Law Commons^™

Is There A Right To Be Free From Corruption?, Anita Ramasastry

Articles

Scholars and policymakers have, for some time, focused on the link between corruption and human rights. This has been to illustrate that corruption is not a victimless crime. While this has publicized the impact of corruption on individuals and on society, it has not changed the lack of political will to prosecute many instances of corruption. Thus citizens often stand by as their leaders plunder national treasuries. Rather than focusing solely on human rights, or trying to create a new “human right” to be free from corruption, this article explores the right to a legal remedy for victims of corruption …

White Paper: Options For A Treaty On Business And Human Rights, Anita Ramasastry, Douglass Cassell

Articles

The United Nations Human Rights Council decided in June 2014 to establish an Intergovernmental Working Group to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.” The first meeting of the Working Group took take place in Geneva in July 2015. The Council did not further specify what sort of instrument should be drafted. The Center for Human Rights of the American Bar Association and the Law Society of England and Wales asked the present authors to prepare a “White Paper” on possible options for a treaty …

Persuasion Treaties, Melissa J. Durkee

Articles

All treaties, akin to contracts between nations, formalize the promises of their parties. Yet the contents of those promises differ, with important consequences.

One particular difference is underappreciated and divides treaties into two fundamentally different categories. In one category of treaty, nations agree that they themselves will act, or refrain from acting, in certain ways. For convenience, I call these “resolution” treaties because they demand that states resolve to act. In the second category, nations make promises they can only keep if nonstate third parties also act or refrain from acting. These are what I term “persuasion” treaties because they …

Respective Roles Of Senate And President In The Making And Abrogation Of Treaties—The Original Intent Of The Framers Of The Constitution Historically Examined, Arthur Bestor

Washington Law Review

The first part of the present article examines the specific question of the placement in the constitutional system of the power to terminate a treaty originally ratified by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, two-thirds of the members present concurring. The power of terminating a treaty is, of course, only a particular segment or subdivision of the far more inclusive power of determining the foreign policy of the Nation. Accordingly, after considering the evidence bearing directly upon the narrow question of treaty abrogation, the present article turns to the larger question of the relationship the framers intended …

Treaties And The Constitution, Isao Sato

Washington Law Review

Problems of the validity of treaties in a constitutional order concern aspects of both international and constitutional law. The chief concern of this article, however, is the effect of the Japanese Supreme Court's power of judicial review upon the validity of treaties in domestic law. The relationship of treaties and the Constitution long has been a favorite theme of Japanese international law scholars. Under the new Constitution it has become an urgent and unavoidable issue for constitutional law scholars as well; the present constitution, unlike the Meiji Constitution, has provisions, (Articles 81 and 98), which bear directly upon the problem.