This book assesses whether a new category of religious actors has been constructed within international law. Religious actors, through their interpretations of the religion(s) they are associated with, uphold and promote, or indeed may transform, potentially oppressive structures or discriminatory patterns. This study moves beyond the concern that religious texts and practices may be incompatible with international law, to provide an innovative analysis of how religious actors themselves are accountable under international law for the interpretations they choose to put forward. The book defines religious actors as comprising religious states, international organizations, and non-state entities that assume the role of interpreting religion and so claim a 'special' legitimacy anchored in tradition or charisma. Cutting across the state / non-state divide, this definition allows the full remit of religious bodies to be investigated. It analyses the crucial question of whether religious actors do in fact operate under different international legal norms to non-religious states, international organizations, or companies. To that end, the Holy See-Vatican, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and churches and religious organizations under the European Convention on Human Rights regime are examined in detail as case studies. The study ultimately establishes that religious actors cannot be seen to form an autonomous legal category under international law: they do not enjoy special or exclusive rights, nor incur lesser obligations, when compared to their respective non-religious peers. Going forward, it concludes that a process of two-sided legitimation may be at stake: religious actors will need to provide evidence for the legality of their religious interpretations to strengthen their legitimacy, and international law itself may benefit from religious actors fostering its legitimacy in different cultural contexts.

Courts, Codes, and Custom addresses the question of why some states recognize and comply with international human rights and environmental law, while others do not. To address this question, Dana Zartner has developed a novel cultural-institutional theory to explain the manner in which a state's domestic legal tradition shapes policy through the process of internalization. A state's legal tradition-the cultural and institutional factors that shape attitudes about the law, appropriate standards of behavior, and the legal process-is the key mechanism by which international law becomes recognized, accepted, and internalized in the domestic legal framework. Legal tradition shapes not only perceptions about law, but also provides the lens through which policy-makers view state interests, directly and indirectly influencing state policy. The book disaggregates the concept of legal tradition and examines how the individual cultural and institutional characteristics present within a state's domestic legal tradition facilitate or hinder the internalization of international law and, subsequently, shape state policy. In turn it explains both the differences in international law recognition across legal traditions, as well as the variance among states within legal traditions. To test this theory Zartner compares case studies within five of the main legal traditions in the world today: common law (U.S. and Australia), civil law (Germany and Turkey), Islamic law (Egypt and Saudi Arabia), mixed traditions (India and Kenya), and East Asian law (China and Japan). She addresses the differences among legal traditions as well as between states within the same tradition; the important role that legal culture and history play in shaping contemporary attitudes about law; and similarities and differences in state policy towards human rights law versus environmental law.

Torture and Moral Integrity is about the wrongness of torture and the nature of morality. It discusses multiple types of torture with great philosophical acuity and it seeks to explain why interrogational torture and other types of torture are always and everywhere morally wrong. At the same time, it rigorously plumbs the general structure of morality and the intricacies of moral conflicts and it probes some of the chief grounds for the moral illegitimacy of various modes of conduct. It sophisticatedly defends a deontological conception of morality against some subtle critiques that have been mounted during the past few decades by proponents of consequentialism. The book tackles a concrete moral problem: a problem that has been heatedly debated during recent years in the governmental and military institutions of many countries as well as in academic circles. At the same time it tackles some very abstract issues in moral and political philosophy. Moreover, as becomes apparent at numerous junctures, the abstract ruminations and the concrete prescriptions are closely connected: Kramer's recommendations concerning the legal consequences of the perpetration of torture by public officials or private individuals, for example, are based squarely on his more abstract accounts of the nature of torture and the nature of morality. His philosophical reflections on the structure of morality are the vital background for his approach to torture, and his approach to torture is a natural outgrowth of those philosophical reflections.

This book focusses on the debates concerning aspects of intellectual property law that bear on access to medicines in a set of developing countries. Specifically, the contributors look at measures that regulate the acquisition, recognition, and use of patent rights on pharmaceuticals and trade secrets in data concerning them, along with the conditions under which these rights expire so as to permit the production of cheaper generic drugs. In addition, the book includes commentary from scholars in human rights, international institutions, and transnational activism. The case studies presented from 11 Latin American countries, have many commonalities in terms of economics, legal systems, and political histories, and yet they differ in the balance each has struck between proprietary interests and access concerns. The book documents this cross-country variation in legal norms and practice, identifies the factors that have led to differences in result, and theorizes as to how differentials among these countries occur and why they endure within a common transnational regulatory regime. The work concludes by putting the results of the investigations into a global administrative law frame and offers suggestions on institutional mechanisms for considering the trade-offs between health and wealth.

