Law Commons^™

Post-Conflict Reconciliation In Ukraine, Elena Baylis

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Reconciliation mechanisms should be a core component of transitional justice in Ukraine. The nature of this conflict as a war justified by claims about history, identity, and legitimacy suggests that there will be a need for post-war reconciliation initiatives. Such reconciliation measures would be intended to enable Ukraine’s Russian, Ukrainian, and other communities to live together constructively within the same state. The goals of social reconciliation also converge with Ukraine’s long-term, political aims vis-à-vis both Russia and the European Union. This paper addresses three types of reconciliation measures that are important for post-conflict Ukraine. Instrumental mechanisms to engage post-conflict social …

Prohibiting Slavery & The Slave Trade, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

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Slavery and the slave trade stubbornly persist in our time, but they receive insufficient attention in international human rights law. Even when courts adjudicate slavery violations, they often fail to characterize slave trade conduct that nearly always precedes slavery. Courts also characterize acts that meet the definition of slavery or the slave trade only as other human rights harms, such as forced labor or human trafficking. This failure to accurately characterize violations also as slavery and the slave trade perpetuates impunity and denies victims full expressive justice. This Article argues for reviving international human rights law’s prohibitions of slavery and …

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

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Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

The State Of The City And The Future Of Human Rights: A Review Of Global Urban Justice, Johanna Kalb

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No abstract provided.

You Say Embargo, I Say Bloqueo - A Policy Recommendation For Promoting Foreign Direct Investment And Safeguarding Human Rights In Cuba, Marcia Narine Weldon

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The United States is the only major industrialized nation that restricts trade with Cuba. Although President Obama issued several executive orders that have facilitated limited trade (and President Trump has scaled some back), an embargo remains in place, and by law, Congress cannot lift it until, among other things, the Cuban government commits to democratization and human rights reform. Unfortunately, the Cuban and U.S. governments fundamentally disagree on the definition of "human rights, " and neither side has shown a willingness to compromise. Meanwhile, although some US. investors clamor to join their European and Canadian counterparts in expanding operations in …

Evaluating International State Constitutionalism, Johanna Kalb

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No abstract provided.

Corporate Social Responsibility Versus Business And Human Rights: Bridging The Gap Between Responsibility And Accountability, Anita Ramasastry

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This article explores the evolution of business and human rights (BHR) from a lawyer’s perspective and examines how it is contextually and conceptually different from corporate social responsibility (CSR) in its aims and ambitions. While CSR emphasizes responsible behavior, BHR focuses on a more delineated commitment in the area of human rights. BHR is, in part, a response to CSR and its perceived failure. This has led to a gap with two disciplines or strands of discourse that are diverging rather than converging. This article explores how the quest for accountability shapes a very different narrative for BHR, which takes …

Disclosing Disclosure's Defects: Addressing Corporate Irresponsibility For Human Rights Impacts, Marcia Narine

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Although many people believe that the role of business is to maximize shareholder value, corporate executives and board members can no longer ignore their companies' human rights impacts on other stakeholders. Over the past four years, the role and responsibility of non-state actors such as multinationals has come under increased scrutiny. In 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed the "UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights," which outline the State duty to protect human rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and both the State and corporations' duties to provide remedies to parties. The Guiding …

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

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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 …

Economic Migration Gone Wrong: Trafficking In Persons Through The Lens Of Gender, Labor, And Globalization, Dana Raigrodski

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This Article argues for an economic analysis of human trafficking which primarily looks at globalization, trade liberalization, and labor migration as the core areas that need to be explored to advance the prevention of human trafficking.

Part I briefly examines the prevailing criminal law enforcement framework regarding human trafficking—both at the international level and in the United States—which stems out of viewing human trafficking as primarily a threat to global security and an underground industry of transnational criminal enterprises. It argues that while criminalization no doubt helped bring much needed attention (and resources) to human trafficking, the narrow criminal law …

From Kansas To The Congo: Why Naming And Shaming Corporations Through The Dodd-Frank Act's Corporate Governance Disclosure Won't Solve A Human Rights Crisis, Marcia Narine

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No abstract provided.

