Human dignity is one of the most challenging and exciting ideas for lawyers and political philosophers in the twenty-first century. Even though it is rapidly emerging as a core concept across legal systems, and is the first foundational value of the European Union and its overarching human rights commitment under the Lisbon Treaty, human dignity is still little understood and often mistrusted. Based on extensive comparative and cross-disciplinary research, this path-breaking monograph provides an innovative and critical investigation of human dignity's origins, development and above all its potential at the heart of European constitutionalism today. Grounding its analysis in the connections among human dignity, human rights, constitutional law and democracy, this book argues that human dignity's varied and increasing uses point to a deep transformation of European constitutionalism. At its heart are the construction and protection of constitutional time, and the multi-dimensional definition of humanity as human beings, citizens and workers. Anchored in a detailed comparative study of case law, including the two European supranational courts and domestic constitutional courts, especially those of Germany, the UK, France and Hungary, this monograph argues for a new understanding of European constitutionalism as a form of humanism.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a dramatic expansion in both the international human rights system and the transnational networks of activists, development organizations, and monitoring agencies that partially reinforce it. Yet despite or perhaps because of this explosive growth, the multiple statuses of human rights remain as unsettled as ever. Human Rights at the Crossroads brings together preeminent and emerging voices within human rights studies to think creatively about problems beyond their own disciplines, and to critically respond to what appear to be intractable problems within human rights theory and practice. This book includes essays that rethink the ideas surrounding human rights and dignity, human rights and state interests in citizenship and torture, the practice of human rights in politics, genocide, and historical re-writing, and the anthropological and medical approaches to human rights. Human Rights at the Crossroads provides an integrative and interdisciplinary answer to the existing academic status quo, with broad implications for future human rights theory and practice in all fields.

We now live in a world which thinks through the legislative implications of criminal justice with one eye on human rights. "Human Rights and the Criminal Justice System "provides comprehensive coverage of human rights as it relates to the contemporary criminal justice system. As well as being a significant aspect of international governance and global justice, Amatrudo and Blake argue here that human rights have also eclipsed the rhetoric of religion in contemporary moral discussion. This book explores topics such as terrorism, race, and the rights of prisoners, as well as existing legal structures, court practices, and the developing literature in criminology, law and political science, in order to critically review the relationship between the developing body of human rights theory and practice, and the criminal justice system.

This book will be of considerable interest to those with academic concerns in this area; as well as providing an accessible, yet sophisticated, resource for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate human rights courses.

Human rights in peace and development are accepted throughout the Global South as established, normative, and beyond debate. Only in the powerful elite sectors of the Global North have these rights been resisted and refuted. The policies and interests of these global forces are antithetical to advancing human rights, ending global poverty, and respecting the sovereign integrity of States and governments throughout the Global South. The link between poverty, war, and environmental degradation has become evident over the last 60 years, further augmenting international consciousness of these issues as interconnected with the rest of the human rights corpus. This book examines the history of this struggle and outlines practical means to implement these rights through a global framework of constitutional protections. Within this emerging framework, it argues that States will be increasingly obligated to formulate policies and programs to achieve peace and development throughout the global society.

Spain is a notable exception to the implicit rules of late twentieth-century democratization: after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975, the recovering nation began to consolidate democracy without enacting any of the mechanisms promoted by the international transitional justice movement. There were no political trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, no formal attributions of blame, and no apologies. Instead, Spain's national parties negotiated the Pact of Forgetting, an agreement intended to place the bloody Spanish Civil War and the authoritarian excesses of the Franco dictatorship firmly in the past, not to be revisited even in conversation. Formalized by an amnesty law in 1977, this agreement defies the conventional wisdom that considers retribution and reconciliation vital to rebuilding a stable nation. Although not without its dark side, such as the silence imposed upon the victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship, the Pact of Forgetting allowed for the peaceful emergence of a democratic state, one with remarkable political stability and even a reputation as a trailblazer for the national rights and protections of minority groups.Omar G. Encarnacion examines the factors in Spanish political history that made the Pact of Forgetting possible, tracing the challenges and consequences of sustaining the agreement until its dramatic reversal with the 2007 Law of Historical Memory. The combined forces of a collective will to avoid revisiting the traumas of a difficult and painful past and the reliance on the reformed political institutions of the old regime to anchor the democratic transition created a climate conducive to forgetting. At the same time, the political movement to forget encouraged the embrace of a new national identity as a modern and democratic European state. Demonstrating the surprising compatibility of forgetting and democracy, "Democratization Without Justice in Spain" offers a crucial counterexample to the transitional justice movement. The refusal to confront and redress the past did not inhibit the rise of a successful democracy in Spain; on the contrary, by leaving the past behind, Spain chose not to repeat it.

