Law Commons^™

“Amidst The Chime Of The Razor Wire”: Narrating Poetic Justice In Guantanamo Bay, Kristina H. Reardon

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

The quest of poetic justice carries Marc Falkoff’s 2007 anthology Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak into the court of public (literary) opinion. While the Pentagon asserts that poetry poses special security risks, and related translation issues may obscure the artistry or message of some of the 17 poets’ verse, Falkoff’s volume nevertheless gives prisoners’ voices a forum in which they might be heard. At the nexus of legal and literary scholarship, poetic voice and its expression become a site of deconstructing identity. The Guantanamo poets invite readers to explore the ways that aesthetics form perceptions of their identity as …

Advancing Climate Justice In International Law: Evaluating The United Nations Human Rights Based Approach, Dr. Damilola S. Olawuyi

Environmental and Animal Law

The Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University College of Law's Center for International Law & Justice and the Environment, Development & Justice Program presented the First Annual Climate and Energy Justice Lecture featuring Dr. Damilola S. Olawuyi. Dr. Olawuyi teaches and conducts research in the area of public international law, specializing in natural resources, energy and environment, oil and gas law and international human rights law.

Comments On The World Bank’S Revised Draft Environmental And Social Framework, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In February 2015, CCSI sent comments to the World Bank regarding its draft Environmental and Social Framework. This took place in the context of the Bank’s consultations on the review and update of its safeguards policies. CCSI’s comments focused on ensuring consistent and comprehensive application of the framework, and on the need to more expansively incorporate human rights standards. The memo also underlined the need to protect all legitimate tenure rights, including those not currently recognized by national law, and to limit the permissibility of forced evictions. In addition, the comments include proposed amendments that would ensure that government borrowers …

Strategic Globalization: International Law As An Extension Of Domestic Political Conflict, Jide Nzelibe

Northwestern University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Data Beyond Borders: Mutual Legal Assistance In The Internet Era, Andrew K. Woods

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The global nature of today’s Internet services presents a unique challenge to international law enforcement cooperation. On a daily basis, law enforcement agents in one country seek access to data that is beyond their jurisdictional reach; as one industry analyst put it, there has been, “an internationalization of evidence.” In order to gain lawful access to data that is subject to another state’s jurisdiction, law enforcement agents must request mutual legal assistance (MLA) from the country that can legally compel the data’s disclosure. But the MLA regime has not been updated to manage the enormous rise of requests for MLA. …

January 24, 2015: More Nihilism On Abortion, Bruce Ledewitz

Hallowed Secularism

Blog post, “More Nihilism on Abortion“ discusses politics, theology and the law in relation to religion and public life in the democratic United States of America.

Argentina's Trials: New Ways Of Writing Memory, Susana Kaiser

Media Studies

The last Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983) left a legacy of an estimated 30,000 desaparecidos (disappeared people). Three decades later, the wall of impunity is now being torn down. Trials are spreading across Argentina and hundreds of repressors are being judged. These trials are public spaces for collective memory making, political arenas for competing memory battles, and forums in which new information and perspectives about what happened under state terrorism continually emerge. Through the testimonies of survivors and the claims of the defense teams we gain new knowledge about the level and scope of the human rights abuses, how the repressive apparatus …

International Law And Sea Level Rise: The New Ila Committee, Davor Vidas, David Freestone, Jane Mcadam

ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has now released its Fifth report.

Current National Security And Human Rights Issues In The United Kingdom, Canada And Hong Kong, Dr. Daniel Alati

ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law

In any jurisdiction, national security legislation is not developed or enacted in a vacuum and, as such, interdisciplinary analyses of this legislation are both necessary and useful.

