Human Rights Law Commons^™

Shedding New Light On Multinational Corporations And Human Rights: Promises And Limits Of “Blockchainizing” The Global Supply Chain, Chang-Hsien Tsai, Ching-Fu Lin

Michigan Journal of International Law

Over the last few decades, advances in transportation and production technology, in conjunction with economic globalization and the emergence of multinational corporations, have consolidated fragmented production processes into long and complex supply chains across jurisdictions. While there are benefits to such global supply chains (“GSCs”), the prevalence of human rights violations attributable to information asymmetry, as well as rule of law gaps between different jurisdictions, has been a constant challenge. Modern slavery, child abuse, harsh working conditions, low wages, and other problems have reoccurred in the factories of upstream suppliers in the global South and have been systemically ignored by …

Climate Justice In The Anthropocene And Its Relationship With Science And Technology: The Importance Of Ethics Of Responsibility, Paolo Davide Farah, Alessio Lo Giudice

Articles

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Therefore, globalization is the necessary hermeneutical horizon to develop an analysis of the metamorphosis climate change could cause at a political, social, and economic level. Within this horizon, this Article shows how the relationship between the concept of the Anthropocene epoch and the request for justice allows for framing a climate-justice and intergenerational equity–focused political interpretation of the effects of climate change. In order to avoid reducing such an interpretation to merely an ideological critique of capitalism, the conception of climate justice needs to be grounded in a rational, ethical model. This Article proposes …

The Human Rights Due Diligence Standard-Setting In The European Union: Bridging The Gap Between Ambition And Reality, Jernej Letnar Černič

Global Business Law Review

Globalization has, over the past decades, erased borders between continents and countries. It has propelled international trade to previously unforeseen heights. Nonetheless, it has brought about not only positive impact, but also negative consequences for individuals and communities worldwide. Businesses have often been alleged to have been directly or indirectly involved in human rights violations. On the other hand, rights-holders have often found it difficult to enforce corporate human rights obligations and accountability either at home or abroad. Nonetheless, the field of business and human rights has in recent years witnessed seminal developments from the adoption of binding laws in …

Trafficking Technology: A Look At Different Approaches To Ending Technology-Facilitated Human Trafficking, David Barney

Pepperdine Law Review

In 2018, many believe that slavery is an antiquated concept. But as with anything else, if it has not become extinct, it has evolved with time. Human trafficking is no different. Each year, millions of men, women and children are trafficked in the United States, and internationally, and forced to work against their will. Through the rise of technology and an increasingly globalized world, traffickers have learned to use technology as a tool to help facilitate the trafficking of persons and to sell those victims to others they never could have reached before. But what are we doing about it? …

A Treaty On Enforcing Human Rights Against Business: Closing The Loophole Or Getting Stuck In A Loop?, Pierre Theilbörger, Tobias Ackermann

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This Article takes a human rights law perspective on the issue of enforcing corporate social responsibility. While corporations receive a variety of rights under international law, they do not equally hold a corresponding set of duties. The Article assesses the merits and shortcomings of existing initiatives to bridge this gap, in particular the Special Representative to the Secretary-General's (legally nonbinding) Framework and Guiding Principles, as well as the most recent initiative at the United Nations Human Rights Council on developing a (legally binding) treaty on business and human rights. While emphasizing that existing legal frameworks-such as human rights law, international …

Corporate Codes As Private Co-Regulatory Instruments In Corporate Governance And Responsibility And Their Enforcement, Jan Eijsbouts

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) codes have gained a prominent role as tools in self-regulation for companies to establish their basic values, norms, and rules that condition the conduct of directors, managers, employees, and-increasingly-of suppliers. This development must be seen in the light of two important paradigmatic changes in the concepts both of CSR and corporate governance. The former is no longer purely voluntary and the latter has become inclusive of CSR, each with far-reaching consequences for the raison d'itre and the place and function of the codes in the smart regulatory mix governing corporations. While the codes were based originally …

The Responsibility To Protect: Emerging Norm Or Failed Doctrine?, Camila Pupparo

Global Tides

This paper seeks to investigate the current shift from the non-intervention norm towards the “Responsibility to Protect,” commonly abbreviated as “RtoP,” which actually mandates intervention in cases of humanitarian intervention disasters. I will look at the May 2011 application of the R2P doctrine to the humanitarian crisis in Libya and assess whether it was a success or a failure. Many critics of the “Responsibility to Protect” norm consider it to be yet another imperial tool used by the West to pursue national interests, so this paper analyzes this argument in detail, referring to case study examples, particularly in the Middle …