Since 2008 increasing pirate activities in Somalia, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean have once again drawn the international community's attention to piracy and armed robbery at sea. States are resolved to repress these impediments to the free flow of trade and navigation. To this end a number of multinational counter-piracy missions have been deployed to the region.
This book describes the enforcement powers that States may rely upon in their quest to repress piracy in the larger Gulf of Aden region. The piracy rules of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the legal safeguards applicable to maritime interception operations are scrutinized before the analysis turns to the criminal prosecution of pirates and armed robbers at sea. The discussion includes so-called shiprider agreements, the transfers of alleged offenders to regional states, the jurisdictional bases for prosecuting pirates, and the feasibility of an internationalized venue for their trial. In addressing a range of relevant issues, this book presents a detailed and comprehensive up-to-date analysis of the legal issues pertaining to the repression of piracy and armed robbery at sea and assesses whether the currently existing legal regime is still adequate to effectively counter piracy in the 21st century.

Civil Rights in American Law, History, and Politics charts the ambiguous and contested meanings of civil rights in law and culture and confronts important questions about race in contemporary America. How important is civil rights in America's story of possibility and change? How has it transformed the very meaning of citizenship and identity in American culture? Why does the subject of race continue to haunt the American imagination and play such a large role in political and legal debates? Do affirmative action and multiculturalism promise a way out of racial polarization, or do they sharpen and deepen it? Are there new and better ways to frame our commitment to equal justice? This book brings together the work of five distinguished scholars to critically assess the place of civil rights in the American story. It offers different ways of talking about civil rights and frames through which we can address issues of civil rights in the future.

Citizenship has come to mean legal and political equality within a sovereign nation-state; in international law, only states may determine who is and who is not a citizen. But such unitary status is the historical exception: before sovereign nation-states became the prevailing form of political organization, citizenship had a range of definitions and applications. Today, nonstate communities and jurisdictions both below and above the state level are once again becoming important sources of rights, allegiance, and status, thereby constituting renewed forms of multilevel citizenship. For example, while the European Union protects the nation-state's right to determine its own members, the project to construct a democratic polity beyond national borders challenges the sovereignty of member governments. Multilevel Citizenship disputes the dominant narrative of citizenship as a homogeneous status that can be bestowed only by nation-states. The contributors examine past and present case studies that complicate the meaning and function of citizenship, including residual allegiance to empires, constitutional rights that are accessible to noncitizens, and the nonstate allegiance of nomadic nations. Their analyses consider the inconsistencies and exceptions of national citizenship as a political concept, such as overlapping jurisdictions and shared governance, as well as the emergent forms of sub- or supranational citizenships. Multilevel Citizenship captures the complexity of citizenship in practice, both at different levels and in different places and times. Contributors: Elizabeth F. Cohen, Elizabeth Dale, Will Hanley, Marc Helbling, Turkuler Isiksel, Jenn Kinney, Sheryl Lightfoot, Willem Maas, Catherine Neveu, Luicy Pedroza, Eldar Sarajlic, Rogers M. Smith.

Il lavoro si propone di analizzare il contratto autonomo di garanzia, uno degli istituti giuridici piu utilizzati nella prassi bancaria e nel commercio internazionale, avendo come punto di partenza gli ordinamenti italiano e tedesco. Attraverso un costante monitoraggio della dottrina formatasi sul tema e della giurisprudenza dei due Paesi coinvolti, l'autore si e posto l'obiettivo di individuare la disciplina piu confacente allo strumento contrattuale studiato, avanzando soluzioni rispettose del quadro sistematico, ma che tengano conto delle esigenza di elasticita e speditezza dei traffici commerciali. Il presente studio, corredato dalla prefazione di Giuseppe B. Portale, uno dei maggiori esperti sul tema, vuole essere una base per l'inquadramento a livello teorico del modello negoziale analizzato, e al tempo stesso un utile strumento per gli operatori nella prassi.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have generated tremendous discussion in global policy and academic circles. On the one hand, they have been hailed as the most important initiative ever in international development. On the other hand, they have been described as a great betrayal of human rights and universal values that has contributed to a depoliticization of development. With contributions from scholars from the fields of economics, law, politics, medicine, and architecture, this volume sets out to disentangle this debate in both theory and practice. It critically examines the trajectory of the MDGs, the role of human rights in theory and practice, and what criteria might guide the framing of the post-2015 development agenda. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in global agreements on poverty and development.

