نشریه حقوق بشر
پیاپی 6 (پاییز و زمستان 1387)

There are different analyses about the concept of citizenship in different fields of humanities. Generally, citizenship can be defined as "modern right of all humans to life and having fundamental rights". By accepting the fact that citizenship rights belong to anyone and there is no discrimination from the viewpoint of these rights, we can reach two important results in internal and international law: first, citizenship is the symbol of national identity of all persons in their origin countries and second, having these rights is not restricted to the nationals of a country but belong to any person. In this paper, challenges around these two prepositions are analyzed.

Much confusion still exists with respect to determining the relation between the particular and the universal. Poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Communitarians, Liberals, The pragmatists like Richard Rorty, and finally, John Rawls have different views dealt with in the article. From my perspective, however, all of these approaches are too abstract. My approach begins with the assumption that it perverts freedom to identity the concept with class, community, or the state. Freedom is only and exclusively the freedom of the individual to act in the world. The aim of my paper is to confront what usually appears as a “false antinomy” by highlighting the role of diversity for democratic society and the ways in which the liberal rule of law with its universal claims serves as the precondition for the freedom of the particular.

Two fundamental questions tend to dominate religious discursive narratives and their interpretations: What duties and which rights are conferred by God applicable to all humans as the creation of God and regardless of their faith? And the second question is whether humans are sufficiently qualified to put into the words of God, not baring, the possibility of faulting the mercy of God for political, social or economic gains where hermeneutics become an ideology tampered with the power of divinity. This paper discusses the untapped possibilities of the varieties of human faith and the potential gains harvest in order to ensure the respect for human rights, the sanctity of the human soul and the varieties of means that provide the necessary space for decisionmaking from a perspective of human difference.

The accelerating phenomenon of globalization has caused many decisions, reactions and assessments to be adopted at the global level and with involvement of transnational factors and also caused a kind of ethical “nation-globe” which is created based on “human rights” notions defined by a set of common interests to be at the core of attention. In this emerging paradigm, certain actors different from governments, inevitably, play roles with various orientations at the international level. However, are these procedures and trends, mostly accepted by everybody in the international area? Or it should be considered to become worthy of being considered? Whether it is a wave affected by power in the hands of the powerful forces and that will bear no fruit except discrimination? The answers to these and some other questions will be discussed in this article in the light of “global citizenship” notion.

The topic of interreligious communication is frequently defended as significant if different ethnic and religious groups are to coexist. Any society that consists of different religious groups has to establish some rules of cooperation that cuts across the religious divide. However, there are problems in such interreligious communication; if one is convinced of the truth of a particular position; it is difficult to consider seriously whether it is really true. Yet the ideology of liberalism is based on the free flow of ideas and the constant readiness of the individual to consider his religious standpoint. Interreligious communication may be seen not as challenging others’ beliefs but merely as exchanging ideas and views. The paper will deal with this theoretical issue and link it with the practical data that has arisen from the work of the Maimonides Foundation, an organization in London that works to foster communication between Muslims and Jews.

A review of arguments about freedom and ethics from ancient times to contemporary era would reveal diverse conceptions of the concepts of freedom and ethics. However, Kant has forwarded his positive theory of freedom as the best possible way of modern man's being in his scientific philosophy. He has formulated the foundations of independent concept of freedom, putting forth some concepts in close connection with the concepts of self-consciousness, inner identity and integrity that make modern man a man in its real sense. Kant's concept of freedom is strongly under the influence of philosophy of Rousseau; freedom is the highest embodiment of man, which is the result of his specific activity aimed at his intellectual and spiritual development. Kant's basic concept of ethic is that of free will which is self-propelled. The action or behavior arises from one's duty which directs man to act or behave morally. The present article is an attempt to elaborate these concepts from the viewpoint of Kant and also to discuss his answer to the following question: How modern man is educated and raised?

Everyone inherits hereditary features and characters from his/her previous generations by heredity. Surely, hereditary factors obligatorily transfer from one generation to the other. Environmental factors and education aren’t in our control and we aren’t born willingly in a special city and country or haven’t chosen our neighbors and schools. Even if we imagine that we have options for changing the places of our lives or jobs, in practice we have chosen situations based on the attitude pre-formed in our minds.
One of the main purposes of human rights should be eliminating imposed differences among people and, consequently, removing discrimination, distinction, inequality and injustice. Implementing the first and second generations of human rights may decrease the effect of environmental imposed factors. However, human rights institutions have not made adequate efforts to study and eliminate the hereditary inequalities and injustices yet.