Law Commons^™

The Inter-American System Of Human Rights: Challenges For The Future, Claudio Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Inter-American system is a combination of human rights norms and supervisory institutions within the Americas. The applicable rules consist primarily of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man ("American Declaration") and the American Convention on Human Rights ("American Convention"). The institutions involved are the organs responsible for supervising compliance with the established rules: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ("the Commission") and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ("the Court"). The system performs supervisory functions basically through country reports adopted by the Commission which describe the overall human rights situation in a country and decisions in …

The International Migration And Recruitment Of Nurses: Human Rights And Global Justice, Lawrence O. Gostin

O'Neill Institute Papers

The international migration of health workers – physicians, nurses, midwives, and pharmacists – leaves the world’s poorest countries with severe human resource shortages, seriously jeopardizing the achievement of the U.N. health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Advocates for global health call active recruitment in low-income countries a crime. Despite the pronounced international concern, there is little research and few solutions. This commentary focuses on the international recruitment of internationally educated nurses (IENs) from the perspective of human rights and global justice. It explains the complex reasons for nurse shortages in rich and poor countries; the duties of source and host countries; …

The Course Of True Human Rights Progress Never Did Run Smooth, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

As the United States moves toward the inauguration in January 2009 of a new President, greater attention is paid to what the country might do to restore and reinforce its traditional role as a leader in the promotion of human rights. This essay warns against any assumption that innovation alone will assure greater enforcement of rights; its points of reference are not only the current administration, but also one long past, that of President John F. Kennedy. Rather than jump to embrace new, global concepts like responsibility to protect, therefore, it argues for careful pursuit of local change. It then …

The 2008 Ruggie Report: A Framework For Business And Human Rights, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In June 2008, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, John Ruggie, submitted the final report of his initial three-year mandate. The Report, titled Protect, Respect and Remedy: A Framework for Business and Human Rights, provides a governance-based set of findings and recommendations on the issue of business and human rights. This essay provides a concise description and brief analysis of the Report.

Like A Virgin? Virginity Testing As Hiv/Aids Prevention: Human Rights Universalism And Cultural Relativism Revisited, Erika George

International & Comparative Law Colloquium Papers

No abstract provided.

Female Genital Mutilation: Exploring Strategies For Ending Ritualized Torture; Shaming, Blaming, And Utilizing The Convention Against Torture, Patricia A. Broussard

Journal Publications

The intent of this article is to graphically describe female genital mutilation (FGM); discuss the background of FGM and its health, psychological, and social implications; propose some workable solutions to ending FGM; and raise the level of awareness of the pain and suffering of women around the world. In part, this article will discuss invoking the Convention against Torture against those nations unwilling to end this horrific practice. There is also a caveat to this article: the author acknowledges that discussing solutions to the practice of FGM is not a simplistic and straight-forward endeavor. Solutions to ending FGM are as …

Global Civil Culture: Crafting Universal Structures Of Feeling, Michael Galchinsky

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Elizabeth Wicks' Human Rights And Healthcare, Barbara A. Noah

Faculty Scholarship

The Author reviews the book Human Rights and Healthcare, by Elizabeth Wicks and published by Hart Publishing, 2007. Although the book focuses mainly on rights within the United Kingdom, those familiar with healthcare and bioethics issues within the United States or elsewhere will find it an extremely useful comparative resource.

Human Rights In The United States Human Rights In The United States: A Special Issue Celebrating The 10th Anniversary Of The Human Rights Institute At Columbia Law School: Foreword, Sarah Cleveland, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Human Rights Institute (HRI) at Columbia Law School. Appropriately, it also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational instrument of the modern international human rights regime. When HRI was founded in 1998, it was established as a crossroads for human rights at Columbia, which would bridge theory and practice, human rights and constitutional rights, and law and other disciplines. From its inception, HRI has been a partner with the university-wide Center for the Study of Human Rights, which was established twenty years earlier …

