Law Commons^™

A Guide To Mireille Delmas-Marty's “Compass”, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This essay appears as the Afterword (pp. 55-64) to a volume featuring an important work by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941-2022) titled A Compass of Possibilities: Global Governance and Legal Humanism. A Collège de France de Paris law professor and one of the pre-eminent legal thinkers of her generation, Delmas-Marty and the essay’s author were longtime colleagues and collaborators. The volume contains an English translation of a 2011 lecture by Delmas-Marty, originally titled “Une boussole des possibles: Gouvernance mondiale et humanismes juridiques.” Amann’s essay surveys that writing, in a manner designed to acquaint non-francophone lawyers and academics with Delmas-Marty’s …

Socialist Republic Of Vietnam V. Pham Thi Doan Trang, David Mccraw, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

On the night of October 6, 2020, at the conclusion of a virtual human rights meeting between the governments of the United States of America and Vietnam, Vietnamese police arrested the journalist and human rights activist Pham Thi Doan Trang at her home in Hanoi. Ms. Trang was arrested and detained for allegedly “conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” and “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the State of Socialist Republic of Vietnam” — two of the most notorious of Vietnam’s fifteen national security offenses.

It would be a full year — during …

The Long Shadow Of United States V. Rosenberg: A Biographical Perspective On The Hon. Irving Robert Kaufman, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Platform-Enabled Crimes: Pluralizing Accountability When Social Media Companies Enable Perpetrators To Commit Atrocities, Rebecca Hamilton

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day across the globe, the corporations running these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. Sometimes, these seemingly banal business activities enable principal perpetrators to commit crimes. Online intermediaries, however, are almost never held to account for their complicity in the resulting harms. This Article introduces the concept of platformenabled crimes into the legal literature to highlight the ways in which the ordinary business activities of online intermediaries enable the commission of crime. It then focuses on a subset of platform-enabled crimes—those in which a social media …

White Supremacy, Police Brutality, And Family Separation: Preventing Crimes Against Humanity Within The United States, Elena Baylis

Articles

Although the United States tends to treat crimes against humanity as a danger that exists only in authoritarian or war-torn states, in fact, there is a real risk of crimes against humanity occurring within the United States, as illustrated by events such as systemic police brutality against Black Americans, the federal government’s family separation policy that took thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the southern border, and the dramatic escalation of White supremacist and extremist violence culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In spite of this risk, the United States does not have …

Submission To The Toronto Police Services Board’S Use Of New Artificial Intelligence Technologies Policy- Leaf And The Citizen Lab, Suzie Dunn, Kristen Mj Thomasen, Kate Robertson, Pam Hrick, Cynthia Khoo, Rosel Kim, Ngozi Okidegbe, Christopher Parsons

Reports & Public Policy Documents

We write as a group of experts in the legal regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), technology-facilitated violence, equality, and the use of AI systems by law enforcement in Canada. We have experience working within academia and legal practice, and are affiliated with LEAF and the Citizen Lab who support this letter.

We reviewed the Toronto Police Services Board Use of New Artificial Intelligence Technologies Policy and provide comments and recommendations focused on the following key observations:

1. Police use of AI technologies must not be seen as inevitable
2. A commitment to protecting equality and human rights must be integrated …

Human Rights And Transnational Organized Crime, Robert Currie, Sarah Douglas

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This chapter will scrutinize the points at which these two legal regimes intersect with and infuse each other. It will proceed in three sections. The first section will provide a brief overview of the international human rights law system, specifically tailored to ground the following parts. The second section will examine the means by which protection is given to the human rights of individuals who are targeted for criminal investigation and prosecution as a result of their alleged involvement in TOC (referred to for efficiency as “accused persons” or “the accused”). It will first briefly explain the means by which …

Closing International Law's Innocence Gap, Brandon L. Garrett, Laurence R. Helfer, Jayne C. Huckerby

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last decade, a growing number of countries have adopted new laws and other mechanisms to address a gap in national criminal legal systems: the absence of meaningful procedures to raise post-conviction claims of factual innocence. These legal and policy reforms have responded to a global surge of exonerations facilitated by the growth of national innocence organizations that increasingly collaborate across borders. It is striking that these developments have occurred with little direct help from international law. Although many treaties recognize extensive fair trial and appeal rights, no international human rights instrument—in its text, existing interpretation, or implementation—explicitly and …

It's Complicated: The Challenge Of Prosecuting Tncs For Criminal Activity Under International Law, Jena Martin

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This essay aims to tackle an increasingly thorny and relevant issue: what do you do if a Transnational Corporation (TNC) commits a crime? The question raises a number of challenges, both philosophically and practically. First, what does it mean to prosecute an organization? Although there are some limited examples (the United States’ prosecution of accounting firm Arthur Andersen being among the most note-worthy), we have relatively little precedence regarding what this would entail; how exactly do you put a corporation on trial? Second, practically speaking, where do you hold the trial? This challenge is magnified by the fact that, by …

Women's Rights, Human Rights And The Criminal Law Or, Feminist Debates And Responses To [De]Criminalization And Sexual And Reproductive Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

