Rights Violations

This chapter provides a detailed overview of rights violations, a form of injustice not fully explicated in the scholarship of Nancy Fraser, Alex Honneth, or their followers. The idea of human rights is presented as a complex construct with many meanings: a force against oppression, a set of laws, a statement of shared value commitments, membership norms, contested principles, aspirations for the extension of dignity to all, and others. The concepts of human rights and justice are compared. Specific human rights are identified as manifestations of the major forms of justice: recognition, resource distribution, representation, and participatory parity. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his activism in profiling rights injustices are examined. The globalizing world is my focal pivotal system, and I discuss Jane Addams&s;s related concept of international mindedness. I focus on the case of Mary G and her resistance to the cruel use of solitary confinement. The generic subprocess of injustice, making invisible, is defined and illustrated by documenting patterns of solitary confinement, its harms, and its invisibility. A region in India, Kerala, is presented to demonstrate the possibility of progress toward the full realization of human rights. A comprehensive set of questions for profiling rights violations is provided.