The Right Of Public Participation In The Law-Making Process And The Role Of The Legislature In The Promotion Of This Right, Karen Czapanskiy, Rashida Manjoo

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, the South African Constitutional Court found a constitutional right to participate in the legislative process in the case of Doctors for Life, Case CCT 12/05 (decided 17 August 2006). In this article, we argue that, first, legislation is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input, and, second, citizenship is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input. Doctors for Life puts South Africa on the road to improving both legislation and citizenship. In the United States, this road is largely untraveled. While rejecting traditional representative democracy as an adequate …

U.S. Immigration Policy: Contract Or Human Rights Law?, Victor C. Romero

Journal Articles

The current immigration debate often reflects a tension between affirming the individual rights of migrants against the power of a nation to control its borders. An examination of U.S. Supreme Court precedent reveals that, from our earliest immigration history to the present time, our immigration policy has functioned more like contract law than human rights law, with the Court deferring to the power of Congress to define the terms of that contract at the expense of the immigrant's freedom.

Pluralism In Ghana: The Perils And Promise Of Parallel Law, Johanna E. Bond

Scholarly Articles

Many states have recognized that minority groups require accommodation to protect them from domination by the majority. Some states have responded by implementing accommodationist policies that cede jurisdiction over certain matters, such as family law, to the minority group. Many multicultural theorists have embraced accommodation as the best way to protect minority groups from oppression by the state. A number of feminists, however, have raised concerns that these accommodationist policies actually increase the vulnerability of women within those accommodated minority communities. In her book Multicultural Jurisdictions, Ayelet Shachar has made a valuable contribution to the theoretical debates surrounding state accommodation …

Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects Of Humanitarian Intervention, Jide Nzelibe

Faculty Working Papers

Invoking memories and imagery from the Holocaust and other German atrocities during World War II, many contemporary commentators and politicians believe that the international community has an affirmative obligation to deter and incapacitate perpetrators of humanitarian atrocities. Today, the received wisdom is that a legalistic approach, which combines humanitarian interventions with international criminal prosecutions targeting perpetrators, will help realize the post-World War II vision of making atrocities a crime of the past. This Article argues, in contrast, that humanitarian interventions are often likely to create unintended, and sometimes perverse, incentives among both the victims and perpetrators of atrocities. The problem …

Human Rights, Social Justice And State Law: A Manual For Creative Lawyering, Program On Human Rights And The Global Economy, National Economic And Social Rights Initiative (Nesri), Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

This manual is written to help lawyers consider the role of transnational law as an interpretive tool in state constitutional and other state law litigation to protect economic and social rights.9 In Chapter I, the manual provides an overview of the relationship between state law and transnational law. In Chapter II, the manual covers key economic and social rights and provides examples of how courts have found those rights to be justiciable in a range of contexts. The principal economic and social rights discussed in Chapter II are:

• The right to health
• The right to housing
• The right to food …

Home State Obligations For The Prevention And Remediation Of Transnational Harm: Canada, Global Mining And Local Communities, Sara Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Canadian mining companies, stock exchanges, mining professionals, and the Canadian government itself, play a significant role in global mining. This unpublished PhD dissertation, completed in January 2008, explores whether Canada has a legal obligation to regulate to prevent and remedy human rights and environmental harm associated with Canadian mining companies operating abroad. Canada and global mining serve as a case study to explore the broader question of whether home states have obligations under international environmental and human rights law. The key claims examined in this dissertation are as follows. First, the exercise of unilateral home state jurisdiction over transnational corporate …

Book Review, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

This book brings together two previously separate aspects of Michael J. Perry’s thoughtful and pioneering scholarship dealing with the proper relation of morality (especially religious morality) to law and human rights and the role of courts in protecting human rights.

Humanity Law: A New Interpretive Lens On The International Sphere, Ruti Teitel

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Rights Over Borders: Transnational Constitutionalism And Guantanamo Bay, David Cole

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay argues that the most profound implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush may lie not in what it says about the place of law in the war on terror, but in what it reflects about the Supreme Court’s altered conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality, and rights in the globalized world.

