Both New Zealand and the United Kingdom challenge assumptions about how a bill of rights functions. Their parliamentary bills of rights constrain judicial review and also look to parliament to play a rights-protecting role. This arises from the requirement to inform parliament if legislative bills are not compatible with rights. But are these bills of rights operating in this proactive manner? Are governments encountering significantly stronger pressures to ensure legislation complies with rights? Are these bills of rights resulting in more reasoned deliberations in parliament about the justification of legislation from a rights perspective? Through extensive interviews with public officials and analysis of parliamentary debates where questions of compliance with rights arise (prisoner voting, parole and sentencing policy, counter-terrorism legislation, and same-sex marriage), this book argues that a serious gap exists between the promise of these bills of rights and the institutional variables that influence how these parliaments function.

Is the neglect of economic, social and cultural abuses in international criminal law a problem of positive international law or the result of choices made by lawyers involved in mechanisms such as criminal prosecutions or truth commissions? Evelyne Schmid explores this question via an assessment of the relationship between violations of economic, social and cultural rights and international crimes. Based on a thorough examination of the elements of international crimes, she demonstrates how a situation can simultaneously be described as a violation of economic, social and cultural rights and as an international crime. Against the background of the emerging debates on selectivity in international criminal law and the role of socio-economic and cultural abuses in transitional justice, she argues that international crimes overlapping with violations of economic, social and cultural rights deserve to be taken seriously, for much the same reasons as other international crimes.

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.

The Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America have been deprived of the right to privacy. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally. Yet the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that can be perceived as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on the poor, and legal scholars typically understand marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights everyone else enjoys. Khiara M. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state-both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. Presenting a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy, Bridges shows how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges seeks to turn popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance-rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. Until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality, poor mothers will continue to be denied this right.

The laws governing humanitarian action stand at the intersection of several fields of international law, regional agreements, soft law and domestic law. Through in-depth case studies and analysis, expert scholars and practitioners come together to offer an interdisciplinary approach, which includes contributions from legal policy, international relations and philosophical perspectives. Providing invaluable overviews and insights, this collection of essays sheds light on the subject and makes sense of the various elements involved to elucidate the foundations of the different approaches by the different levels of humanitarian law and policy.

The first book to comprehensively describe the history, theory, and application of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law When Beatles star John Lennon faced deportation from the U.S. in the 1970s, his lawyer Leon Wildes made a groundbreaking argument. He argued that Lennon should be granted "nonpriority" status pursuant to INS's (now DHS's) policy of prosecutorial discretion. In U.S. immigration law, the agency exercises prosecutorial discretion favorably when it refrains from enforcing the full scope of immigration law. A prosecutorial discretion grant is important to an agency seeking to focus its priorities on the "truly dangerous" in order to conserve resources and to bring compassion into immigration enforcement. The Lennon case marked the first moment that the immigration agency's prosecutorial discretion policy became public knowledge. Today, the concept of prosecutorial discretion is more widely known in light of the Obama Administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, a record number of deportations and a stalemate in Congress to move immigration reform. Beyond Deportation is the first book to comprehensively describe the history, theory, and application of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law. It provides a rich history of the role of prosecutorial discretion in the immigration system and unveils the powerful role it plays in protecting individuals from deportation and saving the government resources. Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia draws on her years of experience as an immigration attorney, policy leader, and law professor to advocate for a bolder standard on prosecutorial discretion, greater mechanisms for accountability when such standards are ignored, improved transparency about the cases involving prosecutorial discretion, and recognition of "deferred action" in the law as a formal benefit.

One of the hallmark features of the post-civil rights United States is the reign of colorblindness over national conversations about race and law. But how, precisely, should we understand this notion of colorblindness in the face of enduring racial hierarchy in American society? In Letters of the Law, Sora Y. Han argues that colorblindness is a foundational fantasy of law that not only informs individual and collective ideas of race, but also structures the imaginative capacities of American legal interpretation. Han develops a critique of colorblindness by deconstructing the law's central doctrines on due process, citizenship, equality, punishment and individual liberty, in order to expose how racial slavery and the ongoing struggle for abolition continue to haunt the law's reliance on the fantasy of colorblindness. Letters of the Law provides highly original readings of iconic Supreme Court cases on racial inequality-spanning Japanese internment to affirmative action, policing to prisoner rights, Jim Crow segregation to sexual freedom. Han's analysis provides readers with new perspectives on many urgent social issues of our time, including mass incarceration, educational segregation, state intrusions on privacy, and neoliberal investments in citizenship. But more importantly, Han compels readers to reconsider how the diverse legacies of civil rights reform archived in American law might be rewritten as a heterogeneous practice of black freedom struggle.

