The Synthesis of Law and Politics and the Evolution of International Justice
ORIGINALLY RECORDED January 30, 2012
Ambassador David Scheffer and former State Department legal adviser John Bellinger discuss how international justice over the last two decades has affected international politics, including the U.S. role in assisting local war crimes prosecutions in Libya and elsewhere.
SPEAKERS:
John B. Bellinger III
David J. Scheffer
PRESIDER:
Jeffrey Toobin
Human rights in the United States | Wikipedia audio article
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Human rights in the United States
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
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Human rights in the United States comprise a series of rights which are legally protected by the Constitution of the United States, including the amendments, state constitutions, conferred by treaty and customary international law, and enacted legislatively through Congress, state legislatures, and state referenda and citizen's initiatives. Federal courts in the United States have jurisdiction over international human rights laws as a federal question, arising under international law, which is part of the law of the United States.The human rights record of the United States of America is a complex matter with varying opinions; first and foremost the Federal Government of the United States has, through a ratified constitution, guaranteed unalienable rights to citizens of the country, and also to some degree, non-citizens. These rights evolved over time through constitutional amendments, supported by legislation and judicial precedent. Along with the rights themselves, the periphery of the population who had access to these rights has expanded over time. Today, the United States has a vibrant civil society and strong constitutional protections for many civil and political rights.On a number of human rights issues, the United States has been internationally criticized for its human rights record, including the least protections for workers of most Western countries, the imprisonment of debtors, and the criminalization of homelessness and poverty, the invasion of the privacy of its citizens through surveillance programs, police brutality, police impunity, the incarceration of citizens for profit, the mistreatment of prisoners and juveniles in the prison system, having the longest prison sentences of any country, being the last Western country with a death penalty, abuses of illegal immigrants, including children, facilitating state terrorism and the continued support for foreign dictators who commit abuses (including genocide), forced disappearances, extraordinary renditions, extrajudicial detentions, torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and black sites, and extrajudicial targeted killings (Disposition Matrix).Some observers give the U.S. high to fair marks on human rights, while others charge it with a persistent pattern of human rights violations.
Public administration | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Public administration
Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.
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- improves your listening skills
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- learn while on the move
- reduce eye strain
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
=======
Public administration is the implementation of government policy and also an academic discipline that studies this implementation and prepares civil servants for working in the public service. As a field of inquiry with a diverse scope whose fundamental goal is to advance management and policies so that government can function. Some of the various definitions which have been offered for the term are: the management of public programs; the translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day; and the study of government decision making, the analysis of the policies themselves, the various inputs that have produced them, and the inputs necessary to produce alternative policies.Public administration is centrally concerned with the organization of government policies and programs as well as the behavior of officials (usually non-elected) formally responsible for their conduct. Many unelected public servants can be considered to be public administrators, including heads of city, county, regional, state and federal departments such as municipal budget directors, human resources (HR) administrators, city managers, census managers, state mental health directors, and cabinet secretaries. Public administrators are public servants working in public departments and agencies, at all levels of government.
In the United States, civil servants and academics such as Woodrow Wilson promoted civil service reform in the 1880s, moving public administration into academia. However, until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy there was not much interest in a theory of public administration. The field is multidisciplinary in character; one of the various proposals for public administration's sub-fields sets out six pillars, including human resources, organizational theory, policy analysis, statistics, budgeting, and ethics.