Introduction

Abstract

Human rights are everywhere —. in constitutions, in the courts, in the media, in international diplomacy and in the streets. Sadly, human rights abuses are also everywhere. Both sets of phenomena are intrinsically social. Human rights have their abusers as well as their enunciators and enforcers, and for every abuse there is a perpetrator as well as a victim - put more generally and structurally, factors that tend to undermine human decency, like poverty, tyranny and racism, create the possibility of abuses of human dignity which involve the attempted redistribution of disadvantage with added pain. Accordingly, sociological questions readily spring to mind when one thinks about human rights, questions such as: