More than twenty years after the fall of communism, many countries in Central and Eastern Europe are still seeking truth and justice for the repression suffered under communist rule. This search has been particularly notable in the Baltic states, given the three countries' histories as both former Soviet republics and later member-states of the European Union. On the one hand, the legacy of Stalinist oppression was more severe in these countries than elsewhere in Central Europe, but on the other hand much of this past could more easily be externalized onto the former Soviet Union (and by extension Russia) following re-independence. Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States develops a novel conceptual framework in order to understand the politics involved with transitional and retrospective justice, and then applies this outline to the Baltic states to analyze more systematic patterns of truth- and justice-seeking in the post-communist world.

There are a multitude of UN legal instruments which pertain to the rights of freedom of expression and information, and this book is the first to comprehensively map them and their function. It details the chequered history of both of these rights within the UN system and evaluates the suitability of the system for overcoming contemporary challenges and threats to the rights. Leading scholars address key issues, such as how the rights to freedom of expression and information can come into conflict with other human rights and with public policy goals, such as counter-terrorism. The book's institutional focus comprises five international treaties, UNESCO and the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression. Relevant for academics, lawyers, policy-makers and civil society actors, it also examines how new communication technologies have prompted fresh thinking about the substance and scope of the rights to freedom of expression and information.

An 'implementation crisis' has been identified in the enforcement of rulings of UN and regional human rights bodies, and fundamental but crucial questions remain unanswered: what exactly does it mean to implement and comply with international and regional human rights decisions, and what factors influence whether a state implements and complies or not? Much more is now known about the work of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, but a gap still exists in the literature on the implementation of the findings of the Commission. This book draws upon the data and evaluation from a four-year research project, analysing the range of pronouncements of the African Commission, including its decisions on individual communications, provisional measures, resolutions, and promotional and protective mission reports. It investigates the extent to which states implement these findings and examines how that implementation is monitored by others.

In recent years, political philosophers have debated whether human rights are a special class of moral rights we all possess simply by virtue of our common humanity and which are universal in time and space, or whether they are essentially modern political constructs defined by the role they play in an international legal-political practice that regulates the relationship between the governments of sovereign states and their citizens. This edited volume sets out to further this debate and move it ahead by rethinking some of its fundamental premises and applying it to new and challenging domains, such as socio-economic rights, indigenous rights, the rights of immigrants and the human rights responsibilities of corporations. Beyond the philosophy of human rights, the book has a broader relevance by contributing to key themes in the methodology of political philosophy and addressing urgent issues in contemporary global policy making.

Human rights can be defined as the basic fundamental rights inherent to all human beings in any society. How these rights are made available and protected in individual countries is an area of much study and debate. Focusing on the significance of human rights in American law and politics, this book seeks to understand when, where, and how American law recognizes and responds to claims made in the name of human rights. How are they used by social movements as they advance rights claims? When are human rights claims accommodated and resisted? Do particular kinds of human rights claims have greater resonance domestically than others? What cultural and psychological factors impede the development of a human rights culture in the United States? This is an exciting and engaging volume that will appeal to a broad range of scholars, practitioners, and students interested in the study of human rights.

The tension between blasphemy laws and the freedom of expression in modern times is a key area of debate within legal academia and beyond. With contributions by leading scholars, this volume compares blasphemy laws within a number of Western liberal democracies and debates the legitimacy of these laws in the twenty-first century. Including comprehensive and up-to-date comparative country studies, this book considers the formulation of blasphemy bans, relevant jurisprudential interpretations, the effect on society, and the ensuing convictions and penalties where applicable. It provides a useful historical analysis by discussing the legal-political rationales behind the recent abolition of blasphemy laws in some Western states. Contributors also consider the challenges to the tenability of blasphemy laws in a selection of well-balanced theoretical chapters. This book is essential reading for scholars working within the fields of human rights law, philosophy and sociology of religion, and comparative politics.

Generations of festering culture wars, compounded by actual wars in predominantly Muslim countries, the terrorism of Isis, and the ongoing migrant crisis have all combined to make religious discrimination the most pressing challenge now facing many governments. For the leading common law nations, with their shared Christian cultural heritage balanced by a growing secularism, the threat presented by this toxic mix has the potential to destabilise civil society. This book suggests that the instances of religious discrimination, as currently legally defined, are constrained by that cultural context, exacerbated by a policy of multiculturalism, and in practice, conflated with racial, ethnic or other forms of discrimination. Kerry O'Halloran argues that many culture war issues - such as those that surround the pro-choice/pro-life debate and the rights of the LGBT community - can be viewed as rooted in the same Christian morality that underpins the law relating to religious discrimination.

Why has there been a human rights backlash in Russia despite the country having been part of the European human rights protection system since the late 1990s? To what extent does Russia implement judgments of the Strasbourg Court, and to what extent does it resist the implementation? This fascinating study investigates Russia's turbulent relationship with the European Court of Human Rights and examines whether the Strasbourg court has indeed had the effect of increasing the protection of human rights in Russia. Researchers and scholars of law and political science with a particular interest in human rights and Russia will benefit from this in-depth exploration of the background of this subject.

The calls for an international treaty to elaborate the human rights obligations of transnational corporations and other business enterprises have been rapidly growing, due to the failures of existing regulatory initiatives in holding powerful business actors accountable for human rights abuses. In response, Building a Treaty on Business and Human Rights explores the context and content of such a treaty. Bringing together leading academics from around the world, this book engages with several key areas: the need for the treaty and its scope; the nature and extent of corporate obligations; the role of state obligations; and how to strengthen remedies for victims of human rights violations by business. It also includes draft provisions for a proposed treaty to advance the debate in this contentious area and inform future treaty negotiations. This book will appeal to those interested in the fields of corporate social responsibility, and business and human rights.

Social justice and human rights movements are entering a new phase. Social media, artificial intelligence, and digital forensics are reshaping advocacy and compliance. Technicians, lawmakers, and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the nonhuman. #HumanRights examines how new technologies interact with older models of rights claiming and communication, influencing and reshaping the modern-day pursuit of justice. Ronald Niezen argues that the impacts of information technologies on human rights are not found through an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other, "traditional" forms of media to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. Niezen considers various ways that the pursuit of justice is happening via new technologies, including crowdsourcing, social media-facilitated mobilizations (and enclosures), WhatsApp activist networks, and the selective attention of Google's search engine algorithm. He uncovers how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the "new victimology" that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others. #HumanRights paints a striking and important panoramic picture of the contest between authoritarianism and the new tools by which people attempt to leverage human rights and bring the powerful to account.

The use of solitary confinement in prisons became common with the rise of the modern penitentiary during the first half of the nineteenth century and his since remained a feature of many prison systems all over the world. Solitary confinement is used for a panoply of different reasons although research tells us that these practices have widespread negative health effects. Besides the death penalty it is arguably the most punitive and dangerous intervention available to state authorities in democratic nations. Nevertheless, in the United States there is currently an estimated 80-100,000 prisoners in small cells for more than 22 hours per day with little or no social contact and no physical contact visits with family or friends. Even in Scandinavia, thousands of prisoners are placed in solitary confinement every year and with an alarming frequency. These facts have spawned international interest in this topic and a growing international reform movement, which includes researchers, litigators and human rights defenders as well as prison staff and prisoners. This book is the first to take a broad international comparative approach and to apply an interdisciplinary lens to this subject. In this volume neuroscientists, high level prison officials, social and political scientists, medical doctors, lawyers and former prisoners and their families from different countries will address the effects and practices of prolonged solitary confinement and the movement for its reform and abolition.

Bringing armed conflicts to an end is difficult; restoring a lasting peace can be considerably harder. Reclaiming Everyday Peace addresses the effectiveness and impact of local level interventions on communities affected by war. Using an innovative methodology to generate participatory numbers, Pamina Firchow finds that communities saturated with external interventions after war do not have substantive higher levels of peacefulness according to community-defined indicators of peace than those with lower levels of interventions. These findings suggest that current international peacebuilding efforts are not very effective at achieving peace by local standards because disproportionate attention is paid to reconstruction, governance and development assistance with little attention paid to community ties and healing. Firchow argues that a more bottom up approach to measuring the effectiveness of peacebuilding is required. By finding ways to effectively communicate local community needs and priorities to the international community, efforts to create an atmosphere for an enduring peace are possible.

Transforming Citizenships engages the performativity of citizenship as it relates to transgender individuals and advocacy groups. Instead of reading the law as a set of self-executing discourses, Isaac West takes up transgender rights claims as performative productions of complex legal subjectivities capable of queering accepted understandings of genders, sexualities, and the normative forces of the law. Drawing on an expansive archive, from the correspondence of a transwoman arrested for using a public bathroom in Los Angeles in 1954 to contemporary lobbying efforts of national transgender advocacy organizations, West advances a rethinking of law as capacious rhetorics of citizenship, justice, equality, and freedom. When approached from this perspective, citizenship can be recuperated from its status as the bad object of queer politics to better understand how legal discourses open up sites for identification across identity categories and enable political activities that escape the analytics of heteronormativity and homonationalism. Isaac West is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa.

Few African countries provide for an explicit right to a nationality. Laws and practices governing citizenship effectively leave hundreds of thousands of people in Africa without a country. These stateless Africans can neither vote nor stand for office; they cannot enrol their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government; they are exposed to human rights abuses. Statelessness exacerbates and underlies tensions in many regions of the continent.

Citizenship Law in Africa, a comparative study by two programs of the Open Society Foundations, describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international rights norms. The report covers topics such as citizenship by descent, citizenship by naturalisation, gender discrimination in citizenship law, dual citizenship, and the right to identity documents and passports. It is essential reading for policymakers, attorneys, and activists. This third edition is a comprehensive revision of the original text, which is also updated to reflect developments at national and continental levels. The original tables presenting comparative analysis of all the continent's nationality laws have been improved, and new tables added on additional aspects of the law.

Since the second edition was published in 2010, South Sudan has become independent and adopted its own nationality law, while there have been revisions to the laws in Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Namibia, Niger, Senegal, Seychelles, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child have developed important new normative guidance.

Priests of Our Democracy tells of the teachers and professors who battled the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s. It traces the political fortunes of academic freedom beginning in the late 19th century, both on campus and in the courts. Combining political and legal history with wrenching personal stories, the book details how the anti-communist excesses of the 1950s inspired the Supreme Court to recognize the vital role of teachers and professors in American democracy. The crushing of dissent in the 1950s impoverished political discourse in ways that are still being felt, and First Amendment academic freedom, a product of that period, is in peril today. In compelling terms, this book shows why the issue should matter to everyone.

This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents in contemporary life. It also updates the story of passport regulations from the publication of the first edition, which appeared just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the present day.

A unique investigation into how alliances form in highly polarized times among LGBTQ, immigrant, and labor rights activists, revealing the impacts within each rights movement. Queer Alliances investigates coalition formation among LGBTQ, immigrant, and labor rights activists in the United States, revealing how these new alliances impact political movement formation. In the early 2000s, the LGBTQ and immigrant rights movements operated separately from and, sometimes, in a hostile manner towards each other. Since 2008, by contrast, major alliances have formed at the national and state level across these communities. Yet, this new coalition formation came at a cost. Today, coalitions across these communities have been largely reluctant to address issues of police brutality, mass incarceration, economic inequality, and the ruthless immigrant regulatory complex. Queer Alliances examines the extent to which grassroots groups bridged historic divisions based on race, gender, class, and immigration status through the development of coalitions, looking specifically at coalition building around expanding LGBTQ rights in Washington State and immigrant and migrant rights in Arizona. Erin Mayo-Adam traces the evolution of political movement formation in each state, and shows that while the movements expanded, they simultaneously ossified around goals that matter to the most advantaged segments of their respective communities. Through a detailed, multi-method study that involves archival research and in-depth interviews with organization leaders and advocates, Queer Alliances centers local, coalition-based mobilization across and within multiple movements rather than national campaigns and court cases that often occur at the end of movement formation. Mayo-Adam argues that the construction of common political movement narratives and a shared core of opponents can help to explain the paradoxical effects of coalition formation. On the one hand, the development of shared political movement narratives and common opponents can expand movements in some contexts. On the other hand, the episodic nature of rights-based campaigns can simultaneously contain and undermine movement expansion, reinforcing movement divisions. Mayo-Adam reveals the extent to which inter- and intra-movement coalitions, formed to win rights or thwart rights losses, represent and serve intersectionally marginalized communities-who are often absent from contemporary accounts of social movement formation.

In spite of a continued increase in the substantive scope and reach of EU fundamental rights, little attention has been paid to their practical enforcement. In this book, Mark Dawson looks at the mechanisms through which EU fundamental rights are protected and enforced, closely examining the interrelation between the EU's pertinent legal and political bodies. He argues that in order to understand EU fundamental rights we must also understand the institutional, political and normative constraints that shape the EU's policies. The book examines the performance of different EU institutions in relation to rights and studies two important policy fields - social rights and rule of law protection - in depth.

Edward Snowden's leaks exposed fundamental differences in the ways Americans and Europeans approach the issues of privacy and intelligence gathering. Featuring commentary from leading commentators, scholars and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic, the book documents and explains these differences, summarized in these terms: Europeans should 'grow up' and Americans should 'obey the law'. The book starts with a collection of chapters acknowledging that Snowden's revelations require us to rethink prevailing theories concerning privacy and intelligence gathering, explaining the differences and uncertainty regarding those aspects. An impressive range of experts reflect on the law and policy of the NSA-Affair, documenting its fundamentally transnational dimension, which is the real location of the transatlantic dialogue on privacy and intelligence gathering. The conclusive chapters explain the dramatic transatlantic differences that emerged from the NSA-Affair with a collection of comparative cultural commentary.

