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HUMAN RIGHTS is becoming the language of the entire world in the realm of politics , international relations, and law. To many scholars it is now deemed the dominant discourse of our day, and it is becoming more broadly so daily. So important has human rights become in the eyes of the global community that the United Nations (un) has declared the years 1995–2004 as the un Decade of Human Rights Education. Human rights education is expanding both within and outside of the United States, with courses and terminal degree programs being established everywhere. The present is only the beginning stage of the study of human rights as an academic discipline that is available not only to law faculties but to other disciplines as well, such as political science, international relations, history, philosophy, social studies, and even religion, to name just a few. The study of human rights should not be undertaken for mere intellectual stimulation or pleasure. It should be undertaken by all persons at appropriate levels and in both academic and nonacademic contexts so that a culture of human rights is inculcated in the learner. The learner (whether a student or not) is the bearer or holder of internationally recognized human rights. Human rights are the birthright of humanity , and their protection is the first responsibility of all states. They are inherent attributes of the human personality, and their purpose is the legal protection of the inherent human dignity of each individual human being. Life itself can be at stake if they are not preserved. With the burgeoning of human rights studies, the need has arisen for academic tools with which to present this critical area of study. Textbooks are being written, articles published, and reports and statistics disseminated. Conferences, seminars, workshops , and institutes are beginning to proliferate. This book is intended to provide to the student of human rights an important tool for understanding the meaning of terms used in the field of international human rights and the words that will unlock the meaning of concepts and theories, law and procedures, institutions, and means of interpreting human rights. This work was born out of my past twenty years of experience as a student, lawyer, • INTRODUCTION • Civilization Is a Race between Education and Catastrophe and professor of international and comparative human rights in both the United States and Europe. When I began to study this field in depth for the first time, in the early 1980s, I had been a lawyer for ten years. Yet I struggled to understand lectures and texts unaccompanied by any, or at best few, definitions of words and terms, leaving me with serious gaps in my knowledge or with misunderstandings. Some words I had never before learned, jus cogens, for example. Others I had learned, but with different meanings, protocol, for example. As a professor teaching the “Introduction to Human Rights” course for the past twelve years, I became convinced of the value of defining a sufficient number of terms for students at the beginning of the course so that they would understand the texts and lectures they would subsequently seek to digest, analyze, and understand. The results were clear and positive. Furthermore, as I taught students from other countries who had already studied human rights in their native (non-English) language, I observed their inability to relate , or at least difficulty in relating, the terms they had learned in their own language with the equivalent term in English, for example, Amparo and habeas corpus. Once they learned the meaning of the English term, they could relate it to what they had learned in their native language and thus were better able to understand the subject matter in English and in their native tongue. Most students of human rights today must learn the subject from a “baptism in a million words.” This means that they must read texts, articles, laws, and reports, ad nauseam, and must try to discern and infer the meaning of terms by themselves through a sort of deductive synthesis. I hope that using this book prior to commencing study or as a tool during study and lectures will help students to maximize their understanding of the subject matter and minimize any misunderstandings. The following list of terms has been culled from written materials in the field of human rights, though some obviously originate from other disciplines, such as history (e.g., Holocaust), political science (e.g., totalitarianism), and international relations (e.g., Third World ). These...

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