For Your Summer Reading List: New Human Rights Histories

What’s on your summer reading list?  I’ve just added three new historical essays from the current (May 2014) issue of the Law and History Review on human rights in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Elizabeth Dale, editor of the Review, blogs that the articles “put the relationship between human rights protections, migration, and problems of racial discrimination into historical context. The result is sometimes surprising.”

According to Dale, in the first of these essays, The Right to Asylum: Britain’s 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law, authors Alison Bashford and Jane McAdam “reconsider the debates over the asylum provision of Britain’s 1905 Aliens Act. Their article traces the evolution of the right to asylum from that Act to the UDHR in 1948, situating the right at the crossroads of international and domestic law and exploring why the broad asylum provisions in the 1905 Act were not copied in the UDHR.”

Two other articles, Race versus Religion in the Making of the International Convention Against Racial Discrimination, 1965, by Ofra FrieselMaking the World in Atlanta’s Image: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Morris Abram, and the Legislative History of the United Nations Race Convention, by Timothy Lovelace, offer close looks at the passage of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in 1965. Dale  writes that Friesel’s study “provides a detailed analysis of why CERD did not cover religious discrimination as well as race. Finally, the article by Lovelace looks closely at the role civil rights activists in the United States played in the drafting of that Convention, reminding us that the idea of universal, as opposed to constitutional, rights has a history even in the United States.”

What’s on your summer reading list?