Cultural Expertise, Law and Rights introduces readers to the theory and practice of cultural expertise in the resolution of conflicts and the claim of rights in diverse societies. Combining theory and case-studies of the use of cultural expertise in real situations, and in a great variety of fields, this is the first book to offer a comprehensive examination of the field of cultural expertise: its intellectual orientations, practical applications, and ethical implications. This book engages an extensive and interdisciplinary variety of topics - ranging from race, language, sexuality, Indigenous rights, and women's rights to immigration and asylum laws, international commercial arbitration, and criminal law. It also offers a truly global perspective covering cultural expertise in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and North America. Finally, the book offers theoretical and practical guidance for the ethical use of cultural expert knowledge. This is an essential volume for teachers and students in the social sciences - especially law, anthropology, and sociology - and members of the legal professions who engage in cross-cultural dispute resolution, asylum and migration, private international law, and other fields of law in which cultural arguments play a role.

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.

* Translation of a prestigious and successful German publication;

This progressive volume furthers the interreligious, international and interdisciplinary understanding of the role of religion in the area of human rights. Building bridges between the often-separated spheres of academics, policy makers and practitioners, it draws on the expertise of its authors alongside historical and contemporary examples of how religion's role in human rights manifests. At the core of the book are four case studies, dealing with Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Authors from each religion show the positive potential that their faith and its respective traditions has for the promotion of human rights, whilst also addressing why and how it stands in the way of fulfilling this potential. Addressed to policy makers, academics and practitioners worldwide, this engaging and accessible volume provides pragmatic studies on how religious and secular actors can cooperate and contribute to policies that improve global human rights.

This book presents an in-depth analysis of how UN Human Rights institutions and mechanisms have addressed environmental protection, sustainable development and climate change. Despite the increasing involvement of UN human rights bodies in addressing environmental degradation and climate change, a systematic review of the convergence between human rights and the environment in these bodies has not been carried out. Filing this lacuna, this book surveys the resolutions, general comments, concluding observations, decisions on individual communications and press releases. It identifies principles that have emerged, explores the ways in which human rights Charter-based and treaty-based institutions are interpreting environmental principles and examines how they contribute to the emerging field of human rights and environment. Given the disproportionate effect that polluting activities have on marginalized and vulnerable groups, Atapattu also discusses how these human rights mechanisms have addressed the impact on women, children, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities and racial minorities. Written by a world-renowned expert on human rights and the environment, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars researching and teaching in this important field of study.

This book presents a ground-breaking, interdisciplinary study into the various goals assigned to international criminal trials. It starts from the proposition that no hierarchy exists amongst the different goals meaning that trials should strive to achieve all of them in equal measure. This is made difficult by the fact that not all of these goals are compatible and the fulfilment of one may lead to others going unmet. Therefore, a balance must be found if the goals of trial are to be achieved at all. The book posits that fairness should serve as the guiding principle when weighing the different trial goals against one another. It is argued that without fairness international and internationalised criminal courts and tribunals lack legitimacy and without legitimacy they lack effectiveness. The book concludes that international criminal trials must adopt procedures that emphasise fairness to all of the parties and trial participants if they wish to accomplish any of the goals set for them. Each chapter is devoted to identifying and explaining a different trial goal, providing analysis of how that particular goal functions in conjunction with the other goals, and discussing the ways in which a fairness-oriented trial model will help achieve those goals. The book provides a dynamic understanding of the different trial goals and the importance of fairness in the trial process by drawing on research from a variety of different legal disciplines while also incorporating scholarship rooted in criminology, political theory, international relations, and psychology. The book will be essential reading for researchers, academics and professionals working in the areas of International Criminal Law, Public International Law and Transitional Justice.

