingness to reinvent human rights as a cross-cultural foundation for both empowerment and social action.

We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights. Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.

An exuberant autobiography that began with a fist fight at a get acquainted dance, then on to an adventurous path, cluttered with pot holes and uncertainty that took me beyond what I could ever imagine. Ultimately, it’s about how you will be remembered: is it your notable accomplishments or the values associated with who you were? Re-visiting my life as a congressman, I began to realize this could be the inkwell that I’d dip my quill into as I shared how becoming a Christian, plus the influence of notable leaders and plenty of serendipity that helped shaped my public persona. It was a reminder about the importance of the higher standard in serving the public interest, obviously lacking in today’s political culture. During my fourteen years in Congress, I witnessed first-hand the civility and trust among the leadership of both political parties that trickled down to the committee rooms and in the House Chamber that lead to notable accomplishments. My own achievements on international trade, human rights, preserving our natural resources happened only because of bipartisan support. Not so today. In the Halls of Congress and beyond (social media), it is more about radical partisanship and the special interests that reigns amok over our political system--a traumatized Congress, verifying what we don’t want to hear: this is democracy at its worst. Hopefully my book is revealing of democracy in its best form. For those of faith who serve in elective office, there is plenty of scrutiny, as I experienced as a Democrat. Whether it’s your adversaries, the skeptical media, or even supporters, there are lingering questions about who you are. Your moral fiber is always on the line, although some political figures manage to twist and slide and escape the judgment that they merit. And others get squarely called out and dragged before the court of public scrutiny. Hopefully, A Higher Calling well serve as a moral compass for others who must cope with their own challenges. My good fortune was a select number of political leaders, whose integrity and moral courage had an influence on my personal and political life that I did not fully appreciate until writing this book. A few were men of faith and others were guided by a moral compass, embracing higher standards that put the national interest first and foremost. Their actions for the common good over political and material self-interest showed me the right way. The act of re-living one’s past was revealing of how the episodes and intrigue captured the essence who I was and to solidify the inevitable question: why am I here? That line of inquiry led me to a rather creative epiphany: it wasn’t so much a memoir that I was prepared to write, but a call to action that made a big difference and has inspired me to share with others.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Demonstrates how the Reagan administration and members of Congress shaped US human rights policy in the late Cold War.

The Global Citizenship Commission was convened, under the leadership of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the auspices of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study, to re-examine the spirit and stirring words of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The result – this volume – offers a 21st-century commentary on the original document, furthering the work of human rights and illuminating the ideal of global citizenship. What does it mean for each of us to be members of a global community? Since 1948, the Declaration has stood as a beacon and a standard for a better world. Yet the work of making its ideals real is far from over. Hideous and systemic human rights abuses continue to be perpetrated at an alarming rate around the world. Too many people, particularly those in power, are hostile to human rights or indifferent to their claims. Meanwhile, our global interdependence deepens. Bringing together world leaders and thinkers in the fields of politics, ethics, and philosophy, the Commission set out to develop a common understanding of the meaning of global citizenship – one that arises from basic human rights and empowers every individual in the world. This landmark report affirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeks to renew the 1948 enterprise, and the very ideal of the human family, for our day and generation.