A Voice for Human Rights (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
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Few names are so closely connected with the cause of hu...)
Few names are so closely connected with the cause of human rights as that of Mary Robinson. As former President of Ireland, she was ideally positioned for passionately and eloquently arguing the case for human rights around the world. Over five tumultuous years that included the tragic events of 9/11, she offered moral leadership and vision to the global human rights movement. This volume is a unique account in Robinson's own words of her campaigns as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
A Voice for Human Rights offers an edited collection of Robinson's public addresses, given between 1997 and 2002, when she served as High Commissioner. The book also provides the first in-depth account of the work of the Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights. With a foreword by Kofi Annan and an afterword by Louise Arbour, the current High Commissioner for Human Rights, the book will be of interest to all concerned with international human rights, international relations, development, and politics.
Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Broadview Literary Texts)
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Mary Robinsons work has begun again to assume a centr...)
Mary Robinsons work has begun again to assume a central place in discussions of Romanticism. A writer of the 1790s?a decade which saw the birth of Romanticism, revolution, and enormous popular engagement with political ideas?Robinson was acknowledged in her time as a leading poet. Her writing exhibits great variety: charm, theatricality, and emotional resonance are all characteristics Robinson displays. She was by turns a poet of sensibility, a poet of popular culture, a chronicler of the major events of the time, and a participant in some of its chief aesthetic innovations. This long-awaited collection is the first critical edition of her poems.
A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter
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Mary Robinsons A Letter to the Women of England (1799...)
Mary Robinsons A Letter to the Women of England (1799) is a radical response to the rampant anti-feminist sentiment of the late 1790s. In this work, Robinson encourages her female contemporaries to throw off the glittering shackles of custom and to claim their rightful places as the social and intellectual equals of men.
Separately published in the same year, Robinsons novel The Natural Daughter follows the story of Martha Morley, who defies her husbands authority, adopts a found infant, is barred from her husbands estate and is driven to seek work as an actress and author. The novel implicitly links and critiques domestic tyrants in England and Jacobin tyrants in France.
This edition also includes: other writings by Mary Robinson (tributes, and an excerpt from The Progress of Liberty); writings by contemporaries on women, society, and revolution; and contemporary reviews of both works.
Every Human Has Rights: A Photographic Declaration for Kids
(The 30 rights set down in 1948 by the United Nations are ...)
The 30 rights set down in 1948 by the United Nations are incredibly powerful. According to the U.N., every humanjust by virtue of being humanis entitled to freedom, a fair government, a decent standard of living, work, play, and education, freedom to come and go as we please and to associate with anyone we please, and the right to express ourselves freely. Every Human Has Rights offers kids an accessibly written list of these rights, commentarymuch of it deeply emotionalby other kids, and richly evocative photography illustrating each right. At the end of this deceptively simple book, kids will knowand feelthat regardless of individual differences and circumstances, each person is valuable and worthy of respect
(As the effects of climate change continue to be felt, app...)
As the effects of climate change continue to be felt, appreciation of its future transformational impact on numerous areas of public law and policy is set to grow. Among these, human rights concerns are particularly acute. They include forced mass migration, increased disease incidence and strain on healthcare systems, threatened food and water security, the disappearance and degradation of shelter, land, livelihoods and cultures, and the threat of conflict. This inquiry into the human rights dimensions of climate change looks beyond potential impacts to examine the questions raised by climate change policies: accountability for extraterritorial harms; constructing reliable enforcement mechanisms; assessing redistributional outcomes; and allocating burdens, benefits, rights and duties among perpetrators and victims, both public and private. The book examines a range of so-far unexplored theoretical and practical concerns that international law and other scholars and policy-framers will find increasingly difficult to ignore.
Mary Therese Winifred Robinson is an Irish Independent politican who served as the 7th, and first female, President of Ireland from December 1990 to September 1997, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002.
Background
Born Mary Therese Winifred Bourke in Ballina, County Mayo, in 1944, she is the daughter of two medical doctors.
Her father was Dr. Aubrey Bourke, of Ballina, while her mother was Dr. Tessa Bourke (née O'Donnell), of Carndonagh, Inishowen, in Ulster. The Hiberno-Norman Bourkes have lived in Mayo since the thirteenth century. Her family had links with many diverse political strands in Ireland.
One ancestor was a leading activist in the Irish National Land League of Mayo and the Irish Republican Brotherhood; an uncle, Sir Paget John Bourke, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II after a career as a judge in the Colonial Service; while another relative was a Catholic nun.
Some branches of the family were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland while others were Catholics. More distant relatives included William Liath de Burgh, Tiobóid mac Walter Ciotach Bourke, and Charles Bourke. Robinson was therefore born into a family that was a historical mix of rebels against and servants of the British Crown.
Education
Mary Bourke attended Mount Anville Secondary School in Dublin and studied law at Trinity College, Dublin (where she was elected a scholar in 1965, the same year as David Norris) graduating in 1967 with first class honours, King's Inns and Harvard Law School.
An excellent student, she obtained a B. A. and an LL. B. from Trinity College in Dublin, and an LL. M. from Harvard Law School before joining the Trinity law faculty.
Career
In 1969, as a member of the social-democratic Irish Labour Party, she was elected to the Seanad, the upper house of parliament, becoming in the process the youngest member of the Seanad and the first woman (and the first Roman Catholic) to represent the Trinity College district. She married Nicholas Robinson in 1970.
Although the Seanad operated in the shadow of Ireland's more powerful legislative house, the Dáil, Dail, Mary Robinson made her presence felt as she fought--usually in vain--for reforms in family and divorce law, for reproductive freedom, and for the rights of homeless people and homosexuals.
Her formidable advocacy was always expressed with the intellectual rigor of the professor and the clinical precision of the barrister.
Robinson resigned from the Irish Labour Party in 1985 to protest its support of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, in which the Republic of Ireland was granted a formal consultive role in the governing of Northern Ireland.
Her action was based on constitutional grounds: The accord had been concluded by the Irish and British prime ministers without consulting the Northern Irish themselves.
The Labour Party nonetheless nominated Robinson in 1990 to run for the presidency, a post that had long been the domain of Ireland's ruling party, Fianna Fail.
Her candidacy was greeted as that of the honorable dissident, doomed to defeat. But she proved to be a confident, energetic campaigner, traveling into remote villages, mountain towns, and island communities as well as the major population centers, offering herself as a "voice for the voiceless" and promising to be a "president with a purpose.
"Her palpable personal decency, her sure grasp of the constitutional potential of the office of president, and the warm, unpretentious elegance with which she wore her academic and legal distinction, won over thousands of voters predisposed to opposing her on the issues with which her name was identified.
Her victory was hailed as a historic political turning point and, indeed, within months the Irish parliament had begun to reconsider its position on all the major legislative issues on which Robinson had earlier failed to achieve reform.
From the start of her six-year term as president, Robinson made a special point of visiting the Irish diaspora communities in Great Britain and the United States, and in May 1993 she met Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace. A few weeks later, she became the first Irish president to visit ethnically mixed groups in predominantly nationalist West Belfast in Northern Ireland and met with the officially ostracized Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams.
As an activist president with a clear agenda, Robinson altered the perspectives of Irish politics and expanded the boundaries of her largely ceremonial office.
Achievements
She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister, campaigner and member of the Irish Senate (1969–1989). She defeated Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan and Fine Gael's Austin Currie in the 1990 presidential election becoming–as an Independent candidate nominated by the Labour Party, the Workers' Party and independent senators–the first elected president in the office's history not to have had the support of Fianna Fáil.
She is widely regarded as a transformative figure for Ireland, and for the Irish presidency, revitalising and liberalising a previously conservative, low-profile political office.
She resigned the presidency two months ahead of the end of her term of office to take up her post in the United Nations. During her UN tenure she visited Tibet (1998), the first High Commissioner to do so; she criticised Ireland's immigrant policy; and criticised the use of capital punishment in the United States.
She extended her intended single four-year term by a year to preside over the World Conference against Racism 2001 in Durban, South Africa; the conference proved controversial, and under continuing pressure from the United States, Robinson resigned her post in September 2002.
Robinson served as Oxfam's honorary president from 2002 until she stepped down in 2012 and is honorary president of the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation EIUC since 2005. She is chairman of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and is also a founding member and chairman of the Council of Women World Leaders. Robinson was a member of the European members of the Trilateral Commission.
In 1969, as a member of the social-democratic Irish Labour Party, she was elected to the Seanad, the upper house of parliament, becoming in the process the youngest member of the Seanad and the first woman (and the first Roman Catholic) to represent the Trinity College district.
Politics
Her formidable advocacy was always expressed with the intellectual rigor of the professor and the clinical precision of the barrister. Robinson resigned from the Irish Labour Party in 1985 to protest its support of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, in which the Republic of Ireland was granted a formal consultive role in the governing of Northern Ireland.
The Labour Party nonetheless nominated Robinson in 1990 to run for the presidency, a post that had long been the domain of Ireland's ruling party, Fianna Fail.
Thus in November 1990 Mary Robinson became the seventh president of Ireland, the first woman and the youngest person to hold the office, and the only president not a member of a political party.
Membership
She was a member of the Irish Senate (1969–1989), a member of the Foundation’s Ibrahim Prize Committee, a member and chairman of the Council of Women World Leaders, and also a member of the European members of the Trilateral Commission.
She was also a member of the Arab Democracy Foundation (since 2007), International Commission of Jurists (since 2009), World Justice Project (Honorary Co-Chairwoman).
Connections
She married Nicholas Robinson in 1970. Together they have three children. Her son Aubrey, a photographer and film-maker who is "committed to social justice", received media attention in 2011 when he participated in Occupy Dame Street. .
