Helen Keller – författare

These poetic, inspiring essays offer remarkable insights into the world of a gifted woman who was deaf and blind. Helen Keller relates her impressions of the world's beauty and promise, perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination.

Helen Kellers självbiografiska bok Mitt livs historia i översättning och med efterord av Helena Fagertun. Keller var helt blind och helt döv och fram till sju års ålder levde hon i en mörk, tyst värld utan språk. Men så kom läraren Anne Sullivan och började få kontakt med henne genom att göra tecken i hennes händer. Genombrottet blev "miraklet vid vattenpumpen" när Helen kände vattnets stråle i sin ena hand och tecknen för vatten i den andra. Plötsligt förstod hon innebörden av "betyder" och hennes språkutveckling rivstartade.

Half a century ago, on 16 December 1966, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). While the adoption of the two UN human rights covenants was celebrated all over the world, their 50th anniversary has received very little attention from the international community. The present book marks this anniversary by taking stock of the first half-century of the existence of what are probably the world's two most important human rights treaties. It does so by reflecting on what the covenants have achieved (or failed to achieve) in the years that have passed, by determining and comparing their current influence in the various regions of the world, and by assessing their potential roles in the future.The book contains papers that were presented during a symposium held in Zurich in 2016, which brought together experts and stakeholders from a range of disciplines and world regions. Some fundamental issues that are addressed by the contributors are as old as the two covenants themselves. They concern, for example, the division of human rights into first- and second-generation rights, and the question of whether there should be one central monitoring body - possibly a world court - or more than just one. However, the contributors go beyond such questions that have been explored before; they develop new answers to old questions and point to new challenges.

The European Convention on Human Rights has evolved into a sophisticated legal system, whose formal reach into the domestic law and politics of the Contracting States is limited only by the ever-widening scope of the Convention itself, as determined by a transnational court. In this book, a team of distinguished scholars trace and evaluate, comparatively, the impact of the ECHR and the European Court of Human Rights on law and politics in eighteen national systems: Ireland-UK; France-Germany, Italy-Spain, Belgium-Netherlands, Norway-Sweden, Greece-Turkey, Russia-Ukraine, Poland-Slovakia, and Austria-Switzerland. Although the Court's jurisprudence has provoked significant structural, procedural, and policy innovation in every State examined, its impact varies widely across States and legal domains. The book charts this variation and seeks to explain it. Across Europe, national officials - in governments, legislatures, and judiciaries - have chosen to incorporate the ECHR into domestic law, and they have developed a host of mechanisms designed to adapt the national legal system to the ECHR as it evolves. But how and why State actors have done so varies in important ways, and these differences heavily determine the relative status and effectiveness of Convention rights in national systems. Although problems persist, the book shows that national officials are, gradually but inexorably, being socialized into a Europe of rights, a unique transnational legal space now developing its own logics of political and juridical legitimacy.

The friendly settlement procedure is an important tool for the reduction of the European Court of Human Rights' (ECtHR) case load. Recent practice demonstrates that this procedure is increasingly resorted to by applicants and Contracting States. This book evaluates this largely unexplored instrument from doctrinal as well as practical perspectives, making recommendations to render the negotiations before the ECtHR more efficient and professional. The book examines questions relating to the admissibility as well as to the practical manageability of friendly settlements. In contrast to ordinary civil proceedings, the friendly settlements procedure has a mixed legal character: while settlements are an inter-partes procedure, they are also binding under international law, as the ECtHR often hands them down in the form of a judgment. In this context, the question arises as to how far the proceedings can be 'privatised' and where the limits to the monetisation of human rights violation lie. This book evaluates possible abuses and identifies the precautions that need to be taken in the framework of friendly settlements. This issue is linked to the question of whether the legal framework which governs the conclusion of a friendly settlement should be formulated in a more concrete manner, given that the position of the parties is unequal and that the role of the Court is hardly defined in this context. Furthermore, the book empirically examines whether the friendly settlement procedure is as advantageous in comparison to ordinary proceedings as others have argued. It also questions whether the friendly settlements procedure can provide the applicant with 'more money faster'.

This book deals with her 25 years after Helen Keller left Radcliffe--the story of her work and friendships.