The past forty years have seen a wide proliferation of disputes under international law concerning cultural heritage. These have included the restitution of stolen art objects or the protection of monuments. Unlike other fields of international law, international cultural heritage law does not have an ad hoc mechanism of dispute settlement. As a result, controversies are to be settled through negotiation or, if it fails, through existing dispute resolution means. This can result in similar cases being settled in different ways, thereby bringing about an incoherent and fragmentary enforcement of the law. This book offers a comprehensive and innovative analysis of the settlement of cultural heritage disputes. This examination is two-fold. First, it assesses the existing legal framework and the available dispute settlement means. Second, it explores the feasibility of two solutions for overcoming the lack of a specialized forum. The first is the establishment of a new international court. The second concerns existing judicial and extra-judicial fora and their interaction through the practice of 'cross-fertilization'. The book focuses on the substance of such interaction, and identifies a number of culturally-sensitive parameters (the 'common rules of adjudication'). It argues that existing judicial and non-judicial fora should adopt a cross-fertilizing perspective to use and disseminate jurisprudence containing these common rules of adjudication. It sets out how such an approach would enhance the effectiveness and coherence of decision-making processes and would be conducive to the development of a lex culturalis. This can be defined as a composite body of rules designed to protect cultural heritage by excluding the mechanical application of the norms established for standard business transactions of ordinary goods.

Locating assisted suicide within the broader medical end-of-life context and drawing on the empirical data available from the increasing number of permissive jurisdictions, this book provides a novel examination of the human rights implications of the prohibition on assisted suicide in England and Wales and beyond. Assisted suicide is a contentious topic and one which has been the subject of judicial and academic debate internationally. The central objective of the book is to approach the question of the ban's compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights afresh; freed from the constraints of the existing case law and its erroneous approach to the legal issues and selective reliance on empirical data. The book also examines the compatibility of the ban on assisted suicide with rights which have either been erroneously disregarded or not considered by either the domestic courts or the European Court of Human Rights. Having regard to human rights jurisprudence more broadly, including in the context of abortion, the research and analysis undertaken here demonstrates that the ban on assisted suicide violates the rights of a significant number of individuals to life, to freedom from torture or inhuman or degrading treatment and to private life. Such analysis does not depend on a strained or contrived approach to the rights at issue. Rather, the conclusions flow naturally from a coherent, logical application of the established principles governing those rights. While the focus of the book is the Suicide Act 1961, the conclusions reached have implications beyond England and Wales, including for the other devolved jurisdictions and international jurisdictions. Beyond courts and legislators, it will be a valuable resource for students of human rights and medical law, as well as medical and legal practitioners and academics working in human rights and end-of-life care.

What does the right to the continuous improvement of living conditions in Article 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights really mean and how can it contribute to social change? The book explores how this underdeveloped right can have valuable application in response to global problems of poverty, inequality and climate destruction, through an in-depth consideration of its meaning. The book seeks to interpret and give meaning to the right as a legal standard, giving it practical value for those whose living conditions are inadequate. It locates the right within broader philosophical and political debates, whilst also assessing the challenges to its realisation. It also explores how the right relates to human rights more generally and considers its application to issues of gender, care and the rights of Indigenous peoples. The contributors deeply probe the meaning of 'living conditions', suggesting that these encompass more than the basic rights to housing, water, food, and clothing. The chapters provide a range of doctrinal, historical and philosophical engagements through grounded analysis and imaginative interpretation. With a foreword by Sandra Liebenberg (former Member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), the book includes chapters from renowned and emerging scholars working across disciplines from around the world.

The Internet has created a formidable challenge for human rights law and practice worldwide. International scholarly and policy-oriented communities have so far established a consensus regarding only one main aspect - human rights in the internet are the same as offline. There are emerging and ongoing debates regarding not only the standards and methods to be used for achieving the "sameness" of rights online, but also whether "classical" human rights as we know them are contested by the online environment. The internet itself, in view of its cross-border nature and its ability to affect various areas of law, requires adopting an internationally oriented approach and a perspective strongly focused on social sciences. In particular, the rise of the internet, enhanced also by the influence of new technologies such as algorithms and intelligent artificial systems, has influenced individuals' civil, political and social rights not only in the digital world, but also in the atomic realm. As the coming of the internet calls into question well-established legal categories, a broader perspective than the domestic one is necessary to investigate this phenomenon. This book explores the main fundamental issues and practical dimensions related to the safeguarding of human rights in the internet, which are at the focus of current academic debates. It provides a comprehensive analysis with a forward-looking perspective of bringing order into the somewhat chaotic online dimension of human rights. It addresses the matter of private digital censorship, the apparent inefficiency of existing judicial systems to react to human rights violations online, the uncertainty of liability for online human rights violations, whether the concern with personal data protection overshadows multiple other human rights issues online and will be of value to those interested in human rights law and legal regulation of the internet.

