International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Morals

Still, Steiner and Alston stands out. The strengths of the book are its comprehensiveness, its large amount of materials on cultural relativism, its legal detail and its collection of documents. It is probably most appropriate for postgraudate law students, but I am using it as the main book for an advanced college class in the United States. The co-editors have provided good updates that take account of recent problems and advances in human rights law. I wish there was more attention still paid to specific geographical examples of human rights violations, especially as the current examples tend to use mostly advanced legal materials. Also, the book could use more extended more basic arguments about the meaning and nature of human rights, as well a wider variety of more elementary contemporary Western and non-Western critiques.

Yet, all in all, this is a very fine collection that is suitable to anyone wishing a wide array of materials on the subject. It will be most effective in the context of a university class, because it can take some work to sort out the large amount of materials by topic or level of reader. Because of this, the book will clearly receive most use by university students and teachers of this subject.


A Glaring Omission...   May 11, 2004
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This volume is comprehensive in scope and interesting to read - but astonishingly, it fails to give even basic coverage to the notion of 'contemporary slavery'!

Contemporary (or modern/new) slavery is a huge problem not only in the developing world but also, (to a lesser but no less important extent) in the West. Organisations such as Anti-Slavery International, at the forefront of the struggle to eliminate new slavery, have found that bringing together the most prevalent contemporary forms of slavery - such as trafficking, bonded labour, forced prostitution, child labour and forced marriage - under a heading which makes the abhorrent and unacceptable nature of these practices clear, is the most effective way to raise public awareness of the plight of millions of modern-day slaves throughout the world.

Thus, usage of the term 'contemporary slavery' is fast becoming common practice among organisations and institutions whose principal aim is the complete abolition of slavery in modern times - I would have expected a volume such as this, with its finger on the pulse of the international human rights scene, to be aware of this development and to reflect it in the content and structure of International Human Rights in Context, 2nd ed.