Human Rights Law Commons^™

Degrees Of Freedom: Building Citizenship In The Shadow Of Slavery, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

By seeing events in the past as part of a dynamically evolving system with a large, but not indefinite, number of degrees of freedom, we can turn our attention to the multiple possibilities for change, and to the ways in which societies that are initially similarly situated may go on to diverge very sharply. Thus it is, I will argue, with societies in the 19th century that faced the challenge of building citizenship on the ruins of slavery.

The Qualities Of Mercy: Maximizing The Impact Of U.S. Refugee Resettlement, Daniel J. Steinbock

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Resettlement in the US. bestows a life changing benefit on thousands of overseas refugees. Because American refugee acceptance can never reach more than a tiny fraction of the world's millions of persecuted or oppressed, however, allocating this bounty requires the US. to choose the lucky few from the worthy many. Since the creation in 1980 of a permanent program of refugee resettlement, three different, and often conflicting, purposes have contended for its trove of immigration-like admissions slots. These are the removal of people from danger or hardship, the furtherance of a cluster of foreign policy objectives, and the facilitation of …

Asylum, Social Group Membership And The Non-State Actor: The Challenge Of Domestic Violence, Michael G. Heyman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article argues that the current approaches to asylum claims based on "social group" membership under the U.N. convention Relation to the Status of Refugees are deeply flawed. The Refugee Convention confers asylum on persons persecuted for their membership in a particular social group. Courts have struggled with the boundaries of the social group definition, and there appears to be no coherent way to reconcile all of the court decisions on what groups qualify as social groups under the Refugee Convention.

This Article suggests that courts adopt a consistent definition of what constitutes a social group. The definition proposed in …

The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms, And The "Rule Of Law", Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Michigan Law Review

The past decade has seen a surge in American and international efforts to promote "the rule of law" around the globe, especially in postcrisis and transitional societies. The World Bank and multinational corporations want the rule of law, since the sanctity of private property and the enforcement of contracts are critical to modern conceptions of the free market. Human-rights advocates want the rule of law since due process and judicial checks on executive power are regarded as essential prerequisites to the protection of substantive human rights. In the wake of September 11, international and national-security experts also want to promote …

The New Leviathan, Dennis Patterson

Michigan Law Review

Reputation in any field is an elusive phenomenon: part notoriety, part honor, part fame, part critical assessment. Even in legal scholarship it has an uneven, unpredictable quality. It is hard to imagine a book by a law professor that has had more immediate impact on world leaders than Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles. Much of the national-security strategy devised by the U.S. administration after the September 11 attacks expresses ideas Bobbitt conceived long before; and from a different point on the political spectrum is the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose televised nationwide address in January explicitly took the book as …

Foreword: Why Retry? Reviving Dormant Racial Justice Claims, Martha Minow

Michigan Law Review

Two familiar arguments oppose lawsuits and legislative efforts to address racial injustices from our national past, and a third tacit argument can be discerned. "Why open old wounds?": this question animates the first argument. The evidence is stale - this expresses the second argument. The third, less explicit objection reflects worries that exposing some gross and unremedied racial injustices from the past will reveal the scale of imperfections in the systems of justice and government and thereby undermine the legitimacy of those systems. To introduce the meticulous and passionate essays in this Colloquium, I elaborate and respond to each of …

American Racial Jusice On Trial - Again: African American Reparations, Human Rights, And The War On Terror, Eric K. Yamamoto, Susan K. Serrano, Michelle Natividad Rodriguez

Michigan Law Review

Much has been written recently on African American reparations and reparations movements worldwide, both in the popular press and scholarly publications. Indeed, the expanding volume of writing underscores the impact on the public psyche of movements for reparations for historic injustice. Some of that writing has highlighted the legal obstacles faced by proponents of reparations lawsuits, particularly a judicial system that focuses on individual (and not group-based) claims and tends to squeeze even major social controversies into the narrow litigative paradigm of a two-person auto collision (requiring proof of standing, duty, breach, causation, and direct injury). Other writings detail the …