Reforming The Global Value Chain Through Transnational Private Regulation, Kishanthi Parella

Scholarly Articles

In many industries, corporations have changed the organization of their production from a vertically integrated model to a model that is often characterized by outsourcing-shifting business activities to external parties -and offshoring, where production occurs at sites overseas. The global value chain (GVC) for an American corporation often involves several tiers of suppliers. One end of the GVC is often occupied by a multinational buyer (MNB), such as a large brand name corporation. At the opposite end of the value chain are the factories, farms, and other production sites that supply multinational corporations with their goods. This organization of production …

Some Thoughts On The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights And The Generations Of Human Rights, Fausto Pocar

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

In recent legal literature on human rights, a commonly accepted approach has been to classify such rights in terms of generations, divided into three tiers. Scholars often divide and ascribe human rights to their corresponding generation. In this practice, first generation rights comprise civil and political rights and freedoms, second generation rights include economic, social, and cultural rights, and third generation rights implicate such diffused rights as more recently identified in international human rights law, such as the right to peace, development, a safe and healthy environment, sufficient and safe food for all, or the use of natural resources. This …

Rescuing The People Of Tuvalu Towards An I.C.J. Advisory Opinion On The International Legal Obligations To Protect The Environment And Human Rights Of Populations Affected By Climate Change, Mariya Gromilova

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

2014 has been announced by the U.N. General Assembly as the "International Year of Small Island Developing States" with the goals of raising awareness of the Small Island Developing States' (SIDS) unique developmental challenges in relation to a range of environmental problems including climate change, and of fostering the ambition to find solutions for these vulnerable States.' However, the way in which international law is constructed runs counter to the ambitions of the General Assembly. The people of Tuvalu, one of the SIDS, are not to blame for climate change, yet they experience its most severe impacts. Regardless of the …

Corporate "Human Rights" To Intellectual Property Protection?, J. Janewa Oseitutu

Faculty Publications

The global intellectual property system protects the interests of intellectual property owners, sometimes to the detriment of competing interests like public health or access to knowledge. Some scholars have proposed a human rights framework for intellectual property as a way to inject balance into the current system. However, the assertion that human rights will bring balance is often coupled with the assumption that corporations are, by definition, excluded from human rights-based intellectual property claims. Yet, corporations have used, and are likely to continue to use, human rights law to ground their intellectual property claims. Since multinational corporations were a major …

A Standard Of Global Justice, Steven R. Ratner

Book Chapters

This chapter presents the standard of justice that is used in this book to appraise international law. That standard is based on two core principles, or what the book calls pillars—the promotion of international and intrastate peace, on the one hand, and respect for the basic human rights of all individuals, on the other. The justice of international norms is determined by the extent to which they lead to a state of affairs involving peace and human rights, with some room for deontological considerations in limited situations. The chapter defends the choice of these two pillars. It elaborates on the …

Corporate Social Responsibility Versus Business And Human Rights: Bridging The Gap Between Responsibility And Accountability, Anita Ramasastry

Articles

This article explores the evolution of business and human rights (BHR) from a lawyer’s perspective and examines how it is contextually and conceptually different from corporate social responsibility (CSR) in its aims and ambitions. While CSR emphasizes responsible behavior, BHR focuses on a more delineated commitment in the area of human rights. BHR is, in part, a response to CSR and its perceived failure. This has led to a gap with two disciplines or strands of discourse that are diverging rather than converging. This article explores how the quest for accountability shapes a very different narrative for BHR, which takes …

White Paper: Options For A Treaty On Business And Human Rights, Anita Ramasastry, Douglass Cassell

Articles

The United Nations Human Rights Council decided in June 2014 to establish an Intergovernmental Working Group to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.” The first meeting of the Working Group took take place in Geneva in July 2015. The Council did not further specify what sort of instrument should be drafted. The Center for Human Rights of the American Bar Association and the Law Society of England and Wales asked the present authors to prepare a “White Paper” on possible options for a treaty …

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 …

Redd+: Climate Justice Or A New Face Of Manifest Destiny? Lessons Drawn From The Indigenous Struggle To Resist Colonization Of Ojibwe Forests In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Philomena Kebec

William Mitchell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Measuring Transnational Human Rights, Cortelyou C. Kenney

Fordham Law Review

Over the past three and a half decades, hundreds of transnational human rights civil suits—i.e., suits seeking monetary compensation for atrocities committed abroad ranging from torture and extrajudicial killing to forced labor and human trafficking—have been filed in the United States. Exhaustive qualitative research chronicles plaintiff “successes” and “failures” as defined by how frequently plaintiffs win, the magnitude of judgments and settlements they obtain, and the extent to which judgments and settlements are enforced. The prevailing wisdom is that while some cases have proven runaway successes along these axes, in general, transnational human rights suits constitute “a modest enterprise akin …