Do states have a duty to assimilate refugees to their own citizens? Are refugees entitled to freedom of movement, to be allowed to work, to have access to public welfare programs, or to be reunited with family members? Indeed, is there even a duty to admit refugees at all? This fundamentally rewritten second edition of the award-winning treatise presents the only comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention and international human rights law. It follows the refugee's journey from flight to solution, examining every rights issue both historically and by reference to the decisions of senior courts from around the world. Nor is this a purely doctrinal book: Hathaway's incisive legal analysis is tested against and applied to hundreds of protection challenges around the world, ensuring the relevance of this book's analysis to responding to the hard facts of refugee life on the ground.

This book discusses the nature of the challenges that have confronted European democracies in recent years. In the past decade, the rule of law in Europe has been put under strain by both external and internal factors. The term "illiberal democracies" is sometimes used to describe the rise of a phenomenon in which the fundamental values of the European legal order, as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, are called into question. The preservation of the independence of the judiciary, of the freedom of expression and the protection of journalists are among the values under threat. But these challenges are also present within the older democracies in which emergency regimes have become more common. As the European Union's sanctions regime shows, striking a balance between security and the rule of law, of which fundamental rights are an intrinsic part, is a constant challenge. Focusing on the European courts' responses to these threats, the book discusses how courts could provide the ultimate line of defense. The acid test of the rule of law might indeed be how it safeguards the judicial guarantees designed to protect core European values beyond the discretion of government.

Positioning itself within significant developments in genocide studies arising from misgivings about two noteworthy observers, Arendt and Milgram, this book asks what lies 'beyond the banality of evil'? And suggests the answer lies within criminology. Offering the author's reflections about how to interpret genocide as a crime, Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide endeavours to understand how the theories of criminal motivation might shed light on these stunning events and make them comprehensible. While a great deal has been written about the shortcomings of the obedience paradigm and 'desk murderers' when discussing the Holocaust, little has been said of what results when investigations are taken beyond these limitations. Through examination and analysis of the literature surrounding genocide studies, Brannigan frames the events within a general theoretical approach to crime before applying his own revised model, specifically to Rwanda and drawn from field-work in 2004 and 2005. This provides a new and compelling account of the dynamics of the 1994 genocide and its distinctive attributes of speed, popularity, totality and emotional indifference. With a focus on the disarticulation of personal culpability among ordinary perpetrators, Beyond the Banality of Evil questions the effectiveness of individual-level guilt imputation in these politically based, collectively orchestrated crimes, and raises doubts about the utility of criminal indictments that have evolved in the context of models of individual misconduct.

The only up-to-date textbook that provides a systematic, critical overview of the human rights-development nexus. The book will provide students and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of human rights as a development challenge, delineate the responses and alternative critical approaches from a theoretical and practical perspective Equips readers with the conceptual frameworks and analytical tools for independent investigation of key issues at the human rights/development interface. Wide-ranging in scope, multi-scalar in looking at global policy initiatives or vulnerable groups such as indigenous peoples Well developed pedagogy including: a student briefing in the introduction, questions for discussion at the end of each chapter, text boxes to highlight particular issues, theoretical approaches, examples, cases and annotated further reading.

The idea of cultural heritage as an 'international public good' can be traced back to the Preamble of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, according to which "damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind". How this idea of cultural heritage as a global public good can be reconciled with the effective enforcement of protection norms is the subject of this study. Bringing together world experts in protecting cultural heritage, Enforcing International Cultural Heritage Law examines the different ways that cultural heritage property can be protected, including protection at the international level, enforcement in domestic courts, and the role of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. The book is divided into three sections. The first section assesses international law and analyses the interaction between international and domestic norms of public and private law. It discusses the different methods of international enforcement, the role of international and mixed criminal tribunals and courts, and the means for protecting cultural heritage in times of armed conflict. The second section addresses the role of national courts, discussing such topics as: barriers to domestic enforcement of international norms, the refusal to enforce foreign law, the difficulty of territorial boundaries in relation to underwater heritage, and the application of criminal sanctions by domestic courts. The final section of the book surveys alternatives to the legal enforcement of the norms protecting cultural heritage, including arbitration, soft law, and diplomacy.