Voting Rights of Refugees develops a novel legal argument about the voting rights of refugees recognised in the 1951 Geneva Convention. The main normative contention is that such refugees should have the right to vote in the political community where they reside, assuming that this community is a democracy and that its citizens have the right to vote. The book argues that recognised refugees are a special category of non-citizen residents: they are unable to participate in elections of their state of origin, do not enjoy its diplomatic protection and consular assistance abroad, and are unable or unwilling, owing to a well-founded fear of persecution, to return to it. Refugees deserve to have a place in the world, in the Arendtian sense, where their opinions are significant and their actions are effective. Their state of asylum is the only community in which there is any prospect of political participation on their part.

By reconsidering the definitions of human trafficking, slavery, servitude and forced labour, Vladislava Stoyanova demonstrates how, in embracing the human trafficking framework, the international community has sidelined the human rights law commitments against slavery, servitude and forced labour that in many respects provide better protection for abused migrants. Stoyanova proposes two corrective steps to this development: placing a renewed emphasis on determining the definitional scope of slavery, servitude or forced labour, and gaining a clearer understanding of states' positive human rights obligations. This book compares anti-trafficking and human rights frameworks side-by-side and focuses its analysis on the Council of Europe's Trafficking Convention and Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. With innovative arguments and pertinent case studies, this book is an important contribution to the field and will appeal to students, scholars and legal practitioners interested in human rights law, migration law, criminal law and EU law.

The principle of proportionality, which has become the standard test for adjudicating human and constitutional rights disputes in jurisdictions worldwide has had few critics. Proportionality is generally taken for granted or enthusiastically promoted or accepted with minor qualifications. A Critique of Proportionality and Balancing presents a frontal challenge to this orthodoxy. It provides a comprehensive critique of the proportionality principle, and particularly of its most characteristic component, balancing. Divided into three parts, the book presents arguments against the proportionality test, critiques the view of rights entailed by it, and proposes an alternative understanding of fundamental rights and their limits.

The Demographic Transformations of Citizenship examines how attempts by contemporary states to govern demographic anxieties are shaping ideas about citizenship both as a boundary-maintaining mechanism and as an ideal of equal membership. These anxieties, while most often centred upon immigration, also stem from other demographic changes unfolding in contemporary states - most notably, the long-standing trend towards lower birth rates and consequent population ageing. With attention to such topics as control over borders, national identity, gender roles, family life and changing stages of life, Askola examines the impact of demographic changes, including but not limited to immigration. Drawing from a variety of disciplines, including law, demography, and sociology, this book discusses how efforts to manage demographic anxieties are profoundly altering ideas about citizenship and belonging.

In every era of communications technology - whether print, radio, television, or Internet - some form of government censorship follows to regulate the medium and its messages. Today we are seeing the phenomenon of 'machine speech' enhanced by the development of sophisticated artificial intelligence. Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover argue that the First Amendment must provide defenses and justifications for covering and protecting robotic expression. It is irrelevant that a robot is not human and cannot have intentions; what matters is that a human experiences robotic speech as meaningful. This is the constitutional recognition of 'intentionless free speech' at the interface of the robot and receiver. Robotica is the first book to develop the legal arguments for these purposes. Aimed at law and communication scholars, lawyers, and free speech activists, this work explores important new problems and solutions at the interface of law and technology.

How can we understand and contest the global wave of violence against women? In this book, Alison Brysk shows that gender violence across countries tends to change as countries develop and liberalize, but not in the ways that we might predict. She shows how liberalizing authoritarian countries and transitional democracies may experience more shifting patterns and greater levels of violence than less developed and democratic countries, due to changes and uncertainties in economic and political structures. Accordingly, Brysk analyzes the experience of semi-liberal, developing countries at the frontiers of globalization-Brazil, India, South Africa, Mexico, the Philippines, and Turkey-to map out patterns of gender violence and what can be done to change those patterns. As the book shows, gender violence is not static, nor can it be attributed to culture or individual pathology-rather it varies across a continuum that tracks economic, political, and social change. While a combination of international action, law, public policy, civil society mobilization, and changes in social values work to decrease gender violence, Brysk assesses the potential, limits, and balance of these measures. Brysk shows that a human rights approach is necessary but not sufficient to address gender violence, and that insights from feminist and development approaches are essential.