Human Rights Law Commons^™

A Global Water Apartheid: From Revelation To Resolution, Itzchak Kornfeld

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

It is well settled in international human rights law that a human right to water exists. Nevertheless, to date, there has been little scholarship about what the practical contours of the right should be. If legal tools are to benefit the world's poor and disenfranchised, they cannot be void due to the impossibility of implementation. This is the problem with the purported human right to water: it is quixotic.

This Article proposes a pragmatic solution to the potable water problem for the world's poor. The solution offered here is based on a model of privatized access to water grounded in …

The Conflict Between The Alien Tort Statute Litigation And Foreign Amnesty Laws, Carlee M. Hobbs

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Since the landmark case Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, foreign individuals have increasingly utilized the Alien Tort Statute to raise claims of human rights violations in the United States federal courts. Defendants, however, have alleged that principles of international comity necessitate dismissal of the suit when the foreign country in which the human rights violations occurred has granted defendants amnesty. While the doctrine of international comity permits dismissal if the case requires a federal court to adjudicate the internal affairs of a foreign country, the Supreme Court held, in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, that the Alien Tort Statue grants U.S. courts jurisdiction over …

The Responsibility To Protect And The Decline Of Sovereignty: Free Speech Protection Under International Law, William Magnuson

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

State sovereignty has long held a revered post in international law, but it received a blow in the aftermath of World War II, when the world realized the full extent of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis on their own citizens. In the postwar period, the idea that individuals possessed rights independent of their own states gained a foothold in world discussions, and a proliferation of human rights treaties guaranteeing fundamental rights followed. These rights were, for the most part, unenforceable, though, and in the 1990s, a number of humanitarian catastrophes (in Kosovo, Rwanda, and Somalia) galvanized the international community to …