This textbook looks at the theory of human rights, its historical roots, and goes on to examine several key areas of human rights, including the intersection between human rights and international law, access to treaty-based mechanisms and their practice and case law, international human rights courts and tribunals, including those with a criminal function, justiciability of rights before the courts, civil and political rights, as well as socio-economic rights.

Solidarity is one of the rights mentioned as a central value in the preamble of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and it is the title of chapter IV which contains with Art. 27 (workers’ right to information and consultation within the undertaking) and Art. 28 (right of collective bargaining and action) central rights of collective labor law. The protection of the weaker party is the central idea, both in individual labor law and in collective labor law. But to which extent does that include the idea of solidarity? If solidarity would be the basic idea of the concept of collective labor law, this would imply a strong social approach. The following elaboration looks for an attempt of a definition and analyzes the components of solidarity in collective labor law based upon European and German Labor Law, bearing in mind provisions and jurisdiction on trade union rights, collective bargaining, the right to strike and on European and German works councils. Besides a legal analysis, sociological methodology is also applied, when the internal and external dimension of solidarity or the concept of inclusive and exclusive solidarity are presented.

Human rights have become a principle and a value that have increasingly gained the support of various segments of society. Human rights are often associated with democracy, the rule of law, the civilizing process and human dignity. They are also associated with the idea that everyone, anywhere and regardless of their citizenship status, has basic rights, which must be respected by others and the state (see, among others, Sen, 2004).

This chapter sketches the development of international human rights law. The legal position of individuals was perceived by states as a domestic affair of the sovereign state, which could effectively treat its citizens as it pleased. It was not until after the Second World War that this fundamentally changed and international law began to grant individuals rights to protect them from the state. The chapter further presents the main categories or generations of human rights and discusses their key characteristics. Human rights are generally organized in three categories or generations: (a) civil and political rights; (b) economic, social, and cultural rights; and (c) collective rights. This chapter will subsequently turn to several matters concerning the scope of human rights norms, including their addressees, their territorial scope of application, and the circumstances under which human rights may be restricted by the state. Finally, this chapter will explain how human rights are monitored and enforced under international law.

This chapter sketches the development of international human rights law. The legal position of individuals was perceived by states as a domestic affair of the sovereign state, which could effectively treat its citizens as it pleased. It was not until after the Second World War that this fundamentally changed and international law began to grant individuals rights to protect them from the state. The chapter further presents the main categories or generations of human rights and discusses their key characteristics. Human rights are generally organized in three categories or generations: (a) civil and political rights; (b) economic, social, and cultural rights; and (c) collective rights. This chapter will subsequently turn to several matters concerning the scope of human rights norms, including their addressees, their territorial scope of application, and the circumstances under which human rights may be restricted by the state. Finally, this chapter will explain how human rights are monitored and enforced under international law.

This chapter introduces the thought of Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood. It outlines the abstract and applied components of their multicultural theory and how this conceptualises group phenomena including religion. It notes how English law, despite the dominance of liberal individualism, has adopted many aspects of multiculturalism, highlights its deficiencies as regards the regulation of religion, and traces its declining influence from 2005. It argues that multiculturalism is a suboptimal model on which to base the law of religion because it relies on too crude an understanding of groups and collective phenomena.

This concluding chapter summarizes the book arguments and reflects on the legacies of the war, the problems at restoring business as usual after a long period of state of exception, and the difficulties of squaring sovereignty, national interests, humanity and human rights. The war and its aftermath profoundly changed the population structure of vast territories and generated a proliferation of migration control policies and new citizenship claims from those who had fought on the battlefront or suffered because of the war. It reshaped economic relationships and the balance of power and had a big impact on reorienting migration flows. The First World War marked a departure from the quest for the universalism of rights and a shift from individuals to collectivities defined in terms of identity, belonging, language, ethnicity, religion or class. Establishing the equation between aliens and dangerousness, the First World War consolidated the idea that policing borders, selecting those who can live in the territory of a country, expelling the unwanted, preventing them from entering, granting and stripping people of their citizenship were (and after the war continued to be) the main prerogatives of the sovereign state, which had the power to decide whom to accept, expel, grant asylum to, include, exclude and endow with rights.

In contrast to current versions of critical theory which in their attack on liberal-capitalist societies develop a more or less vague vision of a socialist society, Christoph Menke, - Frankfurt School third generation - in his brilliant monograph, Kritik der Rechte, Suhrkamp 2015 (A Critique of Rights) fights on two-fronts. He directs his critique not only against liberal-capitalist formations with their conglomerates of societal power, but also against socialist-communist formations with their totalising aggregation tendencies. Against both, he attempts to formulate a theory of the authentic political judgment, which is based upon “counter-rights” in a “new law”.

In the face of obvious deficiencies of both formations, this is a remarkable attempt to develop utopian ideas in politics and law. Building on these ideas, the author suggests is to go beyond individual counter-rights on which Menke focuses exclusively, and to articulate genuinely social counter-rights in three dimensions – in the communicative, the collective and the institutional dimension. What is more, they need to be developed in two directions. One direction is the attribution of counter-rights to collectives, organisations, social movements, networks, functional systems, not as substitutes for individual rights to resistance but as their supplements. The other direction is the pluralisation of counter-rights which Menke defines in a unitary manner. Counter-rights will need to be developed with a high degree of variation if they are supposed to overcome motivation constraints in various media of communication.

This chapter argues for the idea of collective rights with which a people endow themselves in the face of political crises, as opposed to the more popular concept of human rights which is to be given by (often hostile) states to individuals, at the urging of international organizations. Citing examples such as those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and the people of Palestine, the author sheds light on the political rewards in the translation of the rights of the individual to collective rights. The latter kind has the advantage of having evolved from cultural specificities, as opposed to the more conventional idea of transcendent human rights. They are more in tune with material realities as well as unobligated to universal standards and forms.

This chapter gives an overview of the current debates regarding the way human rights has been defined and historicized. It argues that understanding these debates is crucial for an understanding of the ways in which human lights matter to literary study. Referencing the works of Johannes Morsink, Paul Gordon Lauren, Lynn Hunt, and Samuel Moyn, the author moves the through the varied points of origin and genealogies of human rights as we understand them today. The chapter shows that this present concept is by no means unambiguous, and argues that literature and its analysis provides us with one of the best ways to investigate the historical and political tensions that exist at its very foundations.