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Do Human Rights Treaties Help Asylum-Seekers?: Lessons From The United Kingdom, Stephen Meili
Do Human Rights Treaties Help Asylum-Seekers?: Lessons From The United Kingdom, Stephen Meili
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
This Article analyzes the circumstances under which international human rights treaties have helped or hurt asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom since 1991. Combining a database of nearly two thousand asylum decisions and fifty-one interviews with U.K. refugee lawyers, it identifies several factors which help determine the impact of human rights treaties in individual cases. It focuses on the United Kingdom because that country has ratified or otherwise adopted numerous human rights treaties over the past three decades, and U.K. refugee lawyers regularly invoke those treaties in representing their clients.
This Article fills a gap in the treaty effectiveness literature by …
Treaty Bodies And The Interpretation Of Human Rights, Kerstin Mechlem
Treaty Bodies And The Interpretation Of Human Rights, Kerstin Mechlem
Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law
The eight United Nations human rights treaty bodies play an important role in establishing the normative content of human rights and in giving concrete meaning to individual rights and state obligations. Unfortunately, their output often suffers from methodological weaknesses and lack of coherence and analytical rigor, which compromise its legitimacy.
This Article suggests that these deficits could in large part be addressed if the committees applied the customary legal rules of interpretation codified in Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (Vienna Convention), which requires attention to the text, context, and object and purpose …