This book argues that there is an important connection between ethical resistance to British imperialism and the ethical discovery of gay rights. By closely examining the roots of liberal resistance in Britain and resistance to patriarchy in the United States, this book shows that fighting the demands of patriarchal manhood and womanhood plays an important role in countering imperialism. Advocates of feminism and gay rights (in particular, the Bloomsbury Group in Britain) play an important public function in the criticism of imperialism because they resist the gender binary's role in rationalizing sexism and homophobia in both public and private life. The connection between the rise of gay rights and the fall of empire illuminates larger questions of the meaning of democracy and of universal human rights as shared human values that have appeared since World War II. The book also casts doubt on the thesis that arguments for gay rights must be extrinsic to democracy, and that they must reflect Western, as opposed to African or Asian, values. To the contrary, gay rights arise from within liberal democracy, and its critics polemically use such opposition to cover and rationalize their own failures of democracy."

Stephen Gardbaum argues that recent bills of rights in Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia are an experiment in a new third way of organizing basic institutional arrangements in a democracy. This 'new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism' promises both an alternative to the conventional dichotomy of legislative versus judicial supremacy and innovative techniques for protecting rights. As such, it is an intriguing and important development in constitutional design of relevance to drafters of bills of rights everywhere. In developing the theory and exploring the practice of this new model, the book analyses its novelty and normative appeal as a third general model of constitutionalism before presenting individual and comparative assessments of the operational stability, distinctness and success of its different versions in the various jurisdictions. It closes by proposing a set of general and specific reforms aimed at enhancing these practical outcomes.

Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. It's long past time to reconsider the principles on which Western economic and political norms rest. This book advocates for a tradition of political universality as an alternative to the juridical universalism of the Declaration. Insurgent universality isn't based on the idea that we all share some common humanity but, rather, on the democratic excess by which people disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Going beyond the constitutional armor of the representative state, it brings into play a plurality of powers to which citizens have access, not through the funnel of national citizenship but in daily political practice. We can look to recent history to see various experiments in cooperative and insurgent democracy: the Indignados in Spain, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and, going further back, the Paris Commune, the 1917 peasant revolts during the Russian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. This book argues that these movements belong to the common legacy of insurgent universality, which is characterized by alternative trajectories of modernity that have been repressed, hindered, and forgotten. Massimiliano Tomba examines these events to show what they could have been and what they can still be. As such he explores how their common legacy can be reactivated. Insurgent Universality analyzes the manifestos and declarations that came out of these experiments considering them as collective works of an alternative canon of political theory that challenges the great names of the Western pantheon of political thought and builds bridges between European and non-European political and social experiments.

In the last decade a new tool has been developed in the global war against official corruption through the introduction of the offense of "illicit enrichment" in almost every multilateral anti-corruption convention. Illicit enrichment is defined in these conventions to include a reverse burden clause which triggers an automatic presumption that any public official found in "possession of inexplicable wealth" must have acquired it illicitly. However, the reversal of the burden of proof clauses raises an important human rights issue because they conflict with the accused individual's right to be presumed innocent. Unfortunately, the recent spate of international legislation against official corruption provides no clear guidelines on how to proceed in balancing the right of the accused to be presumed innocent against the competing right of society to trace and recapture illicitly acquired national wealth. Combating Economic Crimes therefore sets out to address what has been left unanswered by these multilateral conventions, to wit, the level of burden of proof that should be placed on a public official who is accused of illicitly enriching himself from the resources of the State, balanced against the protection of legitimate community interests and expectations for a corruption-free society. The book explores the doctrinal foundations of the right to a presumption of innocence and reviews the basic due process protections afforded to all accused persons in criminal trials by treaty, customary international law, and municipal law. The book then goes on to propose a framework for balancing and 'situationalizing' competing human rights and public interests in situations involving possible official corruption.

