Law Commons^™

The Role Of Non-Judicial Mechanisms In Protecting Individual Rights : The China And Hong Kong Experiences, Ren Yue

CAPS Working Paper Series

This study intends to examine, from a socio-legal perspective, the different ways of individual rights protection in the Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong. The common misperception is that as Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is allowed to maintain its legal system inherited from the British colonial times, its residents enjoy more and wider individual freedoms than their Mainland compatriots. However, a comparison of relevant individual rights provisions of both Chinese Constitution and Hong Kong Basic Law finds that there is virtually no significant difference between them. The true differences of individual rights protection lie in various non-judicial mechanisms rooted in …

Who Owns The Rules Of War? The War In Iraq Demands A Rethinking Of The International Rules Of Conduct, Kenneth Anderson

Popular Media

The war in Iraq requires a rethinking of the rules of conduct in war, international humanitarian law. The nature of asymmetric warfare in the conflict has turned out to be less a question of technological disparities than the weaker side turning to systematic violations of the laws of war as its method. Over time, we risk creating an international system in which it is tacitly assumed and permitted that the weaker side fight using systematic violations of the law as its method. Part of this trend arises from the biases of 1977 Protocol I which blessed activities of irregular forces …

Legal, Political, And Ethical Hurdles To Applying International Human Rights Law In The State Courts Of The United States (And Arguments For Scaling Them), Penny White

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

No. 2 - The Dean Rusk Lectures At The Dean Rusk Center, Eric Stein, Louis Henkin, Abiodun Williams, Manuel Medina Ortega, Gabriel M. Wilner

Occasional Papers Series

The papers delivered by the four distinguished scholars form the content of this second Dean Rusk Center Occasional Paper. Issues of legitimacy-democracy in the activities of integrated international and supranational organizations are dealt with in the first paper by Professor Eric Stein. Professor Louis Henkin offers incisive comparisons and contrasts on the nature and sources of human rights in international law and rights under the Constitution of the United States. The central role of the United Nations in peace operations is explained in the paper by Mr. Abiodun Williams, the director of strategic planning for the office of the Secretary-General …

Rational Interpretation In Irrational Times: The Third Geneva Convention And The "War On Terror", Neil Mcdonald, Scott Sullivan

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Ballot Boxes Behind Bars: Toward The Repeal Of Prisoner Disenfranchisement Laws, Debra Parkes

All Faculty Publications

This paper takes seriously the objection that allowing prisoners to vote may have an impact on the outcome of elections or on the development of law and policy, given the extraordinarily high incarceration rate currently a reality in the United States. The reality that prisoners may have an impact on the outcome of elections is an argument in favour of allowing them to vote rather than against it. A progressive critique or constitutional challenge of prisoner disenfranchisement should call attention to the instrumental, as well as symbolic and constitutive functions of voting, and must defend the importance of having the …

Symposium Introduction: Law, Religion, And Human Rights In Global Perspective, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Journal Articles

The essays and articles in this Symposium highlight the importance of religion for properly understanding the nature of law, feminism, globalization, human rights, international legal history, and judicial decision making. These essays and articles also challenge the academy to accept a more sophisticated understanding of religion and to understand its importance for all academic inquiry.

Surprised By Sin: Human Rights And Universality, Tawia Baidoe Ansah

Faculty Publications

International human rights law's claim to universality, at the level of normative formation, has been shaped by conceptions of the self over time. The metaphysical reconfigurations of the self, from the Enlightenment to the present, have marked the human rights narrative in particular ways. This essay will suggest that since World War II, a conception of the self within a narrative of rights has been replaced, or at least countermanded, by a conception of sacral evil, with profound implications for the normative claim to universality of the human rights discourse. The essay begins with a synoptic analysis of the rise …

"They Are Our Brothers, And Christ Gave His Life For Them": The Catholic Tradition And The Idea Of Human Rights In Latin America, Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

Through the language of human rights, law can both reflect and constitute some of our most basic ideas about the requirements of human dignity and the human desire for freedom. It captures certain culturally embedded understandings about the nature of the human person in society and carries them forward in time through an institutionalized discourse and practice. This is especially so in those legal traditions that have inherited Western law’s historically consistent orientation toward the individual. Law never makes those sorts of claims in a systematically theoretical way, however. Instead, it is a form of praxis, combining theory and practice, …

Is There A New World Court?, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

I am pleased to introduce our conference on Human Rights and the Law of War: New Roles for the World Court? Why this conference? And why now? Our conference is prompted by two contrasting phenomena: The caseload of the ICJ seems to have been transformed in the post-Cold War period. The World Court is now busier than ever. It has more cases, increasingly involving questions of human rights or ongoing armed conflict. Yet these three inter-related phenomena—increased caseload, and more cases involving human rights or armed conflict—have been little analyzed or studied. Our purpose is to contribute to public and …

Assessing International Criminal Adjudication Of Human Rights Atrocities, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

These remarks were presented on January 5, 2001, as part of a panel on international criminal adjudication at a conference entitled "Into the 21st Century: Reconstruction and Reparations" in Cape Town, South Africa.

The United States joined a number of countries that rushed to sign the treaty to establish the International Criminal Court. They included states like Yemen, Iran, and Israel. These three, along with the United States, were among the few that had refused to vote in favor of the treaty when it was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome in 1998. By the end of 2000, 139 …

Bi-Polar And Polycentric Approaches To Human Rights And The Environment, Michael Burger

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Within the well-established human rights system, there exist at least three ways to promote environmental ends (each of which is discussed further in Section III below): (1) mobilizing existing rights to achieve environmental ends; (2) reinterpreting existing rights to include environmental concerns; and (3) creating new rights, such as the right to a clean environment. To justify engaging in any one of these processes, an advocate must recognize both their moral legitimacy and legal utility. As one author has argued, "the justification for rights is to be found in the way in which they enable us to address a key …

The World Trade Organization And Law Enforcement, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Increased threats from transborder criminal activity are leading to stronger governmental and intergovernmental responses in the military, judicial, and regulatory arenas. These efforts, particularly the non-military efforts, raise a new issue in international economic law: the intersection between trade and law enforcement. This paper provides an overview of this “trade and law enforcement” linkage in four areas: (1) security, (2) health, (3) human rights, and (4) environmental protection. To explain the linkage between trade and law enforcement, I present the taxonomy of how trade measures are usable for law enforcement, and I offer a synopsis of the WTO provisions relevant …

Advancing The Language Of Human Rights In A Global Economic Order: An Analysis Of A Discourse, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Human rights language is particularly attuned to setting out the goals of protecting the worlds least protected people. As human rights advocates have entered negotiations with international economic institutions and transnational corporations (TNCs), such negotiations have often resulted in an alternative language to describe the necessity of protecting and promoting human rights. After describing the progressive inclusion of human rights ideas by TNCs, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, this Article argues that, while such inclusion is a benefit to the human rights movement, the creation of an alternative language to describe human rights goals is potentially detrimental. …

Agora (Continued): Future Implications Of The Iraq Conflict: Editors' Note, Lori Fisler Damrosch, Bernard H. Oxman

Faculty Scholarship

This Agora continues the discussion of future implications of the Iraq conflict begun in the previous issue of the Journal. While the contributions to the first installment of the Agora concentrated mainly on the decision to initiate combat against Iraq in spring 2003 and the implications thereof for the restraints on use of force in the UN Charter and customary international law, the present pieces shift the focus to the management of the transition within Iraq in the aftermath of the military intervention.