Law Commons^™

Illusion Of Justice: Human Rights Abuses In Us Terrorism Prosecutions, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

Terrorism entails horrifying acts, often resulting in terrible losses of human life. Governments have a duty under international human rights law to take reasonable measures to protect people within their jurisdictions from acts of violence. When crimes are committed, governments also have a duty to carry out impartial investigations, to identify those responsible, and to prosecute suspects before independent courts. These obligations require ensuring fairness and due process in investigations and prosecutions, as well as humane treatment of those in custody.

International Courts As Agents Of Legal Change: Evidence From Lgbt Rights In Europe, Laurence R. Helfer, Erik Voeten

Faculty Scholarship

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? The authors develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. The authors examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new dataset that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. The …

Monitoring, Reporting, And Fact-Finding: Does The Human Rights Council Report On Human Rights In North Korea Provide A Template For The Sri Lankan Investigation?, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

2014 has already heralded two significant developments related to monitoring, reporting, and fact-finding (MRF) mechanisms for collecting information on alleged international law violations. First, the Human Rights Council (HRC) published their “Report of the detailed findings of the commission of inquiry on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in February. This report may provide a roadmap for the second important development, the HRC’s decision in March to investigate alleged international law violations during the final phase of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka. More broadly, both these efforts offer lessons for any group or body participating in …

Internet Content Governance And Human Rights, Nicola Lucchi

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The Internet has become an essential tool for various life-related purposes, and it is an instrument necessary for the proper enjoyment of a series of rights-including the right to access knowledge and information and the right to communicate. This new paradigm also implies that all people should have access to the Internet at affordable conditions, and any restrictions should be strictly limited and proportionate. As a consequence, any regulatory and policy measures that affect the Internet and the content that flows over it should be consistent with basic rights and liberties of human beings. This Article intends to explore the …

Book Review, David R. Boyd, The Right To A Healthy Environment, Revitalizing Canada's Constitution, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Boyd’s new book, The Right to a Healthy Environment, attempts to prove that Canadians would benefit if they amended their constitution to recognize the right to a healthy environment. Throughout this work, he emphasizes the general benefits of recognizing environmental rights as human rights and the positive impact recognizing these rights in the Canadian constitution would have on the lives of Canadian citizens. He examines the gradual domestic emergence of environmental rights both in Canadian law and from a global perspective. By including both viewpoints, Boyd attempts to identify the complexities and intricate questions that arise regarding various environmental issues …

The Alien Tort Statute Of 1789 And International Human Rights Violations: Kiobel V. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Paula Alexander Becker

New England Journal of Entrepreneurship

Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. involves an action under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). The case was brought in the United States, Southern District of New York, by the widow of Dr. Barinem Kiobel, a Nigerian activist and member of the Ogoni tribe, and others for human rights violations committed in the Niger River Delta. Defendants include Royal Dutch Petroleum, Shell Transport and Trading Co., and Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria. Although the human rights violations including murder and torture were allegedly committed by the Nigerian military government, it is claimed that the Royal Dutch Petroleum defendants aided …

The Successes And Challenges For The European Court, Seen From The Outside, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"The More Things Change ...": The World Bank, Tata And Enduring Abuses On India's Tea Plantation, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

Tea plantations in India employ more than a million permanent workers, and perhaps twice as many seasonal laborers. This makes the industry the largest private-sector employer in the country. But workers depend on plantations for more than just employment: millions of workers and their families live on the plantations, and rely on them for basic services, including food supplies, health care and education. Indian law has required plantation owners to provide these since the adoption of the Plantations Labour Act (PLA), soon after independence.

The Tata Group, one of India’s most powerful corporate entities, is also one of the most …

Informal Transnational Police-To-Police Information Sharing: Its Structure And Reform, Michael Robert Walton

LLM Theses

This thesis examines the informal sharing of information and cooperation between police agencies across international borders, and how it is or should be informed by international human rights law. The author looks at how intelligence-led policing theory has affected transnational policing. A distinction is made between police actions made on domestic soil that have adverse consequences abroad and police actions made on foreign soil that have adverse consequences. The first category of cases is firmly within jurisdiction and covered by domestic and international legal obligations. The second category of cases introduces the concept of the extraterritorial application of international human …

Serious Harm, James C. Hathaway

Book Chapters

Although the requirement to show a well-founded fear of “being persecuted” is at the heart of the refugee definition, the Refugee Convention does not define or elucidate the meaning to be given to this concept. Indeed, it is generally acknowledged that the drafters of the Convention intentionally declined to define “being persecuted” because they recognized the impossibility of enumerating in advance all of the forms of maltreatment that might legitimately entitle persons to benefit from international protection. The need for a flexible approach to “being persecuted” is especially important today given the duty under the 1967 Protocol to apply the …

Punishments In Penal Institutions: (Dis)-Proportionality In Isolation, Jacob Zoghlin

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Selected Coverage Of The 149th Session Of The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Brittany West, Whitney-Ann Mulhauser, Jason Cowin

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Making The World In Atlanta's Image: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Morris Abram, And The Legislative History Of The United Nations Race Convention, H. Timothy Lovelace

