Law Commons^™

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

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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

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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 …

An Analysis Of China’S Human Rights Policies In Tibet: China’S Compliance With The Mandates Of International Law Regarding Civil And Political Rights, Richard Klein

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No abstract provided.

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

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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 …

Human Rights And Military Decisions: Counterinsurgency And Trends In The Law Of, Dan E. Stigall, Christopher L. Blakesley, Chris Jenks

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The past several decades have seen a Copernican shift in the paradigm of armed conflict, which the traditional Law of International Armed Conflict (LOIAC) canon has not fully matched. Standing out in stark relief against the backdrop of relative inactivity in LOIAC, is the surfeit of activity in the field of international human rights law, which has become a dramatic new force in the ancient realm of international law. Human rights law, heretofore not formally part of the traditional juridico-military calculus, has gained ever increasing salience in that calculus. Indeed, human rights law has ramified in such a manner that …

Socio-Economic Rights And Refugee Status: Deepening The Dialogue Between Human Rights And Refugee Law, Fatma E. Marouf, Deborah Anker

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Over the past two decades, international human rights law has provided an increasingly useful framework for interpreting key criteria of the definition of a refugee. A human rights-based approach to analyzing refugee status helps to increase consistency and uniformity in decision making by state parties regarding who qualifies for international protection.

Michelle Foster's book, International Refugee Law and Socio-economic Rights: Refuge from Deprivation (Cambridge U. Press 2007), comes at a critical time, not only because of increasing acceptance of the connection between refugee law and human rights law and significant developments in the current understanding of economic and social rights, …