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Through a comparative analysis involving 15 countries from around the world this book provides an invaluable assessment of women's equality at the global level. This book explores the constitutional protection of equality and women's rights in 15 countries drawn from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. The work focuses on formal constitutional provisions as well as the substantial level of protection women's equality has achieved in the systems analysed. The investigations involve looking at the relevant gender-related legislation, the participation of women in the institutional arena, and the constitutional interpretation made by constitutional justice on gender issues. Furthermore, the book highlights women's contribution in their roles as judges, parliamentarians, activists and academics, thus increasing the visibility of women's participation in the public sphere. The work will be of interest to academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of Constitutional Law, Human Rights Law and Women's and Gender Studies.

This book shows how international criminal courts have paid only limited and inconsistent attention to atrocity crimes affecting children. It elucidates the many structural, legal, financial and even attitudinal obstacles, often overlapping, that have contributed to the international courts’ focus on the experience of adults, rendering children almost invisible. It reviews whether and how different international and hybrid criminal jurisdictions have considered international crimes committed against or by children. The book also considers how international criminal justice can help contribute to the recognition of the specific impact that international crimes have on children, whether as victims or as participants, and strengthen their protection. Finally, it proposes an agenda to improve this situation, making specific recommendations encompassing the urgent need to further elaborate child-friendly procedures. It also calls for international investigative and prosecutorial strategies to be less adult-centric and broaden the scope of crimes against children beyond the focus on child-soldiers. This book is an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and fieldworkers in the areas of international criminal law, international human rights law/child rights, international humanitarian law, child protection and transitional justice.

History shows a pattern of oppression, forced assimilation, and even destruction of minority groups. Although legal and quasi-legal instruments were adopted after both the First and Second World Wars, it was not until after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the protection of persons belonging to national minorities became a dominant issue in the international legal and political arenas. This book focuses on three mechanisms in the field: the OSCE High Commission on National Minorities (established in 1992), the UN Working Group on Minorities (established 1995), and the CoE Advisory Committee on Minorities (established 1997). The core question examined is whether these mechanisms, with the variety of approaches and working methods at their disposal, really make a difference in the protection of national minorities. Rianne Letschert received the University of Tilburg Prize for the second best dissertation for the doctoral thesis The Impact of Minority Rights Mechanisms on the impact of international minority rights mechanisms on the implementation of minority rights.

The objective of this work is to provide an analysis of the legislative approaches to counter-terrorism and human rights in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The text is aimed at lawyers and practitioners within and outside common law nations. Although the text analyses the subject within the four jurisdictions named, many parts of the book will be of interest and relevance to those from outside those jurisdictions. Considerable weight is placed on inter- tional obligations and directions, with a unique and hopefully useful feature of the text being the inclusion and consideration of a handbook written by me on human rights compliance when countering terrorism (set out in Appendix 4 and considered in Chap. 13). A signi?cant part of the research undertaken for this work was as a result of my being awarded the International Research Fellowship, Te Karahipi Rangahau a Taiao, an annual fellowship generously funded by the New Zealand Law Foun- tion. The New Zealand Law Foundation is an independent trust and registered charitable entity under the Charities Act 2005 (NZ). This project would not have been possible without the Law Foundation's award, which allowed me to undertake research and associated work over reasonably lengthy periods of time in Australia, Canada, Israel, England, Austria, Switzerland and Finland. It is not just the g- graphical location of this work that was made possible, however.

Examining the prevalent issue of domestic violence, this book breaks down the reasons behind the ineffectiveness of existing human rights instruments and the gaps in current legal systems failing those in need. Through a variety of key case studies, it reveals significant gaps in the legal conceptualisation of domestic violence between human rights standards on the one hand and the national legal systems examined—those of Ireland and Lithuania—on the other. The book reveals that, contrary to gender-based universal human rights approaches and despite recent legislative reforms, the legal concept of domestic violence is gender-blind. It fails to capture gender-based empirical realities on the ground, rendering national legal systems devoid of an empirically informed theoretical basis for addressing the problem. Despite the differences in the contextual backgrounds of the two case study countries, the legislation on domestic violence is underpinned by patriarchal beliefs in both. This book employs a gender-based examination of the issue that will be of key interest to scholars, legal practitioners, civil society actors, and students of feminist legal theory, gender equality, gender in international law, gender and human rights and conceptual democracy.

Social and economic rights have hitherto been marginalised in mainstream legal and political discourses and treated as second-class citizens in the human rights family. In recent years, these rights are receiving increasing attention in law and politics, arguably because they raise existential questions on human security and dignity. This one-stop volume examines the international and public law perspectives on socio-economic rights in Africa. Working on the premise that these rights are normative and justiciable, the author methodically and expertly examines the legal frameworks for their protection in global, regional, and national instruments, infusing the analysis with African and comparative jurisprudence. In blending theory with practice, the book also reflects on some governance challenges that continue to hobble the effective realisation of socio-economic rights in Africa. It is a seminal contribution on an important field, an ideal companion for human rights practitioners, international and constitutional lawyers, judges, government advisors, students, social workers, and everyone who desires 'freedom from fear and want'

This book explores the increasing concern over the extent to which those suffering from forced cross-border displacement as a result of environmental change are protected under international human rights law. Formally they are not entitled to admission or stay in a third state country, a situation that has been identified as an international "legal protection gap". The book seeks to provide answers to two basic questions: whether and to what extent existing international law protects cross-border environmental displacement, and whether and how existing formalized regional complementary protection standards can interpretively solidify and conceptualize protection for cross-border environmental displacement. The discussion outlines that the protection of the human person is not only an ex post facto obligation of states, but must be increasingly seen as an ex ante one. The analysis further suggests that the European Union regionally orientated protection regime can help states to consolidate an evolving protection paradigm of proactive and reactive measures being erected at the international level. It can also narrow the identified legal protection gaps. In so doing, it helps states to reconceptualise protection as a holistic and dynamic enterprise. This book will be of great interest to academics in law, political science and human rights, policy makers and civil society organisations both at national and international level.

Reacting to the mixed record of the UK Human Rights Act 1998 and similar enactments concerned with the protection of human rights, this book explores ways of promoting human rights more effectively through political and democratic mechanisms. The book expresses ideological skepticism concerning the relative neglect of social and economic rights and institutional skepticism concerning the limitations of court-centered means for enhancing human rights goals in general. The contributors criticize the 'juridification' of human rights through transferring the prime responsibility for identifying human rights violations to courts and advocate the greater 'politicization' of human rights responsibilities through such measures as enhanced parliamentary scrutiny of existing and proposed legislation. This group of twenty-four leading human rights scholars from around the world present a variety of perspectives on the disappointing human rights outcomes of recent institutional developments and consider the prospects of reviving the moral force and political implications of human rights values.
Thus, contributors recount the failures of the Human Rights Act with regard to counter-terrorism; chart how the 'dialogue' model reduces parliaments' capacities to hold governments to account for human rights violations; consider which institutions best protect fundamental rights; and reflect on how the idea of human rights could be 'rescued' in Britain today. In addition, the book considers the historical human rights failures of courts during the Cold War and in Northern Ireland, the diverse outcomes of human rights judicial review, and aspects of the human rights regimes in a variety of jurisdictions, including Finland, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Canada, Europe, and the United States.

Migrant, Refugee, Smuggler, Saviour investigates one of the most under-examined aspects of the great migration crisis of our time. As millions seek passage to Europe in order to escape conflicts, repressive governments and poverty, their movements are enabled and actively encouraged by professional criminal networks that earn billions of dollars. Many of these smugglers carry out their activities with little regard for human rights, which has led to a manifold increase in human suffering, not only in the Mediterranean Sea, but also along the overland smuggling routes that cross the Sahara, penetrate deep into the Balkans, and into hidden corners of Europe's capitals. But others are revered as saviours by those that they move, for it is they who deliver men, women and children to a safer place and better life. Disconcertingly, it is often criminals who help the most desperate among us when the international system turns them away. This book is a measured attempt, born of years of research and reporting in the field, to better understand how people-smuggling networks function, the ways in which they have evolved, and what they mean for peace and security in the future.

This book outlines the legal status of Muslims in Italy. In particular, it highlights that, when it comes to Islam, the Italian legal system exacerbates the dilemma of contemporary constitutional democracies, increasingly caught between the principle of equality and the right to have rights, which implies the respect of diversity. It provides readers with a deep understanding of how domestic and external socio-political factors may muddle the interpretation of Italy’s constitutional provisions, starting with those relating to state secularism and religious freedom. It is argued that today, as never before, these provisions are torn between the principle of equality and the right to be different. This situation has been exacerbated by incessant states of emergency, from immigration to religion-inspired terrorism, in light of which the presence of Islam in the peninsula has been highly politicized. Italy’s experience on the legal status of Muslims provides an interesting case study and, as such, a valuable source of empirical information for a functioning and pluralistic constitutional democracy, especially when dealing with conditions of fear and insecurity. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and policy-makers working in the areas of law and religion, constitutional law, comparative law, and human rights.

The book analyses the position of the ECtHR which has been more and more confronted with criticism coming from the national sphere, including the judiciary. This culminated in constitutional court judgments declaring a particular ECtHR judgment non-executable, for reasons of constitutional law. Existing scholarship does not differentiate enough between cases of mere political unwillingness to execute an ECtHR judgment and cases where execution is blocked for legal reasons (mainly of constitutional law nature). At the same time, the discussion under EU law on national/constitutional identity limiting the reach of the former has been only loosely linked with the ECHR context. This book presents a new dogmatic concept - 'principled resistance' - to analyse such cases. Taking up examples from the national level, it strives to find out whether the legal reasoning behind 'principled resistance' shows enough commonalities in order to qualify such incidents as expression of a 'new paradigm'.

The freedom to think what you want and to say what you think has always generated a pushback of regulation and censorship. This raises the thorny question: to what extent does free speech actually endanger speech protection? This book examines today's calls for speech legislation and places it into historical perspective, using fascinating examples from the past 200 years, to explain the historical context of laws regulating speech. Over time, the freedom to speak has grown, the ways in which we communicate have evolved due to technology, and our ideas about speech protection have been challenged as a result. Now more than ever, we are living in a free speech paradox: powerful speakers weaponize their rights in order to silence those less-powerful speakers who oppose them. By understanding how this situation has developed, we can stand up to these threats to the freedom of speech.

This book continues the themes addressed by its two predecessors in this mini-series by examining the role of the principle of the welfare interests of the child in the law of the U.S. and Canada. It provides a record of the key milestones in its development in each country and conducts a comparative analysis of the contemporary law relating to children in both. In doing so, it focuses also on the Indigenous communities - the AN/AI and the First Nations - of the U.S. and Canada respectively. By identifying and analysing the functions of the principle in the public (care, protection and control etc), in the private (matrimonial, adoption etc), and in the hybrid (adoption from care, surrogacy etc) sectors of family law, it builds a picture of the law relating to children in the two countries and reveals significant jurisdictional differences. By examining the legislation and related caselaw it assesses the differential effect of the same legal framework on the welfare of Indigenous and other children. In addition to a digest of cases and legislation that identifies and tracks the role of this legal principle, lawyers, academics and other researchers will find a wealth of information on how it has evolved to reflect corresponding changes in social mores. For those interested in politics and social policy, there is much illuminating evidence on how the law has balanced this principle relative to others within both civil and criminal contexts.

Traditionally, human rights have protected those facing the sharp edge of the criminal justice system. But over time human rights law has become increasingly infused with duties to mobilise criminal law towards protection and redress for violation of rights. These developments give rise to a whole host of questions concerning the precise parameters of coercive human rights, the rationale(s) that underpin them, and their effects and implications for victims, perpetrators, domestic legal systems, and for the theory and practice of human rights and criminal justice. This collection addresses these questions with a focus on the rich jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The collection explores four interlocking themes surrounding the issue of coercive human rights: First, the key threads in the doctrine of the ECtHR on duties to mobilise the criminal law as a means of delivering human rights protection. Secondly, the factors that contribute to a readiness to demand coercive measures, including discrimination and vulnerability, and other key justificatory reasoning shaping the development of coercive human rights. Thirdly, the most pressing challenges for the ECtHR's coercive duties doctrine, including: - how it relates to theories and rationales of criminalisation and criminal punishment; - its implications for the fundamental tenets of human rights law itself; - its relationship to transitional justice objectives; and - how (far) it coheres with the imperative of effective protection for persons in precarious or vulnerable situations. Fourthly, the (prospective) evolution of the coercive human rights doctrine and its application within national jurisdictions.

Today, the concept of "the refugee" as distinct from other migrants looms large. Immigration laws have developed to reinforce a dichotomy between those viewed as voluntary, often economically motivated, migrants who can be legitimately excluded by potential host states, and those viewed as forced, often politically motivated, refugees who should be let in. In Crossing, Rebecca Hamlin argues against advocacy positions that cling to this distinction. Everything we know about people who decide to move suggests that border crossing is far more complicated than any binary, or even a continuum, can encompass. Drawing on cases of various "border crises" across Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East, Hamlin outlines major inconsistencies and faulty assumptions on which the binary relies. The migrant/refugee binary is not just an innocuous shorthand—indeed, its power stems from the way in which it is painted as apolitical. In truth, the binary is a dangerous legal fiction, politically constructed with the ultimate goal of making harsh border control measures more ethically palatable to the public. This book is a challenge to all those invested in the rights and study of migrants to move toward more equitable advocacy for all border crossers.

This book presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the substantive and procedural aspects of compensation for wrongful convictions among European countries and the USA, as well as the standard derived from the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The collection draws comparative conclusions as to the similarities and differences between selected jurisdictions and assesses the effectiveness of the national compensation schemes. This enables the designing of an optimum model of compensation, offering accessibility and effectiveness for the victims of miscarriages of justice and being acceptable for jurisdictions based on common law, and civil law traditions, as well as inquisitorial and adversarial types of criminal process. Moreover, the discussion of the minimum European standard as established in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights enables us to identify how the Strasbourg Court can contribute to strengthening the compensation scheme. The book will be essential reading for students, academics and policymakers working in the areas of criminal law and procedure.

This book presents a comprehensive examination of the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and provides an analysis of the level of its reflection in regional human rights systems. The work explores the development of the role of the individual in human rights protection since the 1998 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. It locates the nature, activities and need for protection of human rights defenders within the current international legal framework and outlines the place and scope for a specific right to promote and protect human rights. It traces the origins of the right and the main international instruments that define it, both at national and international level. Finally, it considers the impact that the right to defend human rights can have on constitutional and international law. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of International Human Rights Law and Constitutional Law.

This book examines the evolution of the contemporary crime victim's procedural place within modern western societies. Taking the history of the Irish crime victim as a case study, the work charts the place of victims within criminal justice over time. This evolves from the expansive latitude that they had during the eighteenth century, to their major relegation to witness and informer in the nineteenth, and back to a more contemporary recapturing of some of their previous centrality. The book also studies what this has meant for the position of suspects and offenders as well as the population more generally. Therefore, some analysis is devoted to examining its impact on an offender's right to fair trial and social forms. It is held that the modern crime victim has transcended its position of marginality. This happened not only in law, but as the consequence of the victim's new role as a key socio-political stakeholder. This work flags the importance of victim rights conferrals, and the social transformations that engendered such trends. In this way victim re-emergence is evidenced as being not just a legal change, but a consequence of several more recent socio-cultural transformations in our societies. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics and policy makers in criminal law, human rights law, criminology and legal history.