Religion, Culture, and Human Rights in India

With God as our Witness
Erscheinungsjahr 2027
ISBN: 978-1-5099-8613-2
Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing plc

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 409 g

Reihe: Hart Publishing

This book provides a novel judicial framework for receiving and considering religious and cultural claims in shaping human rights in constitutional secular democracies. It does this through an extended case study of the Indian constitutional jurisprudence.

Abortion and surrogacy, LGBTQ + rights, sex work and euthanasia are arguably the most controversial human rights issues of our time. They all invite passionate religious and cultural debate but are not themselves religious or cultural rights issues. Instead, they pose a fundamental constitutional question: How far can religion and culture go in shaping general human rights in secular constitutional democracies?

Moving beyond the logic of individual rights, this book provides an integrated and holistic approach to answering this classic question of constitutional law. To do this, it proposes an innovative empirically backed normative-theoretical framework which synthesises insights from cultural psychoanalysis, feminist legal scholarship, socio-legal method, constitutional law, evidence law, and political theory.

It looks at a unique constellation of cases belonging to eight different human rights themes covering the period since India's independence in 1947 and systematically analyses the religious and cultural claims made in those cases. It finds that in India, a more holistic approach to answering our classic constitutional puzzle requires a simultaneous consideration of three different theories:

A theory of constitutional interpretation which formulates restrictions on a judge considering religious and cultural claims in fundamental rights cases;
A theory of judicial notice which determines when such claims can be admitted without proof;
A theory of secularism and public reason which argues that the claims must be given weight in the final decision only if they match defensible conceptions of constitutional values.

The book develops these theories and applies them to the Indian cases, providing an innovative approach to an age-old question.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Sheffield.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shukla, Surabhi

Fachgebiete

• Rechtswissenschaften Ausländisches Recht Common Law (UK, USA, Australien u.a.)
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsvergleichung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Part One: The Nature of the Problem
1. Locating Religion and Culture in Human Rights: A Problem without a Location
2. A Cultural Psychoanalytical Account of Indianness A Conceptual Framework for Identifying Prototypical Cases

Part Two: Studying the Cases
3. Getting Familiar with the Cases Part I: Beauty Pageants, Abortion, and Marital Rape
4. Getting Familiar with the Cases: Suicide, Euthanasia, Bar Dancing, Sex Work, Sexuality, and Gender Identity Right to Die, Bar Dancing, Sex Work, and LGBT+ Rights
5. Extracting Religious and Cultural Claims from Cases
6. Coding and Analysing the Religious and Cultural Claims

Part Three: The Normative and Analytical Dimensions of the Problem
7. A Theory of Constitutional Interpretation
8. Employing Judicial Notice
9. Clarifying Secularism and Public Reason
10. Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Shukla, Surabhi
Surabhi Shukla is Lecturer in Law at the University of Sheffield, UK.