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To one aware of the persistence and severity of ancient and modern attacks on private property, the allegiance to private property characteristic of contemporary proponents of human rights may appear remarkable, indeed, mind‐boggling. However, I believe that philosophers committed to human rights identify private property with the human right to property because of their unwarranted confidence in the moral justifiability, and hence the moral acceptability, of private property. In company with John Locke, today's supporters of the view that persons have the human right to property believe that moral reasoning based upon the foundational beliefs of a doctrine of human rights ultimately establishes property to be a human right. Subsequently, they diligently seek morality's sanction for the appropriation, accumulation, and the use and disposal of things in the manner associated with private property. Private property is, therefore, virtually unopposed in its bid for the property chair in the exclusive human rights club. Though decried by opponents as robbery and massively unjust, in theory this form of ownership is remarkably unscathed behind a fortress of arguments. In practice, many societies currently purporting to have instantiated private property in their institutional arrangements have so mitigated property rights that the concept of private property is inapplicable. However, in combination with widespread and strong commitment to private property, the fortress of moral justification for a human right to private property is a serious obstacle to changing a society's property arrangements.

This paper aims to explore the role played by the National Archives of South Africa in human rights promotion and protection. The study examined the challenges that archivists encounter when undertaking archival functions, such as acquisition, appraisal and access provision, that contribute to forming documentary archives crucial for human rights promotion and protection.

A review of literature dealing with acquisition, appraisal and access was used in this research. It was supplemented with interviews.

This paper provides recommendations of benefits in the field of archives management with a focus on the areas of acquisition, appraisal and access. The transformational discourse in the jurisdiction of archives management challenges archival institutions to be active players in selecting historical and cultural archives’ significance that is significant in human rights protections. However, despite judicial requirements that recommend the importance of archives, there is evidence that archival functions such as appraisal, acquisition and access are not being fully used, resulting in national archives institutions that are subject to irregularities that contribute to an unbalanced archives collection.

The paper was limited only to the National Archives of South Africa.

The paper makes practical implications concerning the acquisition, appraisal and providing access to human rights records.

Sufficient funding resource allocation ought to be provided to advance human rights promotion.

This paper offers informed recommendations to address the challenges of acquisition, appraisal and access provision of archive materials. The availability of archives materials reinforces the community by aiding to protect legal rights and prevent human rights violations. It was, thus, necessary to establish whether the National Archives of South Africa is actively building the archives collections that are important for human rights promotion and protection.

The purpose of this paper is to first, provide an overview of the genesis of the business and human rights agenda; second, to identify key areas of focus in the emerging business and human rights agenda; and, finally, to argue for an approach to engaging business in the human rights agenda that is both challenging and practically orientated.

The paper draws on the author’s ethnographic experiences both as a human rights advocate with Human Rights First (1978-2009) and as Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the US State Department (2009-2013).

The paper links the business and human rights agenda to the growth in size and power of corporations. It identifies six key areas of focus in this emerging agenda, specifically, supply chains and labor rights, the extractive industries especially relating to security, information technology and issues of freedom of expression, agriculture and issues of child and forced labor, and investment and socially responsible investors. The paper contends that business schools have a crucial role to play in engaging businesses in a challenging and practical way to provide them with workable solutions to these challenges.

The paper contends that we have come to the end of the beginning of the discussion of business and human rights and are now in the phase of defining what the rules are in this twenty-first century global economy. The paper provides important considerations for taking this phase forward.

This paper provides original insights into the emergence of the business and human rights agenda. It identifies key areas of focus along with a valuable approach to making progress in these areas.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of globalization and its multiple dimensions on human rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The study extends the Poe and Tate (1994) model, which enumerates the various determinants of human rights. Ordered probit estimation is used to estimate the impact of globalization and its dimensions. For the purpose of empirical analysis, the period has been divided into three phases: short, medium and long term. This helps in understanding how the impact of the different dimensions of globalization has evolved over a period of time. Furthermore, analysis has been carried out to detect causality between human rights and globalization.

As per the results, overall globalization and social dimension of globalization do have a positive impact on human rights in long and medium term and, also, Granger-cause human rights. The political dimension of globalization has a positive relation with human rights, though there exists no causality between the two. On the other hand, the economic dimension of globalization fails to have a statistically significant impact on human rights. Impact of the social dimension of globalization dominates that of other dimensions of globalization.

This is one of the few studies that examine, in an empirical fashion, the impact of globalization on human rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It was expected that the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998 would promote a human rights culture in public services and beyond. This paper seeks to focus on the Act's impact on minority, ethnic users of health and social care services.

The paper reviewed recent policy and academic papers as well as legislative and government initiatives since the Act's implementation in 2000. It also looked at user surveys and evidence submitted to Parliament and public inquiries. A critical synthesis and analysis of the data was attempted.

The paper makes the argument that the original intentions behind the HRA have not been materialised. The paper attributes this failure to issues of misunderstanding around the Act and human rights. The paper also argues that by focusing more on mainstreaming the principles underlying the Act and less on its legalistic interpretation, human rights will be seen more relevant by both users and providers of health and social care services.

An original analysis and interpretation of what these principles encompass is attempted whilst brief recommendations for policy and practice are posited.

The purpose of this paper was to identify whether artificial intelligence (AI) products can possess human rights, how to define their rights and obligations and what ethical standards they should follow. In this study, the human rights ethical dilemma encountered in the application and development of AI technology has been focused on and analyzed in detail in the light of the existing research status of AI ethics.

