The Face of Human Rights

by Walter Kälin (Editor), Lars Müller (Editor), Judith Wyttenbach (Editor)

"There is a remarkable paucity of pictorial material to draw on when discussing human rights and the way they are respected or infringed, yet we are deluged everyday in every medium with images that openly show violence. The result is a surfeit of cynicism. The Face of Human Rights presents no such exotic cruelty; rather, the photographs it gathers together capture injustice and evoke real feelings, inviting the reader to participate in an emotionally and intellectually sincere manner. Images of normality in a peaceful world complete the picture and, though they risk losing the reader too tuned into spectacle, they are worth the risk. The Face of Human Rights takes a novel approach to a critical topic, interspersing a visual interpretation of individual legal aspects with textual collages from historical and current human rights discussions. It offers facts and figures, and acknowledges the efforts governmental and non-governmental organizations are making to defend human rights and stamp out their infringement. This publication is intended to help an international public to understand the complex demands, connections, and obstacles involved in a just and fair life together for all human beings. 300,000 children under the age of 18 serve in government forces or armed rebel groups / there is no country in the world where women's wages are equal to those of men / the U.S. government confirms that over 200 inmates have been wrongly convicted since 1973 / average life expectancy in the world is now 66 years, 20 years more than in 1960 / 1.3 billion people still lack access to safe water and 2.3 billion to sanitation / the adult literacy rate worldwide has increased by more than one-third since 1970, but 70% of illiterates are women / over a quarter of the world's people do not get enough food / approximately one in every five black Americans is jailed at some time during their life.

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720 pages, Hardcover

First published November 18, 2004

Reviews

[Wendelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Photos and stories that show the global scope of the continuing struggle for human rights in mulptiple dimensions-- homelessness, severe poverty, torture and rape, violence against women, gender inequality, pathways to education, food security, freedom of the press and freedom of thought, protections of privacy, fair treatment of prisoners and the mentally handicapped, recourse to fair trials and equal treatment before the law, and property rights, from places as distant and as disparate as Kenya to Czechoslovakia to Pakistan to Switzerland.

"Political liberty begins with the majority of individuals in a people feeling jointly liable for the politics of their community. It begins when the individual not merely covets and chides, when he demands of himself, to see reality and not to act upon the faith-- misplaced in politics-- in an early realization only because of the others' stupidity and ill will. It begins when he knows, rather, that politics looks in the concrete world for the negotiable path of each day, guided by the ideal of human existence as liberty."-- Karl Jaspers

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

The photography is exceptional and always clearly inked so which Human Right is being looked. A heavy read but more than worth the effort.