Victory Without Success? – The Guantanamo Litigation, Permanent Preventive Detention, And Resisting Injustice, Jules Lobel

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When the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) brought the first habeas cases challenging the Executive’s right to detain prisoners in a law free zone at Guantanamo in 2002, almost no legal commentator gave the plaintiffs much chance of succeeding. Yet, two years later in 2004, after losing in both the District Court and Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush handed CCR a resounding victory. Four years later, the Supreme Court again ruled in CCR’s favor in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that the detainees had a constitutional right to habeas and declaring the Congressional …

Theater Of International Justice, Jessie Allen

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In this essay I defend international human rights tribunals against the charge that they are not “real” courts (with sovereign force behind them) by considering the proceedings in these courts as a kind of theatrical performance. Looking at human rights courts as theater might at first seem to validate the view that they produce only an illusory “show” of justice. To the contrary, I argue that self-consciously theatrical performances are what give these courts the potential to enact real justice. I do not mean only that human rights tribunals’ dramatic public hearings make injustice visible and bring together a community …

The Challenge Of Domestic Implementation Of International Human Rights Law In The Cotton Field Case, Caroline Bettinger-López

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No abstract provided.

China’S ‘Attitude’ Toward Human Rights: Reading Hungdah Chiu In The Era Of The Iraq War, Dongsheng Zang

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China observers in the United States generally share two observations on China today: that China has made impressive progress in economic development in the past three decades, and that China has maintained a poor human rights record since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. On the economic front, China overtook Japan and became the second largest economy in 2010. In a joint study with China's Development Research Center of the State Council, the World Bank recently predicted that even if the Chinese economy grows a third as slowly in the future, it will outstrip the United States in terms of overall GDP …

Notes In Defense Of The Iraq Constitution, Haider Ala Hamoudi

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This paper is a defense of sorts of the Iraqi constitution, arguing that the language used in it was wisely designed to allow some level of flexibility, such that highly divided political forces could find incremental solutions to the deep rooted sources of division that have plagued Iraqi society since its inception. That Iraq has found itself in such dreadful political circumstances since constitutional ratification is therefore not a function of the open ended constitutional bargain, but rather of the failure of Iraqi legal and political elites to make use of the space that the constitution provided them to develop …

Human Rights Treaties In State Courts: The International Prospects Of State Constitutionalism After Medellin, Johanna Kalb

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No abstract provided.

The Persistence Of Dualism In Human Rights Treaty Implementation, Johanna Kalb

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No abstract provided.

The Human Rights Of Non-Citizens. By David Weissbrodt. (Book Review), Caroline Bettinger-López, Bassina Farbenblum

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No abstract provided.

Dynamic Federalism In Human Rights Treaty Implementation, Johanna Kalb

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In response to the growing academic and political movement that opposes the direct incorporation of treaties into domestic federal law, numerous scholars have proposed that states take on an increased role in the domestic interpretation and implementation of international human rights treaties. The focus of this scholarship to date has been to locate doctrinal gaps where state legislatures and courts may act without intruding in areas of traditionally federal jurisdiction. Thus far, however, little effort has been directed towards modeling an affirmative obligation for state participation in treaty implementation, despite the fact that state action is arguably required, both pragmatically …

Litigating Dignity: A Human Rights Framework, Johanna Kalb

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No abstract provided.

A Closer Look At Law: Human Rights As Multi-Level Sites Of Struggles Over Multi-Dimensional Equality, Susanne Baer

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In many societies, deep conflicts arise around religious matters, and around equality. Often, religious collectives demand the right to self-determination of issues considered - by them - to be their own, and these demands collide with individual rights to, again, religious freedom. These are thus conflicts of religion v. religion. Then, collective religious freedom tends to become an obligation for all those who are defined as belonging to the collective, which carries the problem that mostly elites define its meaning and they silence dissent. Usually, such obligations are also unequal relating to gender, with different regimes for women and for …

Treaties As Law And The Rule Of Law: The Judicial Power To Compel Domestic Treaty Implementation, William M. Carter Jr.

