Law Commons^™

Sex Workers And Human Rights: A Critical Analysis Of Laws Regarding Sex Work, Rachel Marshall

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Technology Bias: What Google Teaches Us About Child Rights, Yvonne Vissing Ph.D, Sarah Burris M.A., Quixada Moore-Vissing Ph.D

Societies Without Borders

Technology both helps and hinders what we know about human rights. Use of Google is of central importance to both the Sociology of Knowledge and the creation of internet literacy. In this study, different search engines are compared regarding content of “child rights” in the fifty United States. Findings include: importance of algorithmic loading of sites; number of hits may not reflect the importance or accuracy of a topic; different search engines produce different findings; and personalized searches result in different results. Personalization of searches in accordance to one’s previous search history may result in people being given information that …

Inventing Legal Combat: Pro-Poor 'Struggles' In The Human Rights Jurisprudence Of The Nigerian Appellate Courts, 1999-2011, Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Basil E. Ugochukwu

Obiora Chinedu Okafor

This article deals with the question whether the jurisprudence of Nigeria’s appellate courts has helped advance or impede the struggles of the poor to assert their human rights in the country. The article begins by defining, delimiting, and situating the concepts “struggle” and “human rights as struggle.” It then moves on to identify and discuss the factors that make the struggles that the poor and the subaltern must wage to realize their human rights a tough one. Following this discussion, the article turns its attention to its main focus, i.e., an analytical examination of the ways in which the corpus …

Rape And Sexual Violence: Questionable Inevitability And Moral Responsibility In Armed Conflict, Katherine W. Bogen

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Wartime sexual violence is a critical human rights issue that usurps the autonomy of its victims as well as their physical and psychological safety. It occurs in both ethnic and non-ethnic wars, across geographic regions, against both men and women, and regardless of the “official” position of commanders, states, and armed groups on the use of rape as tactic of war. This problem is current, pervasive, and global in spite of the status of wartime sexual violence perpetration as a crime against humanity and the capacity of the international criminal court to indict offenders. Though some scholars have argued that …

The Transformative Influence Of International Law And Practice On The Death Penalty In The United States, Richard Wilson

Contributions to Books

No region of the world has been more vocal and persistent in its opposition to U.S. death penalty practice than Europe, which has itself become a death penalty-free zone. The chapter will examine the actions taken by European legislative and judicial bodies against U.S. practice of the death penalty, as well as those of the other regional treaty bodies, with particular attention to the Inter-American human rights system, in which the U.S. reluctantly participates. It then will examine U.S. interactions with its treaty partners in the area of extradition, where death penalty policy is acted out in the exchanges of …

The Fifa World Cup, Human Rights Goals And The Gulf Between, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

With Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 on the horizon, the process for selecting hosts for the World Cup of men’s football has been plagued by charges of corruption and human rights abuses. FIFA celebrated key developing economies with South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014. But amid the aftermath of the global financial crisis, those sittings surfaced grave and persistent criticism of the social and economic efficacy of sporting mega-events. Meanwhile new norms emerged in global governance, embodied in instruments such as the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) and the Sustainable Development Goals. These norms posit that …

Standing And Collective Cultural Rights, Ana Filipa Vrdoljak

Ana Filipa Vrdoljak

The procedural question of standing has deep implications for the definition and enforcement of cultural rights. Cultural rights have individual and collective elements that can lead to several entities seeking access to justice when these rights are violated. This chapter focuses on the question of standing to explore the contours of existing cultural human rights and possible reparations flowing from their violation. It considers claims by (1) an individual member of the group who has been wronged because of their membership of the group; (2) a collective action brought by the group; and (3) a representative action on behalf of …

Indigenous Peoples, Intangible Cultural Heritage And Participation In The United Nations, Ana Filipa Vrdoljak

Ana Filipa Vrdoljak

This chapter concentrates on the participation of indigenous peoples in multilateral initiatives to protect cultural heritage, with specific reference to intangible heritage. While an international instrument for the protection of intangible heritage was adopted over a decade ago, the importance of intangible heritage for indigenous peoples is evident in their work in various UN fora. I examine indigenous peoples’ interventions before UNESCO and bodies established to implement the Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage; within WIPO in respect of ongoing moves to adopt specialist instruments on traditional knowledge and cultural expressions; and finally, within UNEP and the implementation …

