Human Rights Law Commons^™

Special Coverage Of The 140th Period Of Sessions Of The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Sarah Mazzochi, Jess Portmess, Alexandra Haney

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

International Legal Updates, Aimee Mayer, Jessica Lynd, Christopher Tansey, Molly Hofsommer, Misty Seemans, Kaitlin Brush, Leah Chavla

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Updates From The International And Internationalized Criminal Courts, Anna Maitland, Shahroo Yazdani, Cyrena Khoury, Paul Rinefierd, Chris Valvardi, John Coleman

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

United Nations And Ngo Updates, Thomas Avery, Sikina S. Hasham

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Updates From The Regional Human Rights Systems, Sarira Sadeghi, Christopher Tansey, Michael Becker, Emilyrose Johns, Carson Osberg

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Panel I: Building On The Committee Against Torture's Successes And Addressing Its Shortcomings - Stakeholders' Perspectives, Mark Thomson, Yuval Ginbar, Jens Færkel, Santiago Canton, Florence Simbiri-Jaoko, Felice Gaer, Joao Nataf

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Interview: José De Jesús Orozco-Henríquez, Commissioner At The Inter-American Commission On Human Rights, Human Rights Brief

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Updates From The International And Internationalized Criminal Courts, Ivan Carpio, Lindsay Roberts, Zsofia Young, Christopher Tansey, Paul Rinefierd, Slava Kuperstein

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

In Defence Of The Sphere Of Influence: Why The Wgsr Should Not Follow Professor Ruggie's Advice On Defining The Scope Of Social Responsibility, Stepan Wood

All Faculty Publications

The Working Group on Social Responsibility (WGSR) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will meet in Copenhagen from May 17 to 21, 2010 for what is likely to be its last meeting to work on ISO 26000, an international guide on social responsibility. One of the central challenges for the WGSR is to define the scope of an organization’s responsibility for human rights abuses committed by third parties. ISO 26000, approved by a large majority in a recent "Draft International Standard" ballot, answers this question largely in terms of an organization’s degree of control or influence over others’ conduct. …

The Ioc Made Me Do It: Women's Ski Jumping, Vanoc And The 2010 Winter Olympics, Margot Young

All Faculty Publications

This case comment discusses the judicial decisions in Sagen v. VANOC regarding the constitutional challenge brought by women ski jumpers to their exclusion from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. While the claimants argued that the constitutional equality provision (section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) had been infringed, the BC courts' decisions focussed on the novelty of the state action problem. At least one level of court accepted that the exclusion was discriminatory but the challenge failed because the decision to exclude lay within the power of the International Olympic Committee, an entity beyond the ambit of …

Forced Marriage And The Exoticization Of Gendered Harms In United States Asylum Law, Jenni Millbank, Catherine Dauvergne

All Faculty Publications

While claims of forced marriage or pressure to marry represent only a tiny portion of refugee claims overall, they provide an illuminating sliver reflecting the major recurring themes in gender and sexuality claims from recent decades. Refusal to