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 …

Memo To The Obama Administration On The U.S. National Action Plan On Responsible Business Conduct, Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In January 2015, CCSI sent a memo to President Obama to provide input on the U.S. National Action Plan on responsible business conduct. The memo applauded the U.S. Government’s decision to develop a National Action Plan consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, noting that responsible and rights-respecting outward investment can support sustainable development in host countries, and that the U.S. Government has an important role to play in promoting responsible business operations. The memo urged the government to explore in particular how the National Action Plan can address …

Raising Legal Giants: The Agency Of The Poor In The Human Rights Jurisprudence Of The Nigerian Appellate Courts, 1990-2011, Obiora C. Okafor, Basil E. Ugochukwu

Articles & Book Chapters

This article examines the extent to which the jurisprudence of the Nigerian appellate courts has expanded, maintained or contracted the opportunities of the poor for exercising as robustly as possible their own ‘agency’ to act to redress human rights abuses committed against them during the period between 1990 and 2011. In doing so, the article mostly utilises a critical socio-legal framework which situates Nigeria’s human rights law relating to the agency of the poor within its historical, social, economic and political context. Specifically, it utilises – among others – the kernel ideas of Upendra Baxi’s seminal trade-related market-friendly human rights …

Pharmaceutical Patents And The Human Right To Health: The Contested Evolution Of The Transnational Legal Order On Access To Medicines, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

Disputes over the regulation of access to medicines are occurring in multiple transnational, national, and local venues. Competing groups of states and non-state actors shift horizontally and vertically among these forums in an effort to develop competing legal rules over the propriety of granting intellectual property (IP) protection to newly developed life-saving drugs. This chapter applies the framework of Transnational Legal Orders (Terence C. Halliday & Gregory Shaffer, eds. 2015) to explain the origins of these controversies and their consequences. The chapter argues that the current state of affairs arose from a clash between two previously discrete TLOs—one relating to …

Mapping The Interface Between Human Rights And Intellectual Property, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Mechanisms For Punishing Atrocities Committed In Non-International Armed Conflicts, Sean D. Murphy

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Three core crimes have emerged as a part of the jurisdiction of international criminal tribunals: war crimes; genocide; and crimes against humanity. Only two of these crimes (war crimes and genocide) have been addressed through a global treaty that requires States to prevent and punish such conduct and to cooperate among themselves toward those ends. Yet crimes against humanity may be more prevalent than either genocide or war crimes, and are a recurrent feature in non-international armed conflicts (NIACs).

As such, a global convention on prevention, punishment, and inter-State cooperation with respect to crimes against humanity appears to be a …

Human Rights Provisions In Free Trade Agreements: Do The Ends Justify The Means?, Meredith Kolsky Lewis

Journal Articles

Numerous Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) contain provisions imposing human rights-related obligations, particularly in the case of agreements between the European Union and a developing country (often a former colony). Such obligations often consist of hortatory “best endeavors” language rather than legally binding provisions. Even the small number of provisions that are binding are very rarely enforced. Furthermore, even if an FTA features human rights-related provisions, it may contain other terms that have negative implications for human rights. Thus, including human rights provisions in FTAs will not necessarily result in better human rights outcomes. There are additional reasons to be cautious …

Touching Torture With A Ten-Foot Pole: The Legality Of Canada’S Approach To National Security Information Sharing With Human Rights-Abusing States, Craig Forcese

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

In 2011, then-Public Safety Minister Vic Toews issued “ministerial directions” to Canada’s key security and intelligence agencies on “Information Sharing with Foreign Entities.” These directions permit information sharing in exigent circumstances, even where there is substantial risk of mistreatment of an individual. After a brief chorus of condemnation, the directions sank into relative obscurity while remaining part of Canada’s national security policy framework. This article aims to reignite discussion of these policies and their controversial content, relying in large measure on documents obtained by the author directly or through journalistic researchers under access to information law. First, I examine dilemmas …

"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 …

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Indigenous Peoples In The United States Of America, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.

Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples On The Situation Of Maori People In New Zealand, S. James Anaya

Publications

No abstract provided.