One of the most remarkable aspects pertaining to the legal bans and societal debates on the face veil in Europe is that they rely on assumptions which lack any factual basis. To rectify this, Eva Brems researched the experiences of women who wear a face veil in Belgium and brought her research results together with those of colleagues who did the same in four other European countries. Their findings, which are outlined in this volume, move the current discussion on face veil bans forward by providing a much-needed insider perspective. In addition, a number of legal and social science scholars comment on the empirical findings and on the face veil issue more generally.

Adolescence, Privacy, and the Law provides a foundation for understanding privacy rights and how they relate to adolescents. Roger Levesque argues that because privacy is actually an inherently social phenomenon, the ways in which adolescents' privacy needs and rights are shaped are essential to society's broader privacy interests. A close look at empirical understandings of privacy, how it shapes development, and how privacy itself can be shaped provides important lessons for addressing the critical juncture facing privacy rights and privacy itself. Adolescence, Privacy, and the Law provides an overview of the three major strands of privacy rights: decisional, spatial, and informational, and extends current understandings of these strands and how the legal system addresses adolescents and their legal status. Levesque presents comprehensive and specific analyses of the place of privacy in adolescent development and its outcomes, the influences that shape adolescents' expectations and experiences of privacy, and ways to effectively shape adolescents' use of privacy. He explains why privacy law must move in new directions to address privacy needs and pinpoints the legal foundation for moving in new directions. The book charts broad proposals to guide the development of sociolegal responses to changing social environments related to the privacy of adolescents and challenges jurisprudential analyses claiming that developmental sciences do not offer important and useful tools to guide responses to adolescents' privacy. Lastly, Levesque responds to likely criticisms that may hamper the development of sociolegal stances more consistent with adolescents' needs for privacy as well as with societal concerns about privacy.

It is increasingly implausible to speak of a purely domestic abortion law, as the legal debates around the world draw on precedents and influences of different national and regional contexts. While the United States and Western Europe may have been the vanguard of abortion law reform in the latter half of the twentieth century, Central and South America are proving to be laboratories of thought and innovation in the twenty-first century, as are particular countries in Africa and Asia. Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective offers a fresh look at significant transnational legal developments in recent years, examining key judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and regulatory reforms of abortion law in order to envision ways ahead. The chapters investigate issues of access, rights, and justice, as well as social constructions of women, sexuality, and pregnancy, through different legal procedures and regimes. They address the promises and risks of using legal procedure to achieve reproductive justice from different national, regional, and international vantage points; how public and courtroom debates are framed within medical, religious, and human rights arguments; the meaning of different narratives that recur in abortion litigation and language; and how respect for women and prenatal life is expressed in various legal regimes. By exploring how legal actors advocate, regulate, and adjudicate the issue of abortion, this timely volume seeks to build on existing developments to bring about change of a larger order. Contributors: Luis Roberto Barroso, Paola Bergallo, Rebecca J. Cook, Bernard M. Dickens, Joanna N. Erdman, Lisa M. Kelly, Adriana Lamackova, Julieta Lemaitre, Alejandro Madrazo, Charles G. Ngwena, Rachel Rebouche, Ruth Rubio-Marin, Sally Sheldon, Reva B. Siegel, Veronica Undurraga, Melissa Upreti.

Reveals America's long history of making both naturalized immigrants and native-born citizens un-American after stripping away their citizenship Expatriation, or the stripping away citizenship and all the rights that come with it, is usually associated with despotic and totalitarian regimes. The imagery of mass expulsion of once integral members of the community is associated with civil wars, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, or other oppressive historical events. Yet these practices are not just a product of undemocratic events or extreme situations, but are standard clauses within the legal systems of most democratic states, including the United States. Witness, for example, Yaser Esam Hamdi, captured in Afghanistan in November 2001, sent to Guantanamo, transferred to a naval brig in South Carolina when it was revealed that he was a U.S. citizen, and held there without trial until 2004, when the Justice Department released Hamdi to Saudi Arabia without charge on the condition that he renounce his U.S. citizenship. Hamdi's story may be the best known expatriation story in recent memory, but in Revoking Citizenship, Ben Herzog reveals America's long history of making both naturalized immigrants and native-born citizens un-American after their citizenship was stripped away. Tracing this history from the early republic through the Cold War, Herzog locates the sociological, political, legal, and historic meanings of revoking citizenship. Why, when, and with what justification do states take away citizenship from their subjects? Should loyalty be judged according to birthplace or actions? Using the history and policies of revoking citizenship as a lens, Revoking Citizenship examines, describes, and analyzes the complex relationships between citizenship, immigration, and national identity.