My comments today seek to highlight how social and economic rights advocates, particularly those concerned with the right to health, engage with ongoing debates about the role of criminal law in human rights. In particular, I emphasize how many “right to health” campaigns fight for the decriminalization of laws that result in the arrest of marginalized communities or health workers. This trend within right to health advocacy complicates what has been called the anti-impunity turn in human rights. In other words, although many scholars have correctly highlighted the rise of a carceral agenda in human rights, there is also ongoing, …

Extradition And Trial Delays: Recent Developments (And Lessons?) From Canada, Robert Currie, Laura Ellyson

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Extradition – the formal rendition of criminal fugitives between states – is well-known to be a time-consuming process that often has impacts, minor or major, on the ability of states to complete prosecution in a timely manner. Thus, the extradition process can sometimes be at odds with the right to trial within a reasonable time, which is part of the overall package of fair trial rights enshrined in international human rights law. In Canada, this right is implemented by paragraph 11(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In recent years Canadian courts have developed a series of principles …

Targeted Capture, Alexander K.A. Greenawalt

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article confronts one of the most difficult and contested questions in the debate about targeted killing that has raged in academic and policy circles over the last decade. Suppose that, in wartime, the target of a military strike may readily be neutralized through nonlethal means such as capture. Do the attacking forces have an obligation to pursue that nonlethal alternative? The Article defends the duty to employ less restrictive means (“LRM”) in wartime, and it advances several novel arguments in defense of that obligation. In contrast to those who look to external restraints--such as those imposed by international human …

The Trafficking Victim Protection Act: The Best Hope For International Human Rights Litigation In The U.S. Courts?, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

The article focuses on uses Alien Tort Statute as a vehicle for litigating human rights abuses in both civil and criminal prosecutions in the U.S. Topics discussed include developments in International Criminal Law in addressing human rights violations; judicial attitudes that could affect the interpretation of the Trafficking Victim Protection Act; and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain court case on the same.

Wrestling Tyrants: Do We Need An International Criminal Justice System?, Christopher L. Blakesley

Scholarly Works

Prof. Christopher L. Blakesley delivered this keynote address at the Crimes Without Borders: In Search of an International Justice System Symposium, held at the McGeorge School of Law in the spring of 2016.

Corporate Criminal Responsibility For Human Rights Violations: Jurisdiction And Reparations, Kenneth S. Gallant

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Impact Of The “Nirbhaya” Rape Case: Isolated Phenomenon Or Social Change?, Tina P. Lapsia

Honors Scholar Theses

In December 2012, a twenty-three year old college student, who was given the pseudonym “Nirbhaya” (“fearless”), was fatally gang-raped on a private bus in Delhi, India, galvanizing the country to swiftly adopt new legislative measures and catapulting the issue of violence against women in India into the international spotlight. Although assault and rape cases have made India infamous for its high volume of crimes against women, the reaction to this particular incident was much different from before. This paper investigates whether the governmental and societal responses represent social change, as indicated by changing attitudes towards violence against women in India. …

Framing For A New Transnational Legal Order: The Case Of Human Trafficking, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

How does transnational legal order emerge, develop and solidify? This chapter focuses on how and why actors come to define an issue as one requiring transnational legal intervention of a specific kind. Specifically, we focus on how and why states have increasingly constructed and acceded to international legal norms relating to human trafficking. Empirically, human trafficking has been on the international and transnational agenda for nearly a century. However, relatively recently – and fairly swiftly in the 2000s – governments have committed themselves to criminalize human trafficking in international as well as regional and domestic law. Our paper tries to …

The Protection Of Human Rights In The Suppression Of Transnational Crime, Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This chapter examines the troubled relationship between the various legal regimes under which states cooperate to suppress crime and the protection of human rights, specifically the procedural human rights of individuals targeted for investigation in transnational cases. It provides an analysis of what rights protections exist in the context of the suppression treaties themselves, and also whether and to what extent international human rights law imposes obligations on states when they engage in inter-state cooperation in criminal matters (eg extradition, mutual legal assistance). It concludes that despite the topic being an active one for some decades, relatively few hard human …

Frames And Consensus Formation In International Relations: The Case Of Trafficking In Persons, Volha Charnysh, Paulette Lloyd, Beth A. Simmons

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the process of consensus formation by the international community regarding how to confront the problem of trafficking in persons. We analyze the corpus of United Nations General Assembly Third Committee resolutions to show that: (1) consensus around the issue of how to confront trafficking in persons has increased over time; and (2) the formation of this consensus depends upon how the issue is framed. We test our argument by examining the characteristics of resolutions’ sponsors and discursive framing concepts such as crime, human rights, and the strength of enforcement language. We conclude that the consensus-formation process in …

Economic Migration Gone Wrong: Trafficking In Persons Through The Lens Of Gender, Labor, And Globalization, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

This Article argues for an economic analysis of human trafficking which primarily looks at globalization, trade liberalization, and labor migration as the core areas that need to be explored to advance the prevention of human trafficking.

