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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Human Rights Law
United Nations Against Slavery: Unravelling Concepts, Institutions And Obligations, Vladislava Stoyanova
United Nations Against Slavery: Unravelling Concepts, Institutions And Obligations, Vladislava Stoyanova
Michigan Journal of International Law
The article starts with a section containing a historical description (Part I). The turn to broader historical accounts is apposite since the engagement of international law with slavery, servitude, and forced labor predates the emergence of international human rights law. It is also important to clarify whether there is any continuity between these earlier engagements of international law and Article 8 of the ICCPR. When it comes to slavery, it is important to consider the practices to which this label was attached and how this still influences the contemporary understanding of the term. Notably, the terminological fragmentation between slavery and …
After Atrocity: Optimizing Un Action Toward Accountability For Human Rights Abuses, Steven R. Ratner
After Atrocity: Optimizing Un Action Toward Accountability For Human Rights Abuses, Steven R. Ratner
Michigan Journal of International Law
It is a great honor for me to be here to deliver the John Humphrey Lecture. Humphrey led one of those lives within the UN that shaped what the organization has become today—as one of the first generation of UN civil servants, he was to human rights what Ralph Bunche was to peacekeeping, or Brian Urquhart to UN mediation. To read his diaries, so beautifully edited by John Hobbins, is to see a world that has in many ways vanished, a nearly entirely male club, mostly of Westerners, that hammered out new treaties and mechanisms over fine wine and cigars …
Managing The ‘Republic Of Ngos’: Accountability And Legitimation Problems Facing The U.N. Cluster System, J.Benton Heath
Managing The ‘Republic Of Ngos’: Accountability And Legitimation Problems Facing The U.N. Cluster System, J.Benton Heath
J.Benton Heath
This Article identifies and critically assesses the crucial but troubled system for the coordination of international humanitarian assistance (the U.N. “Cluster Approach”). Regardless of whether the Cluster Approach actually helps in disaster response, it exercises substantial power over affected populations by assigning competences and leadership roles. The built-in mechanisms for controlling this power are unworkable, as they ultimately fail to resolve the tension between humanitarian organizations’ autonomy and the need for coordination. This Article identifies the emergence of an alternative model of accountability, based on mutual monitoring and “peer review.” Drawing on theories of network governance and experimentalism, this Article …
Toward A Legal Theory On The Responsibility To Protect, Monica Hakimi
Toward A Legal Theory On The Responsibility To Protect, Monica Hakimi
Articles
Over the past several decades, the central focus of international law has shifted from protecting only sovereign states to protecting individuals. Still, the worst imaginable human rights violations—genocides, ethnic cleansings, crimes against humanity, and systemic war crimes—occur with alarming frequency. And the international response is often slow or ineffectual. The most recent development for addressing this problem is the “responsibility to protect,” an idea that has received so much attention that it now goes simply by R2P. Almost all heads of state have endorsed R2P. The U.N. Secretary General has made R2P a top priority and issued multiple reports on …
An Emerging Norm - Determining The Meaning And Legal Status Of The Responsibility To Protect, Jonah Eaton
An Emerging Norm - Determining The Meaning And Legal Status Of The Responsibility To Protect, Jonah Eaton
Michigan Journal of International Law
The responsibility to protect, from its recent nativity in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), is the latest round in an old debate pitting the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of states against allowing such intervention to prevent gross and systematic violations of human rights. Advocates for the concept see it as an important new commitment by the international community, injecting new meaning into the tragically threadbare promise to never again allow mass atrocities to occur unchallenged. ICISS offered the concept of responsibility to protect as a new way to confront …
Identifying And Enforcing Back-End Electoral Rights In International Human Rights Law, Katherine A. Wagner
Identifying And Enforcing Back-End Electoral Rights In International Human Rights Law, Katherine A. Wagner
Michigan Journal of International Law
From Kenya to Afghanistan, Ukraine, the United States, Mexico, and Iran, no region or form of government has been immune from the unsettling effects of a contested election. The story is familiar, and, these days, hardly surprising: a state holds elections, losing candidates and their supporters claim fraud, people take to the streets, diplomats and heads of state equivocate, and everyone waits for the observers' reports. It is the last chapter of this story-the resolution-that remains unfamiliar and still holds the potential to surprise. The increasing focus on and importance of the resolution of contested elections, that resolution's link to …
