Contenu du sommaire : À quoi servent les droits aujourd'hui ?

The purpose of the article is to identify the current evolution of the nature of the subject of rights. In the first part, the emblematic model of human rights inherited from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution is discussed. The centrality of the political subject, the citizen, is posited in a political democracy based on the legitimate nation-State. The multiplication of the distribution of various rights leads us to note then that the figure of the citizen political subject is now weakened, like that of the State. Human rights are no longer exactly political rights, but become, day by day, naturalized rights whose subject has become the biological man, a natural creature, as exemplary of the human species in biodiversity, among plants and animals. It is the species that is entitled to rights, and the right to a minimum dignity. The political citizen is thus naturalized and depoliticized. The meaning and effects of capitalization of rights as moral goods acquired by rights market subjects are then analyzed. Finally, we conclude by examining the recent entry into the field of environmental subjects, such as rivers, to which are attributed legal personalities and a right to protection which constitutes them as subjects of rights if not to be still clearly subjects of law.

The law is a living and evolving discipline which adapts itself to its environment. At the time of the big data, everything becomes tracks and the personal data are, from now on, one of essential resources of the digital economy. This article examines the reasons and the birth modalities of the right to be digitally forgotten, explores the contents of this subjective law and the way it articulates with the respect of privacy, the freedom of expression, the economic interests of the market players and the transformations of the society. The implementation of the right to be digitally forgotten reflects the questioning relative to the transformation of national legislations and to their efficiency within the cyberspace. This “new law” highlights the challenges occuring in the heart of the various modifications that the law is subject to at the beginning of the XXIth century and questions its adaptation to the cyberspace.

Sexual rights are here questioned in a heterodox way as the whole of the phenomena marking the emergence of sexual idiosyncrasies – including women – and by calling for a new regime of free will, ideologically far removed from the previous themes of liberation and sexual freedom. The article first examines the political figures of sexual rights as they show today especially in China and Bangladesh. In a second part, the author focuses on the intimate echoes of the liberalization of sexualities with French and Laotian examples. Finally, it is the present modalities of desire and enjoyment that are analyzed in a state of emergency.

This article deals with the issue of homosexual rights in Cameroon and the associations that defend them. Taking into account the experiences of homosexual men confronted with State violence, and the police actions that legitimize the violence perpetrated by society towards homosexuals, the argumentation of this work is based on the hiatus between the Cameroon's adherence to the main international treaties that condemn discrimination against homosexuals, legitimize the activities of human rights activists, and the reality on the ground where, in the case of Cameroon, national legislation penalizes homosexuality and hinders the right of association. The law thus becomes an offensive weapon against homosexuals and their defender.

When the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the recognition in international law of these peoples invisibilized by the modern construction of the State and marginalized by dominant societies, marked their integration into the humanity. Ten years after this event that extended the catalog of human rights, adding collective rights to the panoply of individual rights, this article looks back on the developments of the indigenous peoples movement. It recalls the importance for these “new” subjects of law to participate in matters that concern them, the institutionalization of indigenous issues and the construction of a transnational space that places their issues in all the scenarios of global governance. While violations are not always punished by litigation, the author clarifies the linkages between human rights and the rights of indigenous peoples and the existence of regional rights systems that are supposed to enforce them.

This article questions the efficiency of transitional justice. The standing hypothesis of this paper is that NGOs, based on the Serbian NGO example, are united around transnational human-rights protections, but remain in direct competition or discrepancy, regarding regional memory issues, and this can lead to further conflicts in the reconciliation policies. This article questions the difficulties non-governmental organizations have to impose their transitional justice in the face of passivity from the Serbian Government, and the importance of their reliance on international backer agencies. Thanks to foreign pressure, they could influence the Serbian Government. This article shows all the ambiguity for these NGOs to act in the name of human rights, within their own territories but at the same time being in discord between themselves, intertwined in international relations and financially dependent on internationals donors. 

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork (2008-2010) in Mexico among social workers whose mission consists in taking care of and providing support to street children, this article focuses on how these agents seize upon questions raised by adoption procedures and legal norms in this particular context. In order to successfully complete their mission, social workers we interviewed tend to progressively grasp, interpret and use both new discursive and legal resources related to Children's and Human rights. We try to question the role of these resources and their interpretation in the care given to street youth by those agents, within a specific sociopolitical context in Mexico, i.e. the “democratic openness”. We demonstrate that those new resources are mobilized by agents in a unique perspective and within a wider framework than the one originally assigned to them: l'enfoque de derecho y de genero (human rights and gender perspectives on issues raised by street youth). A gender analysis of the data gathered in the fieldwork reveals the manners in which these resources and their interpretation within agents' mission lead to contradictions and paradoxes, replacing street girls under naturalized social roles related to their own gender. Two logics are pitching against each other here: on one side, the social world of the care given to street youth is confronted to a political reference to human rights within a gender perspective; on the other side, depending on one child's gender, the result of the first logic revolves around a contradictory appropriation of these resources, not always following the principle of equality of treatment among these street children.

In the 1900s' legislative debates, labor contract is conceived as an exclusive relation between a worker and an employer, meaning the economic dependance of the former to the latter. But, the Code did not define the labor contract, and it left space for an intervention of the Cour de cassation that took subordination as the criterium of a labor contract. Thus, labor is less the activity of a worker than the expression of the will of an employer, with fundamental rights as the ultimate limit. The labor code proposition established by the GR-PACT adresses this gap, as it defines labor contract not only by the de facto power of the employer, but also by the economic dependance of the worker.

By regulating the entry and residence of non-nationals on French territory, immigration law, as a manifestation of State sovereignty, is at the crossroads of the objectives induced by administrative policing requirements and those required by respect for the fundamental rights of individuals. Developed after the Second World War and continuing to evolve through every immigration reforms, immigration law is also characterized today by its many supranational legal and jurisprudential influences. Due to the logic of “categorization” of individuals carried out through its reference Code and its many other texts and bilateral conventions, the study of this law, as rich as complex, raises questions about the legal conception of the “foreigner” understood as object and subject of law.

Hotel companies are characterized by the existence of an organizational boundary between work on the scene, in interaction with customers, and in the backstage. The dramaturgical approach is particularly fertile in order to highlight the different rules governing work in these two regions. At the same time, in luxury hotels, the cut between scene and backstage is accompanied by a social division of labor, based on criteria of generation, gender and “race”. The professional logic of scene and backstage employees depends on recognition at work and on the constraints of the service relationship. In companies whose barriers between scene and backstage are more rigid, employee resistance strategies behind the scenes generate more tension which fuel their antagonism with those of the scene.