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Tibetan Diaspora In The Shadow Of The Self-Immolation Crisis: Consequences Of Colonialism, Robert D. Sloane

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter for a book on protracted refugee crises argues that the origins of both the unresolved Tibetan refugee crisis and the tragic and unprecedented wave of some 120 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 lie in Tibet’s unacknowledged status as a colony. China illegally invaded and annexed Tibet in 1950, and it remains under belligerent occupation to this day. Contrary to the official views of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the United States, and (to my knowledge) every other state in the world, it is a fiction to refer to the Tibetan people as a Chinese 'minority nationality'. Every …

Memory, Truth And Justice: A Contextualisation Of The Uses Of Photographs Of The Victims Of State Terrorism In Argentina, 1972-2012: Communicating An Intersection Of Art, Politics And History, Richard Askam

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Photographs of the victims of Argentine state terrorism from 1972 to 1983, and most prominently those of the detained-disappeared victims of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional dictatorship (1976-1983), have had a significant role in elucidating the demands of human rights activists since the aftermath of the Trelew Massacre in 1972. In this thesis I examine the role of photographs of victims of state terrorism in the construction of unofficial, or counter, narratives critical of those produced by two dictatorships and by elected democratic administrations in the demand for truth and justice, and in the construction of social memory. I discuss …

Indigenous Peoples And The Jurisgenerative Moment In Human Rights, Kristen A. Carpenter, Angela R. Riley

Publications

As indigenous peoples have become actively engaged in the human rights movement around the world, the sphere of international law, once deployed as a tool of imperial power and conquest, has begun to change shape. Increasingly, international human rights law serves as a basis for indigenous peoples' claims against states and even influences indigenous groups' internal processes of decolonization and revitalization. Empowered by a growing body of human rights instruments, some as embryonic as the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), indigenous peoples are embracing a global "human rights culture" to articulate rights ranging from …

The Judge And The Drone, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

Among the most characteristic issues in modern jurisprudence is the distinction between adjudication and legislation. In the some accounts, a judge's role in deciding a particular controversy is highly constrained and limited to the application of preexisting law. Whereas legislation is inescapably political, adjudication requires at least some form of impersonal neutrality. In various ways over the past century, theorists have pressed this conventional account, complicating the conceptual underpinnings of the distinction between law-application and lawmaking. This Article contributes to this literature on the nature of adjudication through the resuscitation of a structuralist mode of legal interpretation. In the structuralist …

From Kiobel Back To Structural Reform: The Hidden Legacy Of Holocaust Restitution Litigation, Leora Bilsky, Rodger D. Citron, Natalie R. Davidson

Scholarly Works

This paper offers a new approach to the issue of transnational corporate liability for human rights violations and more generally an inquiry into the place of domestic legal experiences in theorizing about transnational law. Grounded in a study of the Holocaust restitution litigation of the 1990s, we explain corporate liability as a type of bureaucratic liability and explore in depth the relationship between the Holocaust litigation and the theory of structural reform litigation developed in the U.S. to address the bureaucratic structure of rights violations. We read the restitution litigation in light of pluralist reformulations of structural reform, in which …

Adjudicating Trips For Development, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

No abstract provided.

Human Rights Frames In Ip Contests, Molly Land

Molly K. Land

No abstract provided.

Act 301 (14-1891) Amicus Reply Brief, Curtis J. Neeley Jr

Curtis J Neeley Jr

Reply covering every brief filed.

Homage To Filártiga, Perry S. Bechky

Perry S. Bechky

The Supreme Court’s new decision in Kiobel severely restricted human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). In doing so, the Court gravely injured the canonical human rights case of Filártiga. This essay celebrates Filártiga, demonstrating that it survives Kiobel in four key respects: its approach to the sources of international law, its conclusion that international law prohibits torture, its dynamic vision of the way the human rights revolution transformed international law, and its hope that courts can help make real a world without torture. The essay presents Filártiga as a living presence and a beacon for future development …

International Adjudication Of Land Disputes: For Development And Transnationalism, Perry S. Bechky

Perry S. Bechky

This short article offers two observations about international adjudication of land disputes. First, the article shows that such adjudication is intended to further development, but that this goal is served better, if counter-intuitively, by rejecting the so-called Salini contribution-to-development test in favor of case-by-case adjudication on the merits. Second, the article locates such adjudication within the modern trend toward transnationalism, a trend that unites international investment law with human rights law. In light of these observations, the article concludes that international adjudication of land disputes may contribute to such human values as development, human rights, and the rule of law.

The International Rule Of Law In A Human Rights Era, Evgenia Pavlovskaia

Evgenia Pavlovskaia

The Brandeis Institute for International Judges (BIIJ) has established itself as a significant and world-renowned program that promotes the role of judges working in the domain of international law and justice. Organized by the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life of Brandeis University, the BIIJ provides a venue for judges from international and regional courts to discuss important issues relating to the administration of justice across their varied jurisdictions.

In 2013, the BIIJ was organized, for the first time in its 12-year history, in partnership with outside academic bodies working in the same field. The institute was held …