Gender equality rights are fundamental human rights that are recognized in international human rights treaties, which bind states to eliminate gender discrimination formally and in practice. Islam is recognized as the official religion in the constitutional law of Islamic countries; religious scholars have the competence to interpret Islamic law, resulting in creating a series of unequal rights for women based on Islamic law, which often continues in legal structures. Nevertheless, a majority of Islamic countries have ratified the international human rights treaties but have put reservations in place based on Sharia concerning articles on gender equality rights. Therefore, this dissertation addressed that the degree to which international law has accepted gender discrimination for religious reasons.

This book provides an up-to-date interdisciplinary assessment of the accountability of executive power in different European States and at the European Union level. From a legal perspective, it wonders to what extent the forms of responsibility and accountability of executive power have evolved in terms of legal technique or framework. From a historical perspective, it looks at the evolution of responsibility paradigms. From a political science perspective, it examines responsibility and the expectations of European democracies in terms of authority and efficiency. The volume also has a quantitative aspect identifying, gathering and analysing statistical material on responsibility and accountability in current political regimes. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers, academics, and policy-makers in constitutional law and politics, public law, comparative law, comparative politics, legal history and government.

Discrimination and the Law provides an exploration and evaluation of discrimination law, focusing primarily on discrimination in employment. Introducing readers to the concepts of equality and the historical origins of discrimination law, Malcolm Sargeant explores the wider political, social and economic contexts through which discrimination law has evolved. The second edition has been thoroughly updated and includes a new chapter considering discrimination against trade unionists, discrimination against 'non-standard' workers as well as the public sector equality duty. The book begins with an examination of what is meant by such concepts as equality and discrimination followed by an analysis of the Equality Act 2010 and the impact of EU and international law. All the protected characteristics contained in the Equality Act 2010 are critically considered (age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation). Issues not covered by the legislation such as those relating to multiple discrimination and caste discrimination are also analysed. Important cases from the UK courts as well as international courts are considered. The book also contains an appendix with the most relevant parts of the 2010 Act. Important cases are highlighted in the text and some reflections as the basis for further discussion are included at the end of each chapter. This is an essential introduction to the wide-ranging law relating to discrimination in the UK for law, HRM and business students.

In Understanding Social Action, Promoting Human Rights, editors Ryan Goodman, Derek Jinks, and Andrew K. Woods bring together a stellar group of contributors from across the social sciences to apply a broad yet conceptually unified array of advanced social science research concepts to the study of human rights and human rights law. The book focus on three key methodological and substantive areas: actors, or social and political perspectives, including behavioral economics; communication, covering linguistics, media studies, and social entrepreneurship; and groups, via organizational theory, political economy, social movements, and complexity theory. Their goal is to provide a more comprehensive and more practical theory of social action, which necessarily requires a better understanding of individuals, organizations of individuals, and the ways in which both relate to other individuals and organizations.

This book uses a practice-driven and empirically founded approach to address the question of whether and how international attention can protect and enable domestic human rights activists in authoritarian settings. It examines the untold origin story of the ‘human rights defender’ term and its uptake among international advocacy organizations, which coalesced with the rise of a theory of human rights change centered around the support for local actors. Rich with analyses of original qualitative and quantitative data, the author spells out this theory of change and tests its assumptions in two case studies: the individual casework of the UN special procedures, and the case of Tunisia under Ben Ali. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of human rights, of the United Nations, and more broadly of international relations and politics in general, and to practitioners working with human rights defenders at risk.

International lawyers and international relations scholars recognize that international norms change over time. Practices that were once permissible and even "normal" - like slavery, conquest, and wartime plundering - are now prohibited by international rules. Yet though we acknowledge norm change, we are just beginning to understand how and why international rules develop in the ways that they do. Wayne Sandholtz and Kendall Stiles sketch the primary theoretical perspectives on international norm change, the "legalization" and "transnational activist" approaches, and argue that both are limited by their focus on international rules as outcomes. The authors then present their "cycle theory," in which norm change is continual, a product of the constant interplay among rules, behavior, and disputes. International Norms and Cycles of Change is the natural follow-on to Prohibiting Plunder, testing the cycle theory against ten empirical cases. The cases range from piracy and conquest, to terrorism, slavery, genocide, humanitarian intervention, and the right to democracy. The key finding is that, across long stretches of time and diverse substantive areas, norm change occurs via the cycle dynamic. International Norms and Cycles of Change further advances the authors' theoretical approach by arguing that international norms have been shaped by two main currents: sovereignty rules and liberal rules. Sovereignty rules are the necessary norms for establishing an international society of sovereign states and deal with the rights, prerogatives, and duties of states. Liberal rules are norms that emerged out of the Enlightenment and enshrine the basic value, dignity, and inherent rights of each person. Sandholtz and Stiles include five cases of sovereignty rules and five of liberal rules in order to reveal the broad cyclic pattern of international change in these two categories of rules.