The Temporal Rivalries Of Human Rights, Fleur E. Johns

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Nation-states' "boundaries" are produced in time: around official working hours and terms of office, for instance, and in the historicomythic "life of the nation." Global human rights practices affirm and depend on nation-states' temporal authority, while also calling that authority into question. In different ways, global markets do likewise. In recent decades, the ubiquity of both finance capital and international human rights law, among other factors, may have encouraged the fracturing of time into intervals of ever-decreasing length. Temporal authority premised on the long-term seems to have declining purchase, even as historicism and futurism abound, discouraging some modes of state-based …

The Variation In The Use Of Sub-Regional Integration Courts Between Business And Human Rights Actors: The Case Of The East African Court Of Justice, James T. Gathii

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Human Development As A Core Objective Of Global Intellectual Property, J. Janewa Oseitutu

Faculty Publications

Global intellectual property obligations shape domestic laws and policies. More than twenty years since the first multilateral trade-based intellectual property agreement, critics contend that global intellectual property law prioritizes intellectual property rights over other interests, and profits over people. Faced with international intellectual-property obligations, nations have been forced to justify laws and policies designed to promote human development in areas such as health and education as exceptions to intellectual property protection. This is the result of legal interpretations that treat the objectives of intellectual property protection and human development as inconsistent with one another. Drawing on the objectives of trade …

The Human Rights Of Sea Pirates: Will The European Court Of Human Rights Decisions Get More Killed?, Barry Hart Dubner, Brian Othero

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Australians' "Right" To Be Bigoted: Protecting Minorities' Rights From The Tyranny Of The Majority, Jillian Rudge

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) is a federal statute prohibiting behavior that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates people based on their race, nationality, ethnicity, or immigration status. It appropriately limits the right to freedom of expression where the exercise of that right encroaches on other, equally fundamental rights to equality and freedom from discrimination. The RDA is one of Australia’s few human rights laws focused on fighting racism. It is especially important for protecting the rights of minorities since Australia lacks a constitutional or federal bill of rights. Unfortunately, in 2014 and 2015, conservative politicians called for a repulsion of …

Book Review, Douglass Cassell

Journal Articles

Reviewing Federico Fabbrini, Fundamental Rights in Europe: Challenges and Transformations in Comparative Perspective (2014)

Fabbrini’s study sheds valuable light on the dynamics that shape the interactions among multiple levels of human rights protection in Europe, and on the consequences for rights protection that tend to ensue. Less successful is his outsized confidence in a comparative approach, especially as applied to political and juridical communities as distinct as the USA and Europe. While the imperfect comparisons yield useful insights, Fabbrini at times overstates their import.

Inventing Legal Combat: Pro-Poor 'Struggles' In The Human Rights Jurisprudence Of The Nigerian Appellate Courts, 1999-2011, Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Basil E. Ugochukwu

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

This article deals with the question whether the jurisprudence of Nigeria’s appellate courts has helped advance or impede the struggles of the poor to assert their human rights in the country. The article begins by defining, delimiting, and situating the concepts “struggle” and “human rights as struggle.” It then moves on to identify and discuss the factors that make the struggles that the poor and the subaltern must wage to realize their human rights a tough one. Following this discussion, the article turns its attention to its main focus, i.e., an analytical examination of the ways in which the corpus …

Of Human Dignities, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

This paper, written for a symposium on the 50th anniversary of Dignitatis Humanae, the Catholic Church’s declaration on religious freedom, explores the conception of human dignity in international human rights law. I argue that, notwithstanding a surface consensus, no generally accepted conception of human dignity exists in contemporary human rights law. Radically different understandings compete against one another and prevent agreement on crucial issues. For example, the Catholic Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation favor objective understandings which, although they differ among themselves, all tie dignity to external factors beyond personal choice. By contrast, many …

Climate Change And Human Trafficking After The Paris Climate Agreement, Michael Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Climate change is a major contributor to migration and displacement. Persistent drought forced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers to move to overcrowded cities, contributing to social turmoil and ultimately a civil war that drove hundreds of thousands of people to attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. Drought also worsened refugee crises in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and other parts of the continent. Climate change can cause displacement in multiple ways. No reliable estimates exist of the number of people who will be displaced partly or wholly by climate change, due to uncertainties concerning the rate …

Prioritising Human Development In African Intellectual Property Law, Janewa Osei Tutu

J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

Human Development As A Core Objective Of Global Intellectual Property, Janewa Osei Tutu

J. Janewa Osei-Tutu