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Published as Chapter 13 in Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa, Gaby Oré Aguilar & Felipe Gómez Isa, eds.

The human rights movement is largely the product of the horrors of World War II. The development of its normative content and structure is the direct result of the abominations committed by the Third Reich during that war. Drawing on the Western liberal tradition, the human rights movement arose primarily to control and contain state action against the individual. It is ironic that it was the victors of the war, most of whom held colonies in Africa, who determined and prevailed upon the United Nations to give form and content to the human rights movement. It is this exclusionary beginning and lack of genuine universality – the absence of major cultures and geographically specific historical perspectives – that are the source of serious tensions within the human rights movement today. This chapter examines the problems raised by the transplantation of this movement – which is uniquely a creature of the North – to Africa and the prospects for viable nongovernmental human rights organizations (NGOs) on the continent. There is no future for the human rights movements in Africa unless it can secure domestic ideological, financial, and moral support from interested constituencies.

Rights

In Copyright

Publication Date

2004

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

City

Philadelphia

ISBN

9780812237832

First Page

191

Last Page

197

Keywords

Africa, Human rights, Organizations, Development, United Nations, Universality, NGO

Disciplines

Human Rights Law | Law

Required Text

Copyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.

African Human Rights Organizations: Questions of Context and Legitimacy

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