Asia is the only area in the world that does not have a human rights court or commission covering the region as a whole. However, a close look at recent developments in the region, especially in East Asia, shows that a human rights system is emerging. Various activities and initiatives for human rights cooperation are developing in Asia at the regional, sub-regional and national levels. Since the establishment of the ASEAN human rights body (AICHR) in 2009, the need for a review of the regional human rights mechanisms in Asia is stronger than ever. With a primary focus on twenty-three East Asian states, Tae-Ung Baik highlights the significant changes that have taken place in recent decades and demonstrates that the constituent elements of a human rights system (norms, institutions and modes of implementation) are developing in Asia.

EU data protection law imposes a series of requirements designed to protect individuals against the risks that result from the processing of their data. It also distinguishes among different types of actors involved in the processing, setting out different obligations for each actor. The most important distinction in this regard is the distinction between ''controllers'' and ''processors''. Together, these concepts provide the very basis upon which responsibility for compliance with EU data protection law is allocated. As a result, both concepts play a decisive role in determining the potential liability of an organisation under EU data protection law, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).Technological and societal developments have made it increasingly difficult to apply the controller-processor model in practice. The main factors are the growing complexity of processing operations, the diversification of processing, services and the sheer number of actors that can be involved. Against this background, this book seeks to determine whether EU data protection law should continue to maintain the controller-processor model as the main basis for allocating responsibility and liability.This book provides its readers with the analytical framework to help them navigate the intricate relationship of roles, responsibility and liability under EU data protection law. The book begins with an in-depth analysis of the nature and role of the controller and processor concepts. The key elements of each are examined in detail, as is the associated allocation of responsibility and liability. The next part contains a historical-comparative analysis, which traces the origin and development of the controller-processor model over time. To identify the main problems that occur when applying the controller-processor model in practice, a number of real-life use cases are examined (cloud computing, social media, identity management and search engines). In the final part, a critical evaluation is made of the choices made by the European legislature in the context of the GDPR. It is clear that the GDPR has introduced considerable improvements in comparison to EU Directive 95/46. In the long run, however, further changes may well be necessary. By way of conclusion, a number of avenues for possible improvements are presented.

The 1905 Aliens Act was the first modern law to restrict immigration to British shores. In this book, David Glover asks how it was possible for Britain, a nation that had prided itself on offering asylum to refugees, to pass such legislation. Tracing the ways that the legal notion of the "alien" became a national-racist epithet indistinguishable from the figure of "the Jew," Glover argues that the literary and popular entertainments of fin de siecle Britain perpetuated a culture of xenophobia. Reconstructing the complex socio-political field known as "the alien question," Glover examines the work of George Eliot, Israel Zangwill, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad, together with forgotten writers like Margaret Harkness, Edgar Wallace, and James Blyth. By linking them to the beliefs and ideologies that circulated via newspapers, periodicals, political meetings, Royal Commissions, patriotic melodramas, and social surveys, Glover sheds new light on dilemmas about nationality, borders, and citizenship that remain vital today."

What is the legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education? While it is well known for establishing racial equality as a central commitment of American schools, the case also inspired social movements for equality in education across all lines of difference, including language, gender, disability, immigration status, socio-economic status, religion, and sexual orientation. Yet more than a half century after Brown, American schools are more racially separated than before, and educators, parents and policy makers still debate whether the ruling requires all-inclusive classrooms in terms of race, gender, disability, and other differences. In Brown's Wake examines the reverberations of Brown in American schools, including efforts to promote equal opportunities for all kinds of students. School choice, once a strategy for avoiding Brown, has emerged as a tool to promote integration and opportunities, even as charter schools and private school voucher programs enable new forms of self-separation by language, gender, disability, and ethnicity. Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, argues that the criteria placed on such initiatives carry serious consequences for both the character of American education and civil society itself. Although the original promise of Brown remains more symbolic than effective, Minow demonstrates the power of its vision in the struggles for equal education regardless of students' social identity, not only in the United States but also in many countries around the world. Further, she urges renewed commitment to the project of social integration even while acknowledging the complex obstacles that must be overcome. An elegant and concise overview of Brown and its aftermath, In Brown's Wake explores the broad-ranging and often surprising impact of one of the century's most important Supreme Court decisions.