This book bridges a scholarly divide between empirical and normative theorizing about procedural justice in the context of relations of power between citizens and the state. Empirical research establishes that people's understanding of procedural justice is shaped by relational factors. A central premise of this volume is that this research is significant but needs to be complemented by normative theorizing that draws on relational theories of ethics and justice to explain the moral significance of procedures and make normative sense of people's concerns about relational factors. The chapters in Part 1 provide comprehensive reviews of empirical studies of procedural justice in policing, courts and prisons. Part 2 explores empirical and normative perspectives on procedural justice and legitimacy. Part 3 examines philosophical approaches to procedural justice. Part 4 considers the implications of a relational perspective for the design of procedures in a range of legal contexts. This collection will be of interest to a wide academic readership in philosophy, law, psychology and criminology.

* Translation of a prestigious and successful German publication;

Displacement caused by climate change is an area of growing concern. With current rises in sea levels and changes to the global climate, it is an issue of fundamental importance to the future of many parts of the world. This book critically examines whether States have obligations to protect people displaced by climate change under international refugee law, international human rights law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on field work undertaken in Bangladesh, India, and the Pacific island States of Kiribati and Tuvalu, it evaluates whether the phenomenon of 'climate change-induced displacement' is an empirically sound category for academic inquiry. It does so by examining the reasons why people move (or choose not to move); the extent to which climate change, as opposed to underlying socio-economic factors, provides a trigger for such movement; and whether traditional international responses, such as the conclusion of new treaties and the creation of new institutions, are appropriate solutions in this context. In this way, the book queries whether flight from habitat destruction should be viewed as another facet of traditional international protection or as a new challenge requiring more creative legal and policy responses. law, and the international law on statelessness. Drawing on

In recent years a series of scandals have challenged the traditional political reliance on public constitutional law and human rights as a safeguard of human well-being. Multinational corporations have violated human rights; private intermediaries in the internet have threatened freedom of opinion, and the global capital markets unleashed catastrophic risks. All of these phenomena call for a response from traditional constitutionalism. Yet it is outside the limits of the nation-state in transnational politics and outside institutionalized politics, in the 'private' sectors of global society that these constitutional problems arise. It is widely accepted that there is a crisis in traditional constitutionalism caused by transnationalization and privatization. How the crisis can be overcome is one of the major controversies of modern political and constitutional theory. This book sets out an answer to that problem. It argues that the obstinate state-and-politics-centricity of traditional constitutionalism needs to be counteracted by a sociological approach which, so far, has remained neglected in the constitutional debate. Constitutional sociology projects the questions of constitutionalism not only onto the relationship between public politics and law, but onto the whole society. It argues that constitutionalism has the potential to counteract the expansionist tendencies of social systems outside the state world, particularly of the globalized economy, science and technology, and the information media, when they endanger individual or institutional autonomy. The book identifies transnational regimes, particularly in the private area, as the new constitutional subjects in a global society, rivals to the order and power of nation states. It presents a model of transnational, societal constitutional fragments that could bring the values of constitutionalism to bear on these private networks, examining the potential horizontal application of human rights in the private sphere, and how such fragments could interact. An original and provocative contribution to the literature on modern constitutionalism, Constitutional Fragments is essential reading for all those engaged in transnational political theory.

This book brings together a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives on conceptualization, measurement, multidimensional impacts and policy and service responses to address child and family poverty. It illuminates issues and trends through country level chapters, thus shedding light on dynamics of poverty in different jurisdictions. The book is structured into three sections: The first includes introductory chapters canvassing key debates around definition, conceptualization, measurement and theoretical and ideological positions. The second section covers impacts of poverty on specific domains of children's and families' experience using snapshots from specific countries/geographic regions. The third section focuses on programs, policies and interventions and addresses poverty and its impacts. It showcases specific interventions, programs and policies aimed at responding to children and families and communities and how they are or might be evaluated. Cross national case studies and evaluations illustrate the diversity of approaches and outcomes.

The question of whether non-state actors have human rights obligations is ultimately dependent on what we mean when we speak of human rights and what entities we consider to be non-state actors. Focusing the debate, this important collection presents an essential set of contributions which address these questions.This research review provides the context for the selection of papers that, first offer a general overview, and then a focus on the roles and impact of national legal orders, international organizations, corporations and rebel groups. This title is essential reading for anyone interested in the fast-moving developments related to the ways human rights law now applies to non-state actors.