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The Supremacy Clause makes the Constitution, federal statutes, and ratified treaties part of the "supreme law of the land." Despite the textual and historical clarity of the Supremacy Clause, some courts and commentators have suggested that the "non-self-executing treaty doctrine" means that ratified treaties must await implementing legislation before they become domestic law. The non-self-executing treaty doctrine has in particular been used as a shield to claims under international human rights treaties.

This Article does not seek to provide another critique of the non-self-executing treaty doctrine in the abstract. Rather, I suggest that a determination that a treaty is non-self-executing …

Secondary Human Rights Law, Monica Hakimi

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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 …

Global Health And Human Rights Imperative, Patricia C. Kuszler

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Open any magazine, click on a television news channel, or surf the net and you are likely to find global health highlighted as one of the foremost challenges of new millennium. First, this article will consider the meaning and measures of global health and detail the path to improved health and development prescribed by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Second, it will trace the development of international human rights law as it relates to health. Third, it demonstrate how human rights and health, long traversing parallel routes, are in fact converging in the 21st Century quest for global health–a …

Minority Rights, Minority Wrongs, Elena Baylis

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Many of the new democracies established in the last twenty years are severely ethnically divided, with numerous minority groups, languages, and religions. As part of the process of democratization, there has also been an explosion of “national human rights institutions,” that is, independent government agencies whose purpose is to promote enforcement of human rights. But despite the significance of minority concerns to the stability and success of these new democracies, and despite the relevance of minority rights to the mandates of national human rights institutions, a surprisingly limited number of national human rights institutions have directed programs and resources to …

A Positive Right To Protection For Children, Tamar Ezer

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Concepts that are useful in other areas of human rights break down in the context of children. Because children are dependent on adults for their development, they are an anomaly in the liberal legal order, which views negative rights as implying fully rational, autonomous individuals that can exercise free choice. This Article argues for a positive right to protection for children, rooted in dignity, by probing the problematic nature of the positive/negative rights duality and exploring alternate legal approaches to protecting children 's rights in both international and comparative law. The adoption of positive rights for children would help assure …

Beyond Rights: Legal Process And Ethnic Conflicts, Elena Baylis

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Unresolved ethnic conflicts threaten the stability and the very existence of multi-ethnic states. Ethnically divided states have struggled to build safeguards against such disputes into their political and legal systems by establishing federal political structures, designing elections to encourage participation, and entering complex power-sharing arrangements, but such measures cannot be expected to prevent all conflict. Human rights and minority rights guarantees likewise have proven unable to accommodate all relevant groups and interests. Accordingly, multi-ethnic states facing persistent ethnic conflicts need to develop effective dispute resolution systems for resolving those conflicts as they arise. This presents an important question: what kinds …

The Mote In Thy Brother’S Eye: A Review Of Human Rights As Politics And Idolatry, William M. Carter Jr.

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Michael Ignatieffs provocatively titled collection of essays, Human Rights As Politics and Idolatry [hereinafter Human Rights], is a careful examination of the theoretical underpinnings and contradictions in the area of human rights. At bottom, both of his primary essays, Human Rights As Politics and Human Rights As Idolatry, make a claim that is perhaps contrary to the instincts of human rights thinkers and activists: namely, that international human rights can best be philosophically justified and effectively applied to the extent that they strive for minimal ism. Human rights activists generally argue for the opposite conclusion: that international human rights be …

Women's International Tribunal On Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, Christine M. Chinkin

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From December 8 to 12,2000, a peoples' tribunal, the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal 2000, sat in Tokyo, Japan. It was established to consider the criminal liability of leading high-ranking Japanese military and political officials and the separate responsibility of the state of Japan for rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity arising out of Japanese military activity in the Asia Pacific region in the 1930s and 1940s.

The immediate background to the tribunal's establishment was a series of events commencing in 1988 when the women's movement in the Republic of Korea began to learn of the research of …