Weekly discussion prompts will be provided at the beginning of each week. Please review and re-review the questions as you go through the weekly readings. This will ensure that you are contextualizing your response as you reflect upon the material. It is expected that each student provides at least one critical short-response per week (at least three-four sentences). You may either reply directly to the prompt itself, or to questions or statements posted by other students. Importantly, there is no RIGHT answer. The sole purpose of the discussion board is to provide a space for us to openly discuss the challenges of human rights in a well-educated manner.

Pick One question!
1. In what way do international human rights norms impact domestic politics? Or do they fail to do so? In other words, why ratify? Provide examples to support your argument.

2. Similar to question one, drawing upon Hafner-Burton, please provide examples of how governments have ratified human rights law as a matter of window dressing.

3. According to Roth, how was President Obama to reverse the Bush Doctrine?

4. According to the short article regarding Swiss human rights protection, why was the state (Switzerland) chastised for not meeting standards put into place by the Convention?

Articles

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/are-human-rights-more-than-empty-promises-/6598312

https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/human_rights_protect%20

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/are-human-rights-more-than-empty-promises-/6598312