Human Rights, 2nd Edition

A Very Short Introduction

By: Andrew Clapham

Narrated by: Peter Lerman

Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Today, it is usually not long before a problem gets expressed as a human rights issue. Indeed, human rights law continues to gain increasing attention internationally, and must move quickly in order to keep up with a social world that changes so rapidly.

This Very Short Introduction title, in its second edition, brings the issue of human rights up to date, considering the current controversies surrounding the movement. Discussing torture and arbitrary detention in the context of counter terrorism, Andrew Clapham also considers new challenges to human rights in the context of privacy, equality, and the right to health. Looking at the philosophical justification for rights, the historical origins of human rights, and how they are formed in law, Clapham explains what our human rights actually are, what they might be, and where the human rights movement is heading.

©2007, 2015 Andrew Clapham (P)2021 Tantor

The Reader Ruins Listening to a Decent Book

In my opinion, the reader shouldn’t be using a microphone to read anything more extensive than a fast food order back to those waiting in the drive-thru. He was not “prime time” professional from a number of delivery directions. Shame on Audible for such low standards.

Informative, Comprehensive, Balanced, and Clear

This book provides a well structured and clearly explicated introduction to human rights. It is at its best when laying out the history of the human rights movement and elaborating on the issues involved in a series of liberal rights, like the right to life, the right to privacy, and freedom from torture. Each of these rights is complicated by a multitude of questions concerning their meaning and application, and Clapham covers a lot of ground in laying out the complexities in a while panoply of purported human rights.

In this sense, it makes a great introduction that might serve as a complement to other Audible works on human rights. Perhaps the deepest and most subtle of these is Richard Thompson Ford’s relatively conservative Universal Rights Down to Earth, which explores the pragmatic possibilities of the human rights agenda. Peter Singer’s One World provides a more idealistic emphasis on the rights that should be claimed and the duties we owe to their claimants. Samuel Moyn’s Enough provides a better history of human rights with an emphasis on economic rights. And John Ruggie’s Just Business emphasizes how the rights agenda might be applied to multinational corporations.

Each of these thinkers is deeply respected within their own subfields of human rights, as is Clapham. So, there is a lot of great material to check out here, and this is a wonderful place to start. It is also a better place to go looking for listening material, because it holds out the promise of at one and the same time expanding our minds and making us better people.

~ Theo Horesh, author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind