Law Commons^™

The Human Face Of Permanent Climate-Induced Displacement, Alaina Umbach

Honors Projects in History and Social Sciences

Climate change is predicted to lead to mass displacement, since the land where millions of people currently live will be, at some point, covered with water. For some populations, this will mean to be permanently displaced to a different country because the territory that their sovereign nations occupy will disappear. The most well‐known cases involve the citizens of Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Maldives. As the negative impact of climate change becomes clearer and closer in time, policy solutions to this problem are discussed. In this paper, I look at previous cases of populations’ displacement to identify policy lessons that …

The Global Enforcement Of Human Rights: The Unintended Consequences Of Transnational Litigation, Andrea Boggio

History and Social Sciences Faculty Journal Articles

In the last few years, a growing number of individuals whose basic rights are violated have filed transnational human rights claims in foreign countries. By placing the individual as a holder of basic rights at the core of the process of development, the capability approach, as put forward by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, provides a fertile theoretical framework to assess translational human rights litigation.

The paper shows that transnational claims are problematic in two regards:

1) They undermine development by discouraging foreign companies from investing in countries that are sources of transnational claims and by weakening local governments and …