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Product Description: What role can US domestic courts play in the worldwide enforcement of human rights? When international courts deny hearings to individual plaintiffs who cannot obtain the sponsorship of their own government (which may well be the defendant), these plaintiffs are finding US courts increasingly willing to hear their cases...read more

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Americans pride themselves on being an ethical people. They go to church, quote the Bible, erect statues, and discuss morality with abandon. They also trust their government to do the right thing when it comes to delivering legal justice and conducting foreign policy. Trouble is, American foreign policy has yielded some pretty spectacular ethical lapses, and (as 9/11 starkly demonstrated) the world is beginning to notice. Here, Mark Gibney lays out some of the most egregious insults the U.S. has visited upon international law, economic justice, and human rights in recent times. He covers everything from multinational corporations, the first Persian Gulf war, and Guantanamo Bay to American refugee policy, foreign aid, and global environmental degradation. Through all these examples, he exposes the discrepancy between the guise of ethical policy motivation and the reality of situational international ethics―or worse. He shows us how we practice 'easy ethics' in an uneasy world, and how it is beginning to catch up with us. Part I concludes with a gallop through the alphabet of countries where the U.S. has engaged in nefarious legal behavior and supported brutal dictatorships―everywhere from Argentina to Zaire. Part II offers a cautious 'coda of hope' in exploring recent trends toward public political apology and forgiveness, new U.S. policies toward AIDS in Africa, and renewed civic commitment flowing out of the tragedy of 9/11. Only when the exercise of American ethics becomes as muscular as our use of military force will the United States become the ethical superpower it projects itself to be. And only then will the concert of nations join us in the harmonization of global governance.

In order to be able to protect human rights, it is first necessary to see the denial of those rights. Aside from experiencing human rights violations directly, either as a victim or as an eyewitness, more than any other medium film is able to bring us closer to this aspect of the human experience. Yet, notwithstanding its importance to human rights, film has received virtually no scholarly attention and thus one of the primary goals of this book is to begin to fill this gap. From an historical perspective, human rights were not at all self-evident by reason alone, but had to gain standing through an appeal to human emotions found in novels as well as in works of moral philosophy and legal theory. Although literature continues to play an important role in the human rights project, film is able to take us that much further, by universalizing the particular experience of others different from ourselves, the viewers. Watching Human Rights analyzes more than 100 of the finest human rights films ever made-documentaries, feature films, faux documentaries, animations, and even cartoons. It will introduce the reader to a wealth of films that might otherwise remain unknown, but it also shows the human rights themes in films that all of us are familiar with.