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Human Rights Law

Human Rights

University of Georgia School of Law

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Full-Text Articles in Law

International Environmental Law At Its Semicentennial: The Stockholm Legacy, Melissa J. Durkee Jan 2022

International Environmental Law At Its Semicentennial: The Stockholm Legacy, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment produced the Stockholm Declaration, an environmental manifesto that forcefully declared a human right to environmental health and birthed the field of modern international environmental law. The historic event powerfully “dramatized . . . the unity and fragility of the biosphere,” sparking a remarkable period of international legal innovation and cooperation on environmental protection in the decades to come.

The Stockholm Declaration can be rightly celebrated for putting environmental issues on the international legal agenda and driving the development of environmental law at the domestic level around the world. At the same …


A Janus Look At International Criminal Justice, Diane Marie Amann Jan 2013

A Janus Look At International Criminal Justice, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

Invoking the name of Janus, the Roman god who looked simultaneously at the past and the future, this article examines international criminal justice at a watershed moment, when a number of 20-year-old ad hoc tribunals were winding down even as the International Criminal Court was entering its teen years. First explored are challenges posed by politics – that is, the need to secure cooperation from states and from the U.N. Security Council – and economics – that is, the need to work within budgetary constraints. The article then surveys significant developments in each of a half-dozen international criminal courts and …


Beyond The Guantánamo Bind: Pragmatic Multilateralism In Refugee Resettlement, Melissa J. Durkee Jan 2011

Beyond The Guantánamo Bind: Pragmatic Multilateralism In Refugee Resettlement, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

The international refugee protection system is under threat. States weary of increased refugee flows and preoccupied with national security increasingly exploit legal gaps or avoid refugee law altogether. The U.S. approach to resettlement of Guantánamo detainee refugees exemplified this trend. Yet, in the Guantánamo context, U.S. avoidance of international refugee law put the executive in a bind that it could not easily escape: Because the U.S. executive was unwilling to assume the political cost of resettling the refugee detainees domestically, it resorted to peddling them for resettlement to foreign states while, at the same time, mounting a robust legal defense …


Major Problems Of International Refugee Law, Wondwossen Lemma Kidane Jan 1997

Major Problems Of International Refugee Law, Wondwossen Lemma Kidane

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis introduces the history behind the legal term “refugee” with the emphasis on the abstract and altogether ambiguous definition, international discrepancies, and the United Nations’ Convention of Status relating to Refugees adopted in 1951. The purpose of the thesis is to highlight the shortcomings of the Convention starting with the legal definition of a refugee then continuing to inherent defects of refugee law, problems of the exclusion/secession of refugee status as stated in the Convention, domestic application of the Convention, and finally some advances in points of suggestion.