Sex And Globalization, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

For some time now, I have focused on a mission to bring together the separate discourses of the human rights and trade fields -- certainly not to blend them, but to raise awareness of their myriad interconnections. Indeed, human rights and trade are interlocking pieces of the puzzle we call international law and cannot possibly remain sequestered in the "splendid isolation" in which they have existed since their inception as disciplines. In any study of globalization, especially if one endeavors to pursue its benefits for all persons, not just the elite around the world, one must be aware of and …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Public Sector Labor Policy: A Human Rights Approach, Robert Hebdon

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Finding The Pearls When The World Is Your Oyster: Case And Project Selection In Clinic Design, Sarah Paoletti

All Faculty Scholarship

Clinical legal education is distinguishable from the rest of the law school curriculum and the extracurricular activities available to law students because it places students directly into the role of a lawyer engaged in real-world practice. Clinical programs are often defined by the cases and projects—the pearls at the heart of the experiential learning experience—that comprise their dockets. Finding the right cases and projects that meet a range of goals remains a perennial challenge in clinic design. In the context of international human rights clinics, the world is your oyster, and that challenge is magni-fied. This Article identifies a set …

Transnational Corporations' Outward Expression Of Inward Self-Constitution: The Enforcement Of Human Rights By Apple, Inc., Larry Cata Backer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Societal constitutionalism presents us with alternatives to state-centered constitutional theory. But this alternative does not so much displace as extend conventional constitutional theory as a set of static premises that structure the organization of legitimate governance units. Constitutional theory, in either its conventional or societal forms, engages in both a descriptive and a normative project-the former looking to the incarnation of an abstraction and the later to the development of a set of presumptions and principles through which this incarnation can be judged. Constitutional theory is conventionally applied to states-that is, to those manifestations of organized power constituted by a …

Main Structural Characteristics Of Global Constitutionalism., Elizabeth Lvova

Elizabeth Lvova

Nowadays current global problems stand as burning challenges of multi-level governance and reflect the importance of advanced cooperation of the states. Moreover the expansion of international human rights revealed the necessity of modification of international legal methods of common values security, shifting them on the global level. In these conditions modern international public law vividly evolved and is apt to reconfiguration including altering positions from cooperation to constitutionalization. Modifying relations among the international public authorities and the global activity of modern international actors (individuals, transnational companies and business organizations, international non-governmental organizations, etc.) pointed out the changes in the international …

Global Poverty And The Right To Development In International Law, Patrick Macklem

Patrick Macklem

This Article advances an account of the right to development as a legal instrument that holds the international legal order accountable for its role in the production and reproduction of global poverty. It first distinguishes moral conceptions of human rights, as instruments that protect universal features of humanity, from legal conceptions, which tie their existence to their specification in international instruments promulgated in compliance with international legal norms governing the creation of legal rights and obligations. Despite textual ambiguities in the various instruments in which it finds expression, the right to development vests in individuals and communities who have yet …

Regulating The Corporate Tap: Applying Global Administrative Law Principles To Achieve The Human Right To Water, Kristin L. Retherford

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Globalization And Law: Law Beyond The State, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

The chapter provides an introduction into law and globalization for sociolegal studies. Instead of treating globalization as an external factor that impacts the law, globalization and law are here viewed as intertwined. I suggest that three types of globalization should be distinguished—globalization as empirical phenomenon, globalization as theory, and globalization as ideology. I go on to discuss one central theme of globalization, namely in what way society, and therefore law, move beyond the state. This is done along the three classical elements of the state—territory, population/citizenship, and government. The role of all of these elements is shifting, suggesting we need …

International Human Rights Law And Social Movements: States' Resistance And Civil Society's Insistence, Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Claire Whitlinger, Alwyn Lim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This review examines recent scholarship on the rise of international human rights law and proposes that social movements have played critical roles both in elevating the standards of human rights in international law and in leveraging these standards into better local practices. Institutionalization of universal human rights principles began in the immediate post–World War II period, in which civil society actors worked with powerful states to establish human rights as a key guiding principle of the international community and to ensure the actors' continuing participation in international human rights institutions. The subsequent decades saw various hurdles arise in international politics, …