Trafficking As A Human Rights Violation: The Complex Intersection Of Legal Frameworks For Conceptualizing And Combating Trafficking, Joan Fitzpatrick

Michigan Journal of International Law

The author will focus on three legal instruments: (1) the 2000 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (the Trafficking Protocol); (2) the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA), enacted by the U.S. Congress in 2000; and (3) the regulations issued in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Justice to implement the T visa for trafficking victims. The U.S. response to trafficking illustrates the difficulties faced by human rights advocates in source, transit, and destination countries to insure that anti-trafficking and other migration …

Sexual Violence As Genocide: The Developing Law Of The International Criminal Tribunals And The International Criminal Court, Jonathan M.H. Short

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This note will explore the treatment of the two primary violent sexual acts, rape and forced pregnancy, in modern international criminal law; more specifically in its treatment as genocide. The woman as an individual is the primary sufferer of sexual violence during armed conflict, however sexual violence is a calculated means by which perpetrators seek to destroy an entire ethnic group. Sexual violence is both an attack against the woman and an attack against the ethnic group, and should be prosecuted as such. While crimes against individuals are best prosecuted as crimes against humanity or under domestic law, crimes committed …

Prosecuting Human Rights Violations In Europe And America: How Legal System Structure Affects Compliance With International Obligations, Micah S. Myers

Michigan Journal of International Law

Will states really live up to these obligations? Are some states, and some legal systems, better equipped to do so than others? After all, it is one thing to commit to prosecuting horrendous offenses, or to recognize that there is an obligation under customary international law to do so, yet it is quite another to actually prosecute the perpetrators of such an offense; this is particularly the case when the government has a strong desire not to prosecute, because the accused are members of the government, because they are strong supporters of it, because they are foreign allies of the …

Internal Protection/Relocation/Flight Alternative As An Aspect Of Refugee Status Determination, James C. Hathaway, Michelle Foster

Book Chapters

In many jurisdictions around the world, the possibility of an ‘internal flight alternative’(IFA) (often referred to as ‘internal relocation alternative’) is invoked to deny refugee status to persons at risk of being persecuted for a Convention reason in part, but not all, of their country of origin. In this, as in so many areas of refugee lawand policy, the viability of a universal commitment to protection is challenged by divergence in State practice. The goals of this paper are therefore, first, briefly to review the origins and development of the practice of considering IFA as an aspect of the refugee …

The Relationship Of Imf Structural Adjustment Programs To Economic, Social, And Cultural Rights: The Argentine Case Revisited, Jason Morgan-Foster

Michigan Journal of International Law

Perhaps as important as what this Note is, is what it is not: Economic theories abound concerning the causes of the Argentine crisis, some of which directly analyze the IMF's causal connection to the Argentine catastrophe. A Note on this subject would be one of economic theory, not international human rights law. While at certain points in the analysis of the human rights implications of SAPs, it will become difficult to avoid some speculation of economic theory, it is not the primary focus of this Note. Rather than implicate the IMF as part of the cause of the crisis, this …

Freedom And Religious Tolerance In Europe, Peter Juviler

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of Protecting the Human Rights of Religious Minorities in Eastern Europe (Peter Danchin & Elizabeth Cole eds.)

Tres Vidas, Una Guerra Rafael Iznaga, Bárbara Pérez Y Gregoria Quesada Entre La Emancipación Y La Ciudadanía, Rebecca Scott

Book Chapters

In this article, Scott takes a microhistorian approach as she looks at the ways in which three Cubans of color (Rafael Iznaga, Bárbara Pérez and Gregoria Quesada), from the same rural neighborhood, sought to define and attain citizenship during and immediately after the Cuban War of Independence from 1895-1898. Juxtaposing oral and written sources, Scott shows how such evidence can be both complementary and contradictory, and how each source should be examined in light of the others.