Part I briefly examines the prevailing criminal law enforcement framework regarding human trafficking—both at the international level and in the United States—which stems out of viewing human trafficking as primarily a threat to global security and an underground industry of transnational criminal enterprises. It argues that while criminalization no doubt helped bring much needed attention (and resources) to human trafficking, the narrow criminal law …

"Fuck Your Breath": Black Men And Youth, State Violence, And Human Rights In The 21st Century, Jeremy I. Levitt

Journal Publications

This polemical essay was written at the behest of Black men and youth, and it is dedicated to African American women who relentlessly fight to safeguard the rights and well-being of Black men, even when in the process their maltreatment and welfare are grossly overlooked and forgotten. Bree Newsome's courageous and necessary removal of the confederate flag in the South Carolina State House is a prime example of such fearless activism. Joanne Deborah Chesimard aka Assata Shakur's-a former leader of the revolutionary organization known as the Black Liberation Armyascendency to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list is another tragically intoxicating …

Abuse And Potential Misuse Of Resources In U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions, Human Rights Institute

Human Rights Institute

New York, July 21, 2014 – Prosecutions of American Muslims for terrorism offenses are rife with abuse, the Columbia Human Rights Institute says in a new report released today and produced jointly with Human Rights Watch. The report, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions, examines 27 federal terrorism cases, some involving aggressive sting operations and others amounting to overbroad prosecutions for material support of terrorism. It also documents the significant human cost of solitary confinement and other restrictive conditions of confinement in these cases.

The Long Arc Of Justice In Guatemala, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Un-Torturing The Definition Of Torture And Employing The Rule Of Immigration Lenity, Irene Scharf

Faculty Publications

In the first three sections, I examine the background of the Convention in the context of international human rights instruments (Section I); the context for a critique of the CAT’s definition of torture, given the legislative history of the Convention and an existing statute that could aid in correcting the misinterpretation adversely affecting CAT enforcement (Section II); and the adverse international implication of the United States’ restrictive meaning of torture (Section III). In a concluding section (IV), I offer possible solutions to the problem, invoking a robust principle of Immigration Lenity to prevent the return of potential torture victims to …

The Dilemma Of Piratical Ransoms: Should They Be Paid Or Not: On The Human Rights Of Kidnapped Seamen And Their Families, Barry H. Dubner, Kimberly Chavers

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Victory Without Success? – The Guantanamo Litigation, Permanent Preventive Detention, And Resisting Injustice, Jules Lobel

Articles

When the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) brought the first habeas cases challenging the Executive’s right to detain prisoners in a law free zone at Guantanamo in 2002, almost no legal commentator gave the plaintiffs much chance of succeeding. Yet, two years later in 2004, after losing in both the District Court and Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush handed CCR a resounding victory. Four years later, the Supreme Court again ruled in CCR’s favor in 2008 in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that the detainees had a constitutional right to habeas and declaring the Congressional …

Positive Obligations And Criminal Justice: Duties To Protect Or Coerce?, Liora Lazarus

All Faculty Publications

This chapter explores the relationship between criminal law, criminal process and human rights from a slightly different perspective. It demonstrates that while human rights may well be used to limit the excesses of security and law and order politics, the nature of the relationship between human rights and criminal justice cannot be captured alone by the view of rights as a limit on the coercive reach of the criminal law and criminal justice institutions. Increasingly, human rights, cast as positive rights, have resulted in claims for the extension of the criminal law, the creation of preventative duties or ‘protective policing …

Juvenile Pirates: "Lost Boys" Or Violent Criminals?, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Piracy off the coast of Somalia has flourished over the past decade, and has both caused a global crisis in maritime shipping and destabilized regional security in East Africa. In addition, piracy attacks have spread more recently to the coast of West Africa, and in particular, the Gulf of Guinea. Thus, piracy is an ongoing global issue that should continue to occupy many maritime nations in the near future, and one that should command continuous scholarly attention.

This article examines the issue of juvenile piracy, with a specific focus on the treatment of juvenile piracy suspects by both the capturing …

Reforming The Right To Legal Counsel In Singapore, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This is an opinion prepared for the Criminal Law Committee of the Law Society of Singapore on an arrested person’s right to legal counsel in Singapore. Specifically, it deals with the following: (1) it summarizes pertinent aspects of the law relating to the right to legal counsel in Singapore; (2) it surveys a number of ASEAN and Commonwealth jurisdictions to determine how long after apprehension the right to counsel is generally accorded to arrested persons, and compares the legal position in these jurisdictions to the situation in Singapore; and (3) it examines two rights ancillary to the right to legal …

Book Review: Gary Botting, Extradition Between Canada And The United States (Ardsley: Transnational Publishers, 2005), Robert Currie

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Both domestic and international laws regarding the extradition of fugitive criminal offenders are in a state of flux throughout the world. The current legal landscape reflects tension between the interest of state authorities in promoting “security,” on the one hand, and increasing recognition that human rights obligations are at play, on the other. Gary Botting’s book, Extradition Between Canada and the United States, successfully addresses this tension by way of a detailed examination of what is probably the most integrated extradition partnership outside the European Union.