Selecting Your Human Rights Research Paper Topic

Today and tomorrow, we will be working on identifying human rights topics for our research papers.

Here are some requirements:

1. Select a contemporary or recent (last 10 years) issue that deals with the rights of human beings (not non-human animals) from birth to death.

2. Make sure this is an issue you can approach without personal, political, or religious bias. The intent of the essay is to provide information, not to present an argument.

3. Do some preliminary research to clarify your understanding of the nature of the issue and make sure there are research resources available on the topic.

4. Avoid selecting topic that are too complex to grasp and discuss withing the context of a single research essay. You may want to narrow your discussion to help with this. For example, nobody can deal with the entire issue of hunger around the world in a single paper. However, you could look at hunger or malnutrition in a specific region or based on a specific cause.

5. Do not duplicate topics. Everyone will have their own topic of research.

Here are some suggestions for inquiry:

Access to clean, safe water

Access to Education – especially by income or gender

Access to legal representation

Adequate Housing

Arbitrary Detention

Asylum

Border conflicts/Marginal populations

Child Labor /

Child Marriage

Child Slavery/Prostitution

Child Soldiers/Orphans of war/Lost children

Civil War

Civilian Casualties in Wartime

Death Squads/Paramilitaries

Detainee Status/Prisoners of War

Disarmament

Domestic Violence

Drug trafficking

Due Process

Employment Discrimination

Environmental Pollution

Fair elections

Feeding programs/Malnutrition

Freedom of Association

Freedom of Expression,

Freedom of Religion

Gangs

Genocide/War Crimes

Government control of media

Health Care: Drug Prices/Intellectual property

Health Care: Health care access for women

Health Care: Tropical diseases/research priorities

Homeless rights

Honor killings

Housing Discrimination

Human Trafficking

Immigrants’ Rights

Indigenous People’s rights

Internally displaced persons

Landmines

Microcredit  - Access to capital

Peacekeeping Programs/Conflict resolution

Police Brutality

Prisoners’ Rights / minors /mentally disabled

Right to national identity

Rights of the mentally ill

Rights of the Physically Disabled

Self-Determination

Street children

Terrorism

Torture

War profiteering

Weapons of mass destruction/Nuclear proliferation