Boumediene was groundbreaking in at least three respects. For the first time in its history, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law enacted by Congress and signed by the president on an issue of military policy in a time of armed conflict. Also for the first …

I Might Need A Good Lawyer, Could Be Your Funeral, My Trial: Global Clinical Legal Education And The Right To Counsel In Civil Commitment Cases, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The quality of counsel assigned to represent individuals facing involuntary civil commitment to psychiatric hospitals is, in most American jurisdictions, mediocre or worse. In many other nations, it is non-existent, or so minimal as to offer only the illusion of legal safeguards. (Perhaps) remarkably, there has been virtually no mention of this latter scandal in the legal literature. Also, there has been little attention paid to this development by the clinical education movement (domestically and globally).

A variety of interrelated factors, however, may shed some light on this scandal, and may, encouragingly, lead to social change in the future:

- …

Corporate Aiding And Abetting Of Human Rights Violations: Confusion In The Courts, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

This article explores whether transnational corporations or their executives can be held criminally or civilly liable for aiding and abetting human rights violations committed by governments, militaries or other actors in foreign countries where they do business. The article particularly examines the mens rea element under international law: whether the aider or abettor must knowingly—or instead purposefully—assist the principal to commit a crime. At present, the principal concern of major corporations about liability for aiding and abetting is the risk of being held liable in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute. But whatever happens with ongoing ATS litigation, the …

The Nobel Effect: Nobel Peace Prize Laureates As International Norm Entrepreneurs, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

For the first time in scholarly literature, this article traces the history of modern international law from the perspective of the constructivist theory of international relations. Constructivism is one of the leadings schools of thought in international relations today. This theory posits that state preferences emerge from social construction and that state interests are evolving rather than fixed. Constructivism further argues that international norms have a life cycle composed of three stages: norm emergence, norm acceptance (or norm cascades), and norm internalization. As such, constructivism treats international law as a dynamic process in which norm entrepreneurs interact with state actors …

Arbitrating Human Rights, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Corporate liability for human rights abuses is one of the most important developments in current international law and practice. With the advent of human rights litigation against corporations, there is now the prospect of a deep-pocket defendant that is complicit in grave human rights abuses, subject to personal jurisdiction, and not immune from suit. Indeed, if a corporation is accused of "aiding and abetting" human rights abuses, this is all but a concession that the corporate actor is not the principal wrong-doer. It is of course possible that this controversial trend toward corporate responsibility may reflect a genuine concern about …

Sex And Globalization, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

UF Law Faculty Publications

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 …

Toward A Vibrant Peruvian Middle Class: Effects Of The Peru-United States Free Trade Agreement On Labor Rights, Biodiversity, And Indigenous Populations, Stephen J. Powell, Paola A. Chavarro

UF Law Faculty Publications

Past research confirms that trade and human rights are inextricably linked by trade's effects on poverty, labor, women, indigenous populations, health, and the environment. We identified surprisingly direct linkages between these two vital policies in WTO agreements as well as that regional trade agreements add positive indirect contributions by to rules-based governance through their emphasis on transparency, accountability, and due process by governments, as well as timeliness, inclusive record keeping, and impartiality in the administrative decisional process. The present research examines a particular country and a single trade agreement, Peru and the trade agreement between Peru and the United States. …

The Legacy Of The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial To American Bioethics And Human Rights, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In this lecture I argue that modern bioethics was born at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, a health law trial that produced one of the first major human rights documents: the Nuremberg Code. Accepting this conclusion has significant consequences for contemporary American bioethics generally, and specifically in the context of our continuing global war on terror in which the United States uses physicians to help in interrogations, torture, and force-feeding hunger strikers.

The primary force shaping the agenda, development, and current state of American bioethics has not been either medicine or philosophy, but law, best described as health law. Like bioethics, …