International Human Rights Law

The Right to Life under International Law offers the first-ever comprehensive treatment under international law of the foundational human right to life. It describes the history, content, and status of the right, considers jurisdictional issues, and discusses the application of the right to a wide range of groups, such as women, children, persons with disabilities, members of minorities, LGBTI persons, refugees, and journalists. It defines the responsibility of not only governments but also the private sector, armed groups, and non-governmental organisations to respect the prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life. It also explains the nature and substance of the duty to investigate potentially unlawful death as well as the mechanisms at global and regional level to promote respect for the right to life.

Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions is the first comprehensive analysis of the role and impact of informal collaborations in the UN human rights treaty bodies. Issues as central to international human rights as the right to water, abortion, torture, and hate speech are often only clarified through the instrument of treaty interpretations. This book dives beneath the surface of the formal access, procedures, and actors of the UN treaty body system to reveal how the experts and external collaborators play a key role in the development of human rights. Nina Reiners introduces the concept of 'Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions' within a novel theoretical framework and draws on a number of detailed case studies and original data. This study makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on human rights, transnational actors, and international organizations, and contributes to broader debates in international relations and international law.

Providing a novel conceptual framework and rich case studies of the Roma in France and the Czech Republic, Zoltán I. Búzás sheds light on the ways in which states are able to resist unwanted human rights obligations by circumventing international human rights norms without violating the laws designed to protect them.

The Right to Life under International Law offers the first-ever comprehensive treatment under international law of the foundational human right to life. It describes the history, content, and status of the right, considers jurisdictional issues, and discusses the application of the right to a wide range of groups, such as women, children, persons with disabilities, members of minorities, LGBTI persons, refugees, and journalists. It defines the responsibility of not only governments but also the private sector, armed groups, and non-governmental organisations to respect the prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life. It also explains the nature and substance of the duty to investigate potentially unlawful death as well as the mechanisms at global and regional level to promote respect for the right to life.

Does human rights law work? This book engages in this heated debate through a detailed analysis of thirty years of the right to health - perhaps the most complex human right - in Brazil. Are Brazilians better off three decades after the enactment of the right to health in the 1988 Constitution? Has the flurry of litigation experienced in Brazil helped or harmed the majority of the population? This book offers an in-depth analysis of these complex and controversial questions grounded on a wealth of empirical data. The book covers the history of the recognition of health as a human right in the 1988 Constitution through the Sanitary Movement's campaign and the subsequent three decades of what Ferraz calls the politics and judicialization of health. It challenges positions of both optimists and sceptics of human rights law and will be of interest to those looking for a more nuanced analysis.

A collection of United Nations documents associated with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these volumes facilitate research into the scope of, meaning of and intent behind the instrument's provisions. It permits an examination of the various drafts of what became the thirty articles of the Declaration, including one of the earliest documents - a compilation of human rights provisions from national constitutions, organised thematically. The documents are organised chronologically and thorough thematic indexing facilitates research into the origins of specific rights and norms. It is also annotated in order to provide information relating to names, places, events and concepts that might have been familiar in the late 1940s but are today more obscure.

When Henry Morgentaler, Canada's best-known abortion rights advocate, died in 2013, activists and scholars began to reassess the state of abortion in the country. In this volume, some of Canada's foremost researchers challenge current thinking about abortion by revealing the discrepancy between what Canadians believe the law to be after the 1988 Morgentaler decision and what people are experiencing on the ground. Showcasing new theoretical frameworks and approaches from law, history, medicine, women's studies, and political science, these timely essays reveal the diversity of abortion experiences across the country, past and present, and make a case for shifting the debate from abortion rights to reproductive justice.

Discover how modern technological realities shape freedoms of expression and opinion with this comprehensive resource. The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics delivers an extensive review of the challenges facing modern communication rights. It offers readers an examination of the interplay between communication law and ethics and the role played by communication professionals in protecting individuals' rights to communication. Distinguished authors Loreto Corredoira, Ignacio Bel Mallén and Rodrigo Cetina Presuel walk readers through the fundamental ideas and concepts that represent universal common ground regarding communication rights. They compare communication rights theories developed in Europe, the United States, Latin America, Australia, and East Asia to describe how communication-related freedoms and rights are formulated and applied around the world. Finally, the meaning of the phrases "freedom of expression" and "freedom of the press" are examined in the context of national constitutions and international human rights instruments.The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics provides readers with: A diverse, global perspective on how communication rights are protected and challenged around the world A universal vision of communication rights that encourages dialogue rather than confrontation A comparison of the American First Amendment of the Constitution with European communication rights theories and other legal traditions around the world An exploration of the frontiers of communication rights concepts, terminology, jurisdiction, and territoriality Perfect for professors, graduate students, doctoral students, and postdoctoral researchers studying communication rights and freedom of expression around the world, The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics also belongs on the bookshelves of researchers studying issues surrounding freedom of the press in North America, Europe, and Latin America.

This book on constructing a legal right to housing in India seeks to achieve three ends: first, examine the costs incurred in translating a moral right into the language of the law; second, unpack the ways in which existing law and policy impact the realisation of the right to housing and situate any attempt to legally guarantee the right within this context; and finally, begin thinking through the many complexities that will arise should the right be articulated within the law. A comprehensive chronology of central housing law and policy provides the descriptive background for this analytical text, while also acting as a rich introductory resource on the subject. Asserting a need as a right and then seeking legislative recognition for the right is a formula often used in rights struggles. This book takes a critical look at this process, in order to facilitate informed engagement with the law.

When it comes to upholding human rights both at home and abroad, many Canadians believe that we have always been "on the side of the angels." This book tells the story of Canada's contributions - both good and bad - to the development and advancement of international human rights law at the Commission on Human Rights from 1946 to 2006. In it, Canada's reputation is examined through its involvement in a number of contentious human rights issues - political, civil, racial, women's, and Indigenous. An in-depth historical overview of six decades of Canadian engagement within the UN human rights system, this book offers new insights into the nuances, complexities, and contradictions of Canada's human rights policies.

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Canada has abundant natural wealth, beautiful landscapes, vast forests, and thousands of rivers and lakes. The land defines Canadians as a people, yet the country has one of the industrialized world's worst environmental records. Building on his previous book, The Environmental Rights Revolution (2012), David R. Boyd describes how recognizing the constitutional right to a healthy environment could have a transformative impact by empowering citizens, holding governments and industry accountable, and improving Canada's green record. This important and provocative book provides a road map to protect human health, the well-being of the planet, and the interests of future generations.

Canadians like to see themselves as champions of human rights in the international community. Closer to home, however, the human rights system in Canada - particularly its public institutions such as commissions and tribunals - has been the object of sustained debate and vehement criticism, based largely on widespread myths about how it works. In Speaking Out on Human Rights, Pearl Eliadis explodes these myths, analysing the pervasive distortions and errors on which they depend. Canada's human rights system, a unique legal tradition operating within a powerful modern constitution, is a fundamental mechanism for ensuring the practical application of our national commitment to tolerance and inclusion. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Canada's leading human rights experts and extensive original research, Eliadis explores the evolution of commissions and tribunals as vehicles of public policy and considers their mandate to mediate rights conflicts in such contested areas as hate speech, religious freedoms, and sexuality. She provides a frank assessment of how Canada's human rights system functions and argues that misplaced critiques have prevented urgent and necessary discussions about the reforms that are needed to improve fairness and equality before the law and to ensure institutional independence, impartiality, and competence. Speaking Out on Human Rights shows how our human rights system plays a unique and important role in the rights revolution both in Canada and internationally and offers promising avenues for its future development.

This book shows how human rights became the primary language for social change in Canada and how a single decade became the locus for that emergence. The author argues that the 1970s was a critical moment in human rights history--one that transformed political culture, social movements, law, and foreign policy. Human Rights in Canada is one of the first sociological studies of human rights in Canada. It explains that human rights are a distinct social practice, and it documents those social conditions that made human rights significant at a particular historical moment. A central theme in this book is that human rights derive from society rather than abstract legal principles. Therefore, we can identify the boundaries and limits of Canada's rights culture at different moments in our history. Until the 1970s, Canadians framed their grievances with reference to Christianity or British justice rather than human rights. A historical sociological approach to human rights reveals how rights are historically contingent, and how new rights claims are built upon past claims. This book explores governments' tendency to suppress rights in periods of perceived emergency; how Canada's rights culture was shaped by state formation; how social movements have advanced new rights claims; the changing discourse of rights in debates surrounding the constitution; how the international human rights movement shaped domestic politics and foreign policy; and much more. In addition to drawing on secondary literature in law, history, sociology, and political science, this study looked to published government documents, litigation and case law, archival research, newspapers, opinion polls, and materials produced by non-governmental organizations.

This book provides a detailed analysis of South Africa's actions on the UN Human Rights Council, examining the country's positions on civil and political rights, economic rights and development, social groups whose rights are frequently violated, and abuses in specific countries. The most detailed and comprehensive study of any country's record on the UN Human Rights Council to date, this book demonstrates that despite occasional support for human rights, South Africa's overall record ranged from opposing to failing to support human rights. This is compounded by an anti-Western or 'anti-imperial' edge to South Africa's positions on the UNHRC. Using South Africa as a study case of a liberal country consistently behaving illiberally, this book therefore challenges the widespread belief in international relations theory, typically found in liberal and constructivist thought, that there is an alignment of domestic political society and foreign policy values. Addressing ongoing debates since the presidency of Nelson Mandela about the place of human rights in South Africa's foreign policy, South Africa and the UN Human Rights Council will be useful to students and scholars of international relations, human rights, international law, and African politics.

The updated second edition provides useful information about international human rights norms and their relevance to South Africa. Considering the interplay between international and domestic human rights standards, the book explains and explores how the South African Constitution protects human rights. The material is presented in a coherent and accessible style to facilitate the understanding of the past, present and future of human rights protection in South Africa and beyond.

The human rights movement in South Africa's transition to a postapartheid democracy has been widely celebrated as a triumph for global human rights. It was a key aspect of the political transition, often referred to as a miracle, which brought majority rule and democracy to South Africa. The country's new constitution, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the moral authority of Nelson Mandela stand as exemplary proof of this achievement. Yet, less than a generation after the achievement of freedom, the status of human rights and constitutionalism in South Africa is uncertain. In government the ANC has displayed an inconsistent attitude to the protection, and advancement, of hard-won freedoms and rights, and it is not at all clear that a broader civic and political consciousness of the importance of rights is rooting itself more widely in popular culture.

The South African Constitutional Court has issued internationally prominent decisions abolishing the death penalty, enforcing socio-economic rights, allowing gay marriage and promoting equality. These decisions are striking given the country s Apartheid past and the absence of a grand human rights tradition. By contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court has generally ruled more conservatively on similar questions. This book examines the Constitutional Court in detail to determine how it has functioned during South Africa s transition and compares its rulings to those of the U.S. Supreme Court on similar rights issues. The book also analyzes the scholarly debate about the Constitutional Court taking place in South Africa. It furthermore addresses the arguments of those international scholars who have suggested that constitutional courts do not generally bring about social change. In the end, the book highlights a transformative pragmatic method of constitutional interpretation a method the U.S. Supreme Court could employ.

Current processes of globalization are challenging Human Rights and the attempts to institutionalize them in many ways. The question of the connection between religion and human rights is a crucial point here. The genealogy of the Human Rights is still a point of controversies in the academic discussion. Nevertheless, there is consensus that the Christian tradition - especially the doctrine that each human being is an image of God - played an important role within the emergence of the codification of the Human Rights in the period of enlightenment. It is also obvious that the struggle against the politics of apartheid in South Africa was strongly supported by initiatives of churchy and other religious groups referring to the Human Rights. Christian churches and other religious groups do still play an important role in the post-apartheid South Africa. They have a public voice concerning all the challenges with which the multiethnic and economically still deeply divided South African society is faced with. The reflections on these questions in the collected lectures and essays of this volume derive from an academic discourse between German and South African scholars that took place within the German-South African Year of Science 2012/13.

With the ideological shift to neoliberalism and the introduction of austerity measures following the Global Recession, the UK has experienced divestment in the National Health Service, growing food bank use, increasing housing problems and growing inequities in access to digital services. These inequities have been both highlighted and compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Questioning the ideology that economic growth should be prioritised above all else, this book demonstrates that an alternative approach to social policy, based on human rights and social justice, is necessary to tackle the existing systemic inequalities brought to the foreground by COVID-19.

The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) was formed in the 1930s against a backdrop of fascism and 'popular front' movements. In this volatile political atmosphere, the aim of the NCCL was to ensure that civil liberties were a central component of political discourse. Chris Moores's new study shows how the NCCL - now Liberty - had to balance the interests of extremist allies with the desire to become a respectable force campaigning for human rights and civil liberties. From new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s to the formation of the Human Rights Act in 1998, this study traces the NCCL's development over the last eighty years. It enables us to observe shifts and continuities in forms of political mobilisation throughout the twentieth century, changes in discourse about extensions and retreats of freedoms, as well as the theoretical conceptualisation and practical protection of rights and liberties.

How does the UK Supreme Court approach human rights law? This book presents the first comprehensive overview of the human rights jurisprudence of the Court, analysing the opinions expressed by the current Justices and their predecessors, both judicially and extra-judicially. It criticizes the judges for not developing the common law in a way which supplements the Human Rights Act, for not making imaginative enough use of that Act, and for adopting an attitude toConvention rights which is often out of step with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.After setting the scene by explaining the constraints which are placed on the Supreme Court Justices, the book considers how human rights are conceptualized by the Court in general and how in particular the procedural questions thrown up by the Human Rights Act have been dealt with so far. It then examines on a right-by-right basis the Justices' position on all the Convention rights and those additional international human rights standards which have been incorporated into UK law. Focusing onthe views expressed by individual judges, the book details the many differences of opinion which have come to light and characterizes the prevailing positions, before attempting to predict what stance may be adopted in future on new issues.The book offers an invaluable resource for any practitioners bringing human rights cases before the Court, and its critical arguments on the state of UK human rights law will be essential reading for all academics working in European human rights law.

The UK's engagement with the legal protection of human rights at a European level has been, at varying stages, pioneering, sceptical and antagonistic. The UK government, media and public opinion have all at times expressed concerns about the growing influence of European human rights law, particularly in the controversial contexts of prisoner voting and deportation of suspected terrorists as well as in the context of British military action abroad. British politicians and judges have also, however, played important roles in drafting, implementing and interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. Its incorporation into domestic law in the Human Rights Act 1998 intensified the ongoing debate about the UK's international and regional human rights commitments. Furthermore, the increasing importance of the European Union in the human rights sphere has added another layer to the relationship and highlights the complex relationship(s) between the UK government, the Westminster Parliament and judges in the UK, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.The book analyses the topical and contentious issue of the relationship between the UK and the European systems for the protection of human rights (ECHR and EU) from doctrinal, contextual and comparative perspectives and explores factors that influence the relationship of the UK and European human rights.