Disposable Workers: Applying A Human Rights Framework To Analyze Duties Owed To Seriously Injured Or Ill Migrants, Lori A. Nessel

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The practice of medical repatriation, or the extrajudicial deportation of seriously ill immigrants directly by hospitals, was largely unknown and under-theorized until recently. In the past few years, a number of scholars have focused on the legal and ethical issues raised by this practice. However, medical repatriation has most often been analyzed in isolation as an example of an anomalous unlawful or unethical action undertaken by hospitals, rather than as a predictable, if horrifying, extension of a legal regime that treats migrant labor as disposable. In contrast, this Article contextualizes the private deportation of migrant workers by hospitals within broader …

Edzia Carvalho On Human Rights In The Global Political Economy: Critical Processes. By Tony Evans. Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011. 232pp., Edzia Carvalho

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Human Rights in the Global Political Economy: Critical Processes. By Tony Evans. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011. 232pp.

Hannah Arendt In A Global Age: Political Evil And International Theory, Matthew S. Weinert

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory. By Patrick Hayden. New York: Routledge, 2009. 145 pp.

The Global Market And Human Rights: Trading Away The Human Rights Principle, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

No abstract provided.

Trade And Justice: Linking The Trade Linkage Debates, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

No abstract provided.

Globalization And The Theory Of International Law, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

The dominant modern account of the social basis of international law has been the "society of states" model. In this view, to the extent that international law constructs an ordered social space (a claim which has been contested since Hobbes if not before), it is a social space in which states are the actors. This view has had a profound effect on international law. For example, the doctrine of state responsibility classically understands international harms to individuals within a framework of harm to a state's rights. Normatively, to the extent justice is considered an operational concept in international law, it …

Introduction -- The Trade Linkage Phenomenon: Pointing The Way To The Trade Law And Global Social Policy Of The 21st Century, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

No abstract provided.

Corporate Obligations Under The Human Right To Water, Jernej Letnar Cernic

Jernej Letnar Černič

Almost a billion people do not have access to clean and safe water. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is increasingly being considered a fundamental human right. Corporations play an important role in the realization of the right to water. For example, they can become violators of the right to water where their activities deny access to clean and safe water or where water prices increase without warning. Corporations can have a positive or negative impact on the human rights of individuals, wider communities and indigenous peoples. This paper argues that corporations bear a certain responsibility for the realization …

Multiculturalism And The Struggle Of National Normative Challenges, Marc Alexander C. Gionet

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Globalization has not translated into a set of universal monolithic values. As populations relocate for various reasons, increasingly less effort is required not only to stay connected, but to remain within the home community via satellite television, radio, telecommunications, and locally concentrated diaspora. Henryk M. Broder has described such a phenomenon as the development of “ parallel societies, ” which result from immigrants’ failure or lack of interest in integrating into a host community. The question that many commentators have attempted to answer is: does the development of parallel societies, or even additional cultural diversity, represent a threat or a …

The Right To Food And Buyer Power, Aravind Ganesh

Aravind Ganesh

Modern global food supply chains are characterised by extreme levels of concentration in the middle of those chains. This paper argues that such concentration leads to excessive buyer power, which harms the consumers and food producers at the ends of the supply chains. This paper argues that the harms suffered by farmers are serious enough as to constitute violations of the international human right to food as it is expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Political Rights, and further argues that world competition law regimes cannot ignore these human rights …

Barb Rieffer-Flanagan On Muslims In Global Politics: Identities, Interests, And Human Rights. By Mahmood Monshipouri. Philadelphia: University Of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 325pp., Barb Rieffer-Flanagan

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Muslims in Global Politics: Identities, Interests, and Human Rights. By Mahmood Monshipouri. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 325pp.

Confronting The Past: Democratic Rhetoric Or Socially Necessary?, Rachel Oster

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In the current globalized international system, politics, economics, and societal issues are the concern of not only the state but of the world as a whole. It is increasingly apparent that participation in the global community requires states to implement, at minimum, conventional democracy within which individual rights are recognized and protected. Yet for much of the developing world, democratic regimes are partially contested given that many states were historically controlled by non-democratic, often militant regimes that offered security to citizens during times of economic crises.

Human Rights And The Global Economy: The Centrality Of Economic And Social Rights, Marley S. Weiss

Maryland Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.