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Added Value and Human Rights

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Cocoa and the Economics of Global Inequity AbstractThe denial of “added value” lies at the core of global economic inequity and its human rights consequences. While underdeveloped countries supply the raw materials that fuel global industries, developed economies capture the real wealth by processing, branding, and selling finished goods. Cocoa is a striking example: West Africa produces most of the world’s cocoa beans, yet farmers earn poverty wages while multinational chocolate companies reap billions in profits. This inequity sustains child labor, denies the right to education, entrenches poverty, and fuels migration. International human rights law recognizes the rights to work, to an adequate standard of living, and to self-determination over natural resources. Yet global trade practices continue to violate these rights by preventing producing countries from sharing in the added value of their own resources. Fairer trade and production systems that respect human rights are essential to dismantling structural inequities and creating global stability. In economics, “added value” refers to the increase in worth created when a raw material is transformed into a finished product. A commodity such as cocoa beans may be cheap in its raw form, but once it is roasted, blended, packaged, and branded, it becomes part of a global chocolate industry worth over $120 billion annually. The control over who gets to add that value—and thus capture the wealth it generates—largely determines which societies prosper and which remain in poverty. The case of cocoa shows the stark injustice of this arrangement. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana together […]

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Torture and Islamic Law

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Abstract This article considers the relationship between Islamic law and the absence or practice of investigative torture in the countries of today’s Muslim world. Torture is forbidden in the constitutions, statutes, and treaties of most Muslim-majority countries, but a number of these countries are regularly named among those in which torture is practiced with apparent impunity. Among these countries are several that profess a commitment to Islamic law as a source of national law, including some that identify Islamic law as the principal source of law and some that go so far as to declare themselves “Islamic states.” The status of investigative torture in Islamic law has long been unsettled: most early classical jurists forbade it, but some later classical jurists permitted it in at least certain circumstances. The permission some jurists gave the practice in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) was matched and augmented by a broader license jurists gave executive actors in the realm of governance or administration (siyasa), a realm seen as necessarily less constrained by jurisprudential limitations. Historical evidence indicates that investigative torture was indeed practiced by executive actors at various periods and places of the pre-modern Muslim world. Nevertheless, statistical analysis indicates little or no correlation between the absence or practice of torture in today’s Muslim-majority countries and the degree of commitment these countries profess to Islamic law. Instead, this article concludes, the absence or practice of torture in a given Muslim-majority country today (and the willingness of Muslim-majority countries to join international covenants that ban torture) […]

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Systemic Racism in the U.S. Immigration Laws

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by Kevin R. Johnson, UC Davis Abstract This Essay analyzes how aggressive activism in a California mountain town at the tail end of the nineteenth century commenced a chain reaction resulting in state and ultimately national anti-Chinese immigration laws. The constitutional immunity through which the Supreme Court upheld those laws deeply affected the future trajectory of U.S. immigration law and policy. Responding to sustained political pressure from the West, Congress in 1882 passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an infamous piece of unabashedly racist legislation that commenced a long process of barring immigration from all of Asia to the United States. In upholding the Act, the Supreme Court in an extraordinary decision that jars modern racial sensibilities declared that Congress possessed “plenary power”—absolute authority—over immigration and that racist immigration laws were immune from judicial review of their constitutionality. The bedrock of U.S. immigration jurisprudence for more than a century and never overruled by the Supreme Court, the plenary power doctrine permits the treatment of immigrants in racially discriminatory ways consistent with the era of Jim Crow but completely at odds with modern constitutional law. The doctrine enabled President Trump, a fierce advocate of tough-as-nails immigration measures, to pursue the most extreme immigration program of any modern president, with devastating impacts on noncitizens of color. As the nation attempts to grapple with the Trump administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants, it is an especially opportune historical moment to reconsider the plenary power doctrine. Ultimately, the commitment to remove systemic racism from the nation’s social […]

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Sharia and Human Rights

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by Ahmed E. Souaiaia* Abstract: Being an extremely dynamic determinant system that can be both formalized and popularized, Sharia has the potential to be used to promote and protect rights as well as to be an instrument of exclusion and human rights abuse. In fact, that is the role Sharia has played throughout the history of Islamic civilization: rulers, from Yazid to Numeiri, justified their transgressions by their role as enforcers of God’s Sharia; and rebels, aggrieved, and dissenting social groups, from the Ibadis to the Muslim Brotherhood, invoked the Sharia for motivation and justification in their pursuit of delegitimizing and overthrowing unjust regimes. With an eye on its effects on human rights in historical and modern contexts, let’s take a close look at the definitions, functions, and history of Sharia. ________________ In Muslim-majority countries, where leaders debate and negotiate legal reforms, the persistent question is whether Sharia should be the source of law or a source of law. In countries where Muslims are minorities, some local and national governments have proposed laws banning the adoption of Sharia. In territories and countries controlled by Islamist armed groups, Sharia courts have been established and self-styled scholars have imposed themselves as chief Sharia judges (sing. qadi shar`i). Social movements, violent and non-violent ones, have emerged in many Muslim-majority countries have been demanding the “implementation of Sharia” in their communities. These events might give the impression that Sharia is a concrete and well-defined concept, body of law, and legal system. In reality, the […]

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Applying the Systems Thinking Framework to Human Rights

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The Systems Thinking Framework is not a new approach to problem solving. It is, however, unknown or new to most researchers and scholars active in the broad areas of scholarly inquiry known as social sciences and the humanities. For scientists and researchers in physics and biological, engineering, and computer sciences however, systems thinking has been used to successfully build a formidable body of knowledge solving some of the most difficult problems and explaining mysterious phenomena. Explaining systems thinking as it applies to human rights, a topic of interest to scholars in almost all academic and professional fields of study, and as it is applied by scholars of human rights is a challenging task, let alone convincing scholars to adopt it in their research and teaching. Notwithstanding all the above, given the complexity of the topic of human rights, systems thinking can be a compelling framework for explaining the forces behind some of the most egregious human rights abuses throughout history and across cultures. The degree of success in applying the framework to human rights largely depends on researchers’ ability to define the elements of the framework, for the definitions will greatly vary. Therefore, providing definitions of what is a “systems thinking framework” is a good place to start. At the core of the Systems Thinking Framework (STF) is the idea of “system”. To be sure, engaging with the concept of systems thinking requires a capacity to process many things at the same time including the meanings and functions of “system” […]

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