As constitutional law globalizes, the quest for a common grammar or 'generic constitutional law' becomes more pressing. Proportionality is one of the most prominent and controversial components of the modern, global constitutional discourse. In view of the alarming tension between the triumphant success of proportionality and the severity of the criticism directed towards it, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the critics of proportionality and demonstrates that their objections against the proportionality test are not convincing. It clarifies and further develops the current theories of proportionality and balancing. Building upon on Robert Alexy's predominant principles theory, the book suggests several modifications to this theory. Drawing examples from the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Justice, and various national constitutional courts it illustrates the argument in favour of proportionality and demonstrates its relevance for deciding concrete cases.

The potential of the e-health revolution, increased data sharing, database linking, biobanks and new techniques such as geolocation and genomics to advance human health is immense. For the full potential to be realized, though, privacy and confidentiality will have to be dealt with carefully. Problematically, many conventional approaches to such pivotal matters as consent, identifiability, and safeguarding and security are inadequate. In many places, research is impeded by an overgrown thicket of laws, regulations, guidance and governance. The challenges are being heightened by the increasing use of biospecimens, and by the globalization of research in a world that has not globalized privacy protection. Drawing on examples from many developed countries and legal jurisdictions, the book critiques the issues, summarizes various ethics, policy, and legal positions (and revisions underway), describes innovative solutions, provides extensive references and suggests ways forward.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, enacted March 1, 1875, banned racial discrimination in public accommodations-hotels, public conveyances, and places of public amusement. In 1883 the US Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, ushering in generations of segregation until 1964. This first full-length study of the Act covers the years of debates in Congress and some forty state studies of the midterm elections of 1874 in which many supporting Republicans lost their seats. They returned to pass the Act in the short session of Congress. This book utilizes an army of primary sources from unpublished manuscripts, rare newspaper accounts, memoir materials, and official documents to demonstrate that Republicans were motivated primarily by an ideology that civil equality would produce social order in the defeated southern states.

The ease of transportation, the opening of international immigration policies, the growing refugee movements, and the increasing size of unauthorized immigrant populations suggest that immigration worldwide is a phenomenon of utmost importance to professionals who develop policies and programs for, or provide services to, immigrants. Immigration occurs in both the wealthy nations of the global North and the poorer countries of the global South; it involves individuals who arrive with substantial human capital and those with little. It has far-reaching implications for a nation's economy, public policies, social and health services, and culture.
The purpose of this volume, therefore, is to explore current patterns and policies of immigration in key countries and regions across the globe and analyze the implications for these countries and their immigrant populations. Each of its chapters, written by an international and interdisciplinary group of experts, explores how country conditions, policies, values, politics, and attitudes influence the process of immigration and subsequently affect immigrants, migration, and the nation itself.
No other volume explores the landscape of worldwide immigration as broadly as this does, with sweeping coverage of countries and empirical research, together with an analytic framework that sets the context of human migration against a wide backdrop of experiential factors that take shape long before an immigrant enters a host country. At once a sourcebook and an applied model of immigration studies, Immigration Worldwide is a valuable reference for scholars and students seeking a wide-ranging yet nuanced survey of the key issues salient to debates about the programs and policies that best serve immigrant populations and their host countries.

This volume of essays is concerned with the discrimination against older people that results from a failure to recognise their diversity. By considering the unique combinations of discrimination that arise from the interrelationship of age and gender, pensions, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class and disability, the contributors demonstrate that the discrimination suffered is multiple in nature. It is the combination of these characteristics that leads to the need for more complex ways of tackling age discrimination.

The overarching objective of this volume is to discuss and critique the legal regulation of human trafficking in national and transnational context. Specifically, discussion is needed not only with regard to the historical and philosophical points of departure for any criminalisation of trafficking, but also, regarding the societal and social framework, the empirical dimension such as existing statistics in the area, and the need for more data. The book combines descriptive and normative analyses of the crime of trafficking in human beings from a cross-legal perspective. Notwithstanding the enhanced interest for human trafficking in politics, the public and the media, a critical perspective such as the one pursued herewith has so far been largely absent. Against this background, this approach allows for theoretical findings to be addressed by pointing out and elaborating different, interdisciplinary conflicts and inconsistencies in the regulation of human trafficking. The book discusses the phenomenon of human trafficking critically from various angles, giving it 'shape' and showing how it comes to life in the legal regulation.