Very little in the American way of life functions adequately under surveillance. Democracy itself may be at mortal risk due to the loss of privacy and the increase in surveillance. Examining challenges in a wide range of contexts, this book investigates and critically examines our systems of data management, including the ways that data are collected, exchanged, analyzed, and re-purposed. The volume calls for re-establishing personal privacy as a societal norm and priority, requiring action on the part of everyone at personal, societal, business, and governmental levels. Because new media products and services are professionally designed and implemented to be frictionless and highly rewarding, change is difficult and solutions are not easy. This volume provides insight into challenges and recommended solutions.

Religious freedom is now widely accepted as fundamental to any liberal democracy. It is recognised in domestic, regional, and international human rights instruments and its importance is lauded by philosophers, lawyers, judges, clergy, and even politicians. While it is easy to support religious freedom in the abstract, tensions can arise between the activities of religious organizations and the law that challenge this general commitment to religious freedom. Should religious organizations be permitted to discriminate against women or gay people in their employment practices, when admitting members, or in providing goods and services? Should the courts interfere in these organizations to protect the interests of a disaffected member or to resolve internal property disputes? Should the state allow religious tribunals to determine or advise on family matters? While much has been written about religious individuals and the law, there has been a discernible lack of literature on organizations and the law. Jane Norton fills this gap with Freedom of Religious Organizations. By exploring potential conflicts between the law and religious organizations, and examining whether the current British response to such conflicts is justified, this book will consider when English law ought to apply to religious organizations and how these conflicts should be dealt with.

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.

This collection of essays explores current developments in privacy law, including reform of data protection laws, privacy and the media, social control and surveillance, privacy and the Internet, and privacy and the courts. It places these developments into a broader international context, with a particular focus on the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Adopting a comparative approach, it creates an important resource for understanding international trends in the reform of privacy and data protection laws across a variety of contexts. Written by internationally recognised experts, Emerging Challenges in Privacy Law: Comparative Perspectives provides an accessible introduction to contemporary legal and policy debates in privacy and data protection law. It is essential reading for academics, policy makers and practitioners interested in current challenges facing privacy and data protection law in Europe and in the common law world.

Each year, more than half a million migrant children journey from countries around the globe and enter the United States with no lawful immigration status; many of them have no parent or legal guardian to provide care and custody. Yet little is known about their experiences in a nation that may simultaneously shelter children while initiating proceedings to deport them, nor about their safety or well-being if repatriated. Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State examines the draconian immigration policies that detain unaccompanied migrant children and draws on U.S. historical, political, legal, and institutional practices to contextualize the lives of children and youth as they move through federal detention facilities, immigration and family courts, federal foster care programs, and their communities across the United States and Central America. Through interviews with children and their families, attorneys, social workers, policy-makers, law enforcement, and diplomats, anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink foregrounds the voices of migrant children and youth who must navigate the legal and emotional terrain of U.S. immigration policy. Cast as victims by humanitarian organizations and delinquents by law enforcement, these unauthorized minors challenge Western constructions of child dependence and family structure. Heidbrink illuminates the enduring effects of immigration enforcement on its young charges, their families, and the state, ultimately questioning whose interests drive decisions about the care and custody of migrant youth.

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.

International human rights law has only recently concerned itself with water. Instead, international water law has regulated the use of shared rivers, and only states qua states could claim rights and bear duties towards each other. International human rights law has focused on its principal mission of taming the powers of a state acting territorially. Takele Soboka Bulto challenges the established analytic boundaries of international water law and international human rights law. By demonstrating the potential complementarity between the two legal regimes and the ensuing utility of regime coordination for the establishment of the human right to water and its extraterritorial application, he also shows that human rights law and the international law of watercourses can apply in tandem with the purpose of protecting non-national non-residents in Africa and beyond.