In this study, first of all, the development and application of AI technology, as well as the concept and characteristics of human rights ethics, are introduced. Second, the human rights ethics of AI technology are introduced in detail, including the human rights endowment of AI machines, the fault liability of AI machines and the moral orientation of AI machines. Finally, the approaches to human rights ethics are proposed to ensure that AI technology serves human beings. Every link of its research, production and application should be strictly managed and supervised.

The results show that the research in this study can provide help for the related problems encountered in AI practice. Intelligent library integrates human rights protection organically so that readers or users can experience more intimate service in this system. It is a kind of library operation mode with more efficient and convenient characteristics, which is based on digital, networked and intelligent information science. It aims at using the greenest way and digital means to realize the reading and research of human rights protection literature in the literature analysis method.

Intelligent library is the future development mode of new libraries, which can realize broad interconnection and sharing. It is people-oriented and can make intelligent management and service and establish the importance of the principle of human rights protection and the specific idea of the principle. The development of science and technology brings not only convenience to people's social life but also questions to be thought. People should reduce its potential harm, so as to make AI technology continue to benefit humankind.

The applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in different sectors have become agendas for discussions in the highest circle of experts. The applications of AI can help society and can harm society even by jeopardizing human rights. The purpose of this study is to examine the evolution of AI and its impacts on human rights from social and legal perspectives.

With the help of studies of literature and different other AI and human rights-related reports, this study has taken an attempt to provide a comprehensive and executable framework to address these challenges contemplated to occur due to the increase in usage of different AI applications in the context of human rights.

This study finds out how different AI applications could help society and harm society. It also highlighted different legal issues and associated complexity arising due to the advancement of AI technology. Finally, the study also provided few recommendations to the governments, private enterprises and non-governmental organizations on the usage of different AI applications in their organizations.

This study mostly deals with the legal, social and business-related issues arising due to the advancement of AI technology. The study does not penetrate the technological aspects and algorithms used in AI applications. Policymakers, government agencies and private entities, as well as practitioners could take the help of the recommendations provided in this study to formulate appropriate regulations to control the usage of AI technology and its applications.

This study provides a comprehensive view of the emergence of AI technology and its implication on human rights. There are only a few studies that examine AI and related human rights issues from social, legal and business perspectives. Thus, this study is claimed to be a unique study. Also, this study provides valuable inputs to the government agencies, policymakers and practitioners about the need to formulate a comprehensive regulation to control the usage of AI technology which is also another unique contribution of this study.

This paper aims to respond to increasing interest in the intersection between accounting and human rights and to explore whether access to information might itself constitute a human right. As human rights have “moral force”, establishing access to information as a human right may act as a catalyst for policy change. The paper also aims to focus on environmental information, and specifically the case of corporate water‐related disclosures.

This paper follows Griffin and Sen, who suggest that a candidate human right might be recognised when it is consistent with “founding” human rights, it is important and it may be influenced by societal action. The specific case for access to corporate water‐related information to constitute a human right is evaluated against these principles.

Access to corporate water‐related disclosures may indeed constitute a human right. Political participation is a founding human right, water is a critical subject of political debate, water‐related information is required in order for political participation and the state is in a position to facilitate provision of such information. Corporate water disclosures may not necessarily be in the form of annual sustainability reports, however, but may include reporting by government agencies via public databases and product labelling. A countervailing corporate right to privacy is considered and found to be relevant but not necessarily incompatible with heightened disclosure obligations.

This paper seeks to make both a theoretical and a practical contribution. Theoretically, the paper explores how reporting might be conceived from a rights‐based perspective and provides a method for determining which disclosures might constitute a human right. Practically, the paper may assist those calling for improved disclosure regulation by showing how such calls might be embedded within human rights discourse.

This paper addresses the social forces, such as cultural traditions, economic structures, and legal systems, affecting animal (human and nonhuman) rights. Also considered are the cross‐cultural degrees of societal advancement on rights, as illustrated by cultures that are stagnant on rights, progressive on rights, and regressive on rights. The definition of “advanced” versus “primitive” cultures is somewhat complicated with the argument being that technologically and materially advanced cultures can be primitive on rights issues, as found in the present‐day US. The right‐wing Bush administration, greatly aided by the “war on terrorism”, has devolved human rights by reducing civil liberties, freedom of assembly, educational opportunities, and economic equality. This repression of human rights has repercussions for environmental protection and nonhuman rights, as demonstrated herein.

This paper scrutinizes the impact of socioeconomic, political, legal and religious factors on the internal ethical values of human rights organizations (HROs) worldwide. The authors aim to examine the Code of Ethics for 279 HROs in 67 countries and the social and legal settings in which they operate.

Using the framework of protect, respect and remedy, the authors look for keywords that represent the human rights lexicon in these three areas. In the protection of human rights, the authors select the terms: peace, transparency, freedom and security. For the respect of humans, the authors use the terms: dignity, equality, respect and rights. Sources of remedies come from justice and ethics. The analysis seeks to determine what political economy settings drive the ethical value choices of the organizations. Those choices are proxied by those keywords they mention in their Code of Ethics.

The analysis show that the scope of ethical values mentioned are higher when the HRO is in a country with more domestic violence, lower income inequality, French civil or Islamic legal origin and higher trust in politicians. In regard to the determinants of the ten keywords individually, the authors conclude that the status of the socioeconomic, political, religious and legal settings impact with local HROs mention each of the keywords: peace, justice, transparency, dignity, equality, ethics, respect, freedom, security and rights.

The analysis is based on HROs that have a webpage in English and list the employee Code of Conduct.

This study is the first to examine the Code of Ethics for HROs. The authors demonstrate that country-specific characteristics help to drive their internal ethical values.