Rafael Iznaga fought in the war as a soldier of the Liberation Army, and returned with prestige and status. While his life can …

What's In A Label?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

One of the most striking features of the international refugee regime as it has evolved over the last quarter century is the proliferation of labels. Rather than simply assessing the circumstances of applicants against the Convention refugee definition, the governments of most developed states have instead invented a seemingly endless list of alternative statuses - "B" status, humanitarian admission, temporary protected status, special leave to remain, Duldung, and the like. Persons assigned one of these labels have generally been protected against refoulement in line with Article 33 of the Refugee Convention. But in a variety of other ways, they have …

Gender, Human Rights, And Peace Agreements, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

I would first like to thank the organizers for the very great honor of being asked to present the annual Schwartz Lecture in 2002. It is especially apposite to discuss issues of international peace agreements in Ohio, not far from Dayton which is famous as the location of the process that brought an end to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However this lecture is going to examine issues that were not explored at Dayton, that is, some relationships between gender, peace agreements, and international human rights. In addition, because the function of peace agreements in today's world has become the broader …

Who Should Watch Over Refugee Law?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

On 13 December 2001, states committed themselves" ... to consider ways that may be required to strengthen the implementation of the 1951 Convention and/or 1967 Protocol". It is wonderful that after half a century we may finally be on the verge of taking oversight of the treaty seriously.

Russian Compliance With Articles Five And Six Of The European Convention Of Human Rights As A Barometer Of Legal Reform And Human Rights In Russia, Jeffrey Kahn

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note examines two of Russia's obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): the Article 5 right to liberty and security, and the Article 6 right to a fair trial to gauge Russian compliance with European human rights norms. These articles lie at the heart of systematic legal reform in the Russian Federation. This Note defends the thesis that the agonizingly slow progress of judicial reform and the advancement of human rights in Russia is a function of the inevitable lag of conceptual norms behind institutional reform. Part I explores the weak place of the rule of law …

A Ghost Is Haunting Europe, Maria Grahn-Farley

Michigan Journal of International Law

Review of Responsible Selves: Women in the Nordic Legal Cultures (Kevät Nousiainen, Åsa Gunnarsson, Karin Lundström, & Johanna Niemi-Kiesiläinen eds.)

Antiterrorism Military Commissions: The Ad Hoc Dod Rules Of Procedure, Jordan J. Paust

Michigan Journal of International Law

While the article Antiterrorism Military Commissions: Courting Illegality was set for publication, the Department of Defense formally issued its first set of Procedures for Trials by Military Commission of Certain Non-United States Citizens in the War Against Terrorism. The President's November 13th Military Order had set up several per se violations of international law. Instead of attempting to avoid them, the DOD Order of March 21, 2002 continued the violations, set up additional violations of international law, and created various rules of procedure and evidence that, if not per se violative of international law, are highly problematic. This is a …

Truth As Right And Remedy In International Human Rights Experience, Thomas M. Antkowiak

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note seeks to explore the origins, scope, and key possibilities of an evolving right to the truth. It will argue that truth is not only an essential component of the universally recognized "right to an effective remedy," but that it also serves as the gateway to a broader reparative framework necessary for victims of gross human rights abuse. The analysis shall span the Inter-American, European, and United Nations systems of human rights protection, and also will treat the burgeoning idea of the truth commission, a very prominent means of extra-judicial inquiry in contemporary transitional societies. At the conclusion, the …

The Promise Of A Post-Genocide Constitution: Healing Rwandan Spirit Injuries, Adrien Katherine Wing, Mark Richard Johnson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article hopes to extend Critical Race Theory's social construction of race theory by emphasizing ethnicity as well as race. The Rwandans are undoubtedly within the so-called "Black race." Historically, they have also been socially constructed as consisting of different races and ethnicities, even though many scholars and Rwandans do not see ethnic, much less racial, distinctions. Some of these Rwandans who did see such differences participated in the genocide.