Identity, Effectiveness, And Newness In Transjudicialism's Coming Of Age, Mark Toufayan
Identity, Effectiveness, And Newness In Transjudicialism's Coming Of Age, Mark Toufayan
Michigan Journal of International Law
This Article attempts to expose and problematize the ideological connections and normative commitments between these theoretical explanations of effectiveness and the pragmatic process-oriented proposals made in the 1990s when the United Nations was searching for ways to renew the discipline of international human rights law while avoiding the dual risks of politicization and Third World normative fragmentation. The liberal theory of effective supranational adjudication was the culmination of decade-long efforts by American liberal internationalists to provide a theoretical basis for and programmatic proposals towards achieving a more "effective" international human rights regime. Their theory aims at structuring the interface between …
Secondary Human Rights Law, Monica Hakimi
Secondary Human Rights Law, Monica Hakimi
Articles
In recent years, the United States has appeared before four different treaty bodies to defend its human rights record. The process is part of the human rights enforcement structure: each of the major universal treaties has an expert body that reviews and comments on compliance reports that states must periodically submit. What's striking about the treaty bodies' dialogues with the United States is not that they criticized it or disagreed with it on the content of certain substantive rules. (That was all expected.) It's the extent to which the two sides talked past each other. Each presumed a different set …
The Un: A Situation Report, Benjamin Zawacki
The Un: A Situation Report, Benjamin Zawacki
ExpressO
The UN: A Situation Report is a review of two recent books on the past, present, and future of the UN; in short, of its relevance in a changing and uni-polar world at the end of Kofi Annan’s two terms as Secretary-General. The books’ focus is both on the organization’s successes and failures, and its efforts at self-reform in the face of near-constant criticism. They are reviewed as individually divergent in quality but as a formidable “situation report” when read in tandem. Paul Kennedy’s The Parliament of Man, save for its first of three parts, is generally criticized for its …
Humanitarian Inviolability In Crisis: The Meaning Of Impartiality And Neutrality For U.N. And Ngo Agencies Following The 2003-2004 Afghanistan And Iraq Conflicts, Kenneth Anderson
Humanitarian Inviolability In Crisis: The Meaning Of Impartiality And Neutrality For U.N. And Ngo Agencies Following The 2003-2004 Afghanistan And Iraq Conflicts, Kenneth Anderson
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
Introduction. Humanitarian inviolability is the ability of humanitarian relief agencies, whether official agencies such as the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or private organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to act in situations of extreme human need and suffering, particularly in circumstances of armed conflict, with the assurance that their personnel, their property, and their activities will not be made the object of attack. It is a concept that is at the core of all humanitarian relief work, especially during war, when the cooperation of the belligerent parties is essential …
The Role Of The Organization Of African Unity (Oau) In Regional Conflict Resolution And Dispute Settlement, Peter Mweti Munya
The Role Of The Organization Of African Unity (Oau) In Regional Conflict Resolution And Dispute Settlement, Peter Mweti Munya
LLM Theses and Essays
The emergence of an artificially constructed modern state with internal contradictions, sophisticated state apparatus, and weaponry, coupled with external forces has made Africa one of the most unstable regions in the world, and peace prospects a daunting task. The post-cold war era punctuated by forces of economic liberalization and dominance of the Breton Woods institutions in the economic management of the developing countries has not only accelerated the economic marginalization of Africa placing her at the fringes of the global economy but also wrought insecurity in their wake. This post-cold war and serves to emphasize the need for the OAU …
Setting A New Agenda For U.N. Human Rights Activities, Hurst Hannum
Setting A New Agenda For U.N. Human Rights Activities, Hurst Hannum
Michigan Journal of International Law
Review of The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal (Philip Alston ed.)
Measuring Freedom? The Undp Human Freedom Index, Lisa J. Bernt
Measuring Freedom? The Undp Human Freedom Index, Lisa J. Bernt
Michigan Journal of International Law
Part I of this Note describes and compares the Humana index and the UNDP's Human Freedom Index. Part II surveys some of the criticism of the Human Freedom Index since its publication in May 1991, and identifies fundamental problems with the manner in which the Human Freedom Index was prepared and presented. This Note concludes with recommendations for refining and presenting such an index in future years.