CALL FOR PAPERS
Sur - International Journal on Human Rights welcomes contributions to be published in its coming issues. The Sur Journal is published twice a year, distributed free of charge to approximately 3,000 readers in over 100 countries. It is edited in three languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish and can also be accessed online at http://www.surjourn al.org.
The journal is aimed at academics and activists dedicated to study and protect human rights. Our main purpose is to disseminate Global Southern perspectives, stressing their specificity, and facilitating the contact among its members, without ignoring the important contributions of the more economically developed countries. The Journal is published by SUR HUMAN RIGHTS UNIVERSITY NETWORK (www.surnet. org).
The issues of the journal are not thematic, permitting the publication of articles dealing with human rights from multiple perspectives. For our next issue - No. 6 - however, we will prioritize articles which, preferentially but not exclusively, address the following topics:
Rights of the Child
The recent history of the debate on childhood seems to confirm, especially in Global South, the existence of changing paradigmatic themes. These themes are said to be paradigmatic because they portray, in given moment, the sum of our perceptions around an issue, in this case the issue of childhood. If the 1980's was the decade of "children in street situation" and the 1990's was the decade of child labor, the twenty-first century seems to begin with the issue of adolescents' criminal responsibility. In this context, the absence of reliable quantitative information has allowed the mass media to easily transform into synonyms "juvenile violence" and "urban insecurity". The International Convention on the Rights of the Child addresses this problem in its articles 37 and 40.
Sur Journal invites scholars to submit articles on the topic from different perspectives and areas of knowledge addressing an issue that may be summarized as: Urban insecurity, juvenile violence and fundamental rights: Problems and perspectives.
Equality and Affirmative Action
The culture of human rights still carries the legacy of formal equality left by liberalism, a legacy which states that rights should be blind to differences of race, color, age, sexual orientation, origin, ethnicity, etc. To what extent should this legacy be preserved and to what extent should it be changed in order to assure an equal implementation of rights? Taking national and international legal documents into consideration, would it be enough to recognize rights only from a formal, abstract perspective, blind to the context even in cases where these rights are not being equally implemented to members of different groups.
In other words, does the culture of human rights also comprise the equal implementation of these rights, or doesn't it? Is affirmative action an effective, ethical and legally acceptable means to assuring an equal implementation of rights? In which circumstances would it be accepted or not accepted? Would affirmative action be accepted for all or only for some vulnerable groups? Would it be accepted in all or only in some institutions (schools, universities, companies, government, political parties, etc.)? Would there be specific structures of affirmative action that could be accepted and other structures that could not be accepted (quotas, scholarships, goals, etc.)? What would be the alternatives to affirmative action to achieve an equal implementation of rights? Affirmative action has been adopted in different parts of the world -India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Brazil, United States, among others. How do these experiences justify or not justify new affirmative action policies in other countries?
The Sur Journal invites scholars to submit articles discussing the questions presented.
As aforementioned, these themes are not exclusive, but only preferential.
Format
Contributions should be sent in electronic form (MS Word format) to surjournal@surjourn al.org and should follow these guidelines:
-Between 7,000 and 10,000 words.
-Concise and objective footnotes. (Please find at the end of this text the rules for citation.)
-Short biography of author with a maximum of 50 words.
-Abstract with no more than 150 words, including keywords for the required bibliographical classification.
-Date when the paper was written.
Articles can be sent at any time. However, only submissions received by November 30, 2006 will be considered for issue number 6. Articles received after that date will be considered for subsequent issues.
Ideally articles should be original and unpublished. Exceptionally, however, relevant contributions already published elsewhere may be accepted, provided that the required authorizations are granted. Please inform if, where and when the paper has been published before.
The selection of articles and all other editorial matters are the exclusive responsibility of the Editorial Board, formed by the following members:
Christof Heyns, Pretoria University, South Africa
Emílio Garcia Méndez, Universidade de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Fifi Benaboud, Centro Norte-Sul do Conselho da União Européia, Portugal
Fiona MacAulay, Bradford University, United Kingdom
Flavia Piovesan, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brasil
J. Paul Martin, Columbia University, USA
Kwame Karikari, Ghana University, Ghana
Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyed, Cairo University, Egypt
Richard Pierre Claude, Maryland University, USA
Roberto Garretón, Former - UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Chile
Contributions will be evaluated by at least two members of the Editorial or the Consultative Board and, whenever necessary, also by external specialists. Any suggested changes will be submitted to the authors and published only with their explicit authorization.
As the Journal is distributed free of charge, we are unfortunately unable to remunerate our contributors.
Sur Journal uses Creative Commons license 2.5.
** For Rules of Citation, please visit the Sur website at http://www.surjourn al.org/
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