Repairing The Legacy Of Ins V. Elias-Zacarias, Shayna S. Cook

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article examines the evolution of the nexus requirement in United States refugee law since the Elias-Zacarias decision. Part I discusses the Supreme Court's decision in Elias-Zacarias, identifying the choices the Court made among the arguments presented before it that resulted in the motive-oriented approach to nexus. This Part also delves into the Court's statement about the evidence required to demonstrate motive, concluding that the Court's treatment of the evidence before it foreshadows the confusion lower courts have demonstrated in evaluating evidence of motive. Part II looks at appellate decisions on the nexus issue since 1992, highlighting cases that …

Using Immigration Law To Protect Human Rights: A Critique Of Recent Legislative Proposals, William J. Aceves, Paul L. Hoffman

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article critiques several legislative proposals that sought to impose immigration restrictions on serious human rights abusers. Part I provides a brief overview of the international restrictions on immigration relief. In particular, it focuses on those restrictions that limit immigration relief available to individuals who have committed serious human rights abuses. Part II then reviews the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and its restrictions on immigration relief. It also examines the federal agencies charged with investigating cases of serious human rights abusers in the United States. Part III describes recent legislative proposals that have sought to deny immigration relief to …

Causation In Context: Interpreting The Nexus Clause In The Refugee Convention, Michelle Foster

Michigan Journal of International Law

The aim of this Article is to explore current approaches to identifying and applying the causation test inherent in the "for reasons of" clause and to attempt to devise a sui generis test appropriate to the unique aims and objects of the Convention. Part I begins by reviewing both the principles governing the causation analysis and their methods of application in different jurisdictions. Part II then proceeds to review the considerations that might inform the development of a causation standard in refugee law, including guidance that might be obtained from other areas of law, against the background of the need …

Dueling Fates: Should The International Legal Regine Accept A Collective Or Individual Pradigm To Protect Women's Rights?, Michigan Journal Of International Law

Michigan Journal of International Law

Transcript for Symposium held at the University of Michigan Law School on Saturday, April 6, 2002.

Persecution In The Fog Of War: The House Of Lords' Decision In Adan, Michael Kagan, William P. Johnson

Michigan Journal of International Law

In this Article, we argue that the House of Lords' reasoning in Adan was seriously flawed. The House of Lords correctly recognized that evidence that minorities face a heightened risk of being persecuted can be sufficient to show a nexus to a Convention ground. Yet it erred when it went on to hold that only differentially at-risk individuals or groups can benefit from refugee status. If a person's risk of being persecuted is causally linked to his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, the nexus requirement is satisfied irrespective of whether the …

African Courts, International Law, And Comparative Case Law: Chimera Or Emerging Human Rights Jurisprudence?, Mirna E. Adjami

Michigan Journal of International Law

Though the potential creation of a supranational human rights court has brought international attention to the African human rights system, international law and human rights scholars rarely turn to African examples when studying the domestic application of international human rights norms. This Article seeks to fill that gap by analyzing cases from several Anglophone common law countries in sub-Saharan Africa that invoke international law and comparative case law as interpretive support in their national fundamental rights jurisprudence.

When Interests Diverge, Robert S. Chang, Peter Kwan

Michigan Law Review

In her recent book Cold War Civil Rights, Professor Mary L. Dudziak, sets forth "to explore the impact of Cold War foreign affairs on U.S. civil rights reform" (p. 14). Tracing "the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in influencing civil rights policy" (p. 17), she draws "together Cold War history and civil rights history" (pp. 14-15), two areas that are usually treated as distinct subjects of inquiry. In mixing the two together, she shows that "the borders of U.S. history are not easily maintained." Perhaps it is fitting that the field …

Who Should Watch Over Refugee Law?, James C. Hathaway

Articles

We simply cannot afford to sell out the future of refugee protection in a hasty bid to establish something that looks, more or less, like an oversight mechanism for the Refugee Convention.