ABSTRACT
As a subject for study, human rights has been somewhat neglected by the discipline of criminology. Whilst philosophers have concerned themselves with the ethics and dilemmas presented by human rights and violations of them, lawyers similarly troubled by the importance of human rights have largely tried to seek out which human rights are protected by law and, more radically, those which should be. There is no one definition of human rights, and legal perspectives tend to concentrate on those human rights that are set out in law or that are capable of legal protection. There is an abundance of writing on human rights from various legal perspectives, and this literature is almost impossible to quantify. There is, in fact, no general theory of human rights (Douzinas 2000: 4). Human rights as a subject of concern for criminology was first acknowledged by the Schwendingers (1975), who argued ‘any crime should be defined as any behaviour that violates human rights’. Although human rights protection is conferred by the state through law, the state can act criminally by abusing those rights – and both lawyers and criminologists have concerned themselves with the state as perpetrator of crime. However, the law is also concerned with human rights as civil rights – dealt with by civil rather than criminal law. More pragmatic legal thinking is concerned with how harms to individuals can be defined as human rights and with what forms of compensation or redress are available to those who have suffered human rights violations.