This book contributes to current debates on the protection of human rights in the 21st century. With the global economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, the post-intervention chaos in Libya, the migration crisis in Europe, and the regional conflagration sparked by the conflict in Syria, the need to protect human rights has arguably never been greater. In light of the precipitous decline in global respect for human rights and the eruption or escalation of intra-state crises across the world, this book asks 'what is the future of human rights protection?'. Seeking to avoid both denial and fatalism, this book thus aims to: examine the principles at the very foundation of the debate on human rights; diagnose the causes of the decline of liberal internationalism so as to offer guiding lessons for future initiatives; identify those practices and developments that can, and should, be preserved in the new era; question the parameters of the contemporary debate and advance perspectives that aim to identify the contours of future ideas and practices that may offer a way forward. This book will be of much interest to students of humanitarian intervention, R2P, international organisations, human rights and security studies.

This book studies how victims of human rights violations in Latin America, their families, and their advocates work to overcome entrenched impunity and seek legal justice. Their struggles show that legal justice is a multifaceted process, the overarching purpose of which is to restore human dignity and prevent further violence. Uncovering, revealing, and proving the truth are essential elements of legal justice, and are also powerful tools to activate the process. When faced with stubborn impunity at home, victims, families, and advocates can carry on their work for legal justice by bringing cases in courts in other countries or in the inter-American human rights system. These extra-territorial courts can jump-start the process of legal justice at home. Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America examines the political and legal struggle through the lens of the human story at the heart of these cases.

We live in an interconnected world in which expressive and religious cultures increasingly commingle and collide. In a globalized and digitized era, we need to better understand the relationship between the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and international borders. This book focuses on the exercise and protection of cross-border and beyond-border expressive and religious liberties, and on the First Amendment's relationship to the world beyond US shores. It reveals a cosmopolitan First Amendment that protects cross-border conversation, facilitates the global spread of democratic principles, recognizes expressive and religious liberties regardless of location, is influential across the world, and encourages respectful engagement with the liberty regimes of other nations. The Cosmopolitan First Amendment is the product of historical, social, political, technological and legal developments. It examines the First Amendment's relationship to foreign travel, immigration, cross-border communication and association, religious activities that traverse international borders, conflicts among foreign and US speech and religious liberty models, and the conduct of international affairs and diplomacy.

The relationship between nationalism and the rule of law has been largely neglected by scholars although separately they have often captured public discourse and have emerged as critical concepts. This book provides the first systematic account of this relationship. It develops an analytical framework for understanding the interactions of nationalism and the rule of law by focusing on the domains of citizenship, transitional justice and international justice. The book engages these insights further in a detailed empirical analysis of three case studies from the former Yugoslavia. The author argues that while the tensions and contradictions between nationalism and the rule of law have become more apparent in the post-Cold War era, they can also be harnessed for productive purposes. In exploring the role of law in managing and transforming nationalism, the book emphasises the deliberative character of legal processes and offers an original perspective on the power of international law to reshape public discourse, politics, and legal orders.

Rights for Others is an empirical study of what happens when international human rights are applied domestically in The Netherlands. It tracks recent debates in Dutch society on citizenship and the rights of immigrants, and analyses the shift from the perception of human rights as a 'foreign policy concern' to the slow processes of homecoming in what has traditionally been a left-wing society, but now includes many more right-wing political parties. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Oomen combines insights from law, sociology and anthropology to explain how rights gain significance in framing social and political discussions. The book provides comprehensive coverage on relevant constitutional law, legal culture and rights realization as well as discussing case material on human rights education, polarization, socio-economic rights, domestic violence and the rights of minorities. This is an invaluable contribution to the global fields of human rights and socio-legal studies for scholars and researchers.

Is there still a right to seek asylum in a globalised world? Migration control has increasingly moved to the high seas or the territory of transit and origin countries, and is now commonly outsourced to private actors. Under threat of financial penalties airlines today reject any passenger not in possession of a valid visa, and private contractors are used to run detention centres and man border crossings. In this volume Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen examines the impact of these new practices for refugees' access to asylum. A systematic analysis is provided of the reach and limits of international refugee law when migration control is carried out extraterritorially or by non-state actors. State practice from around the globe and case law from all the major human rights institutions is discussed. The arguments are further linked to wider debates in human rights, general international law and political science.

In recent years, the UN Human Rights Council has approved the 'Respect, Protect, and Remedy' Framework and endorsed the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These developments have been welcomed widely, but do they adequately address the challenges concerning the human rights obligations of business? This volume of essays engages critically with these important developments. The chapters revolve around four key issues: the process and methodology adopted in arriving at these documents; the source and justification of corporate human rights obligations; the nature and extent of such obligations; and the implementation and enforcement thereof. In addition to highlighting several critical deficits in these documents, the contributing authors also outline a vision for the twenty-first century in which companies have obligations to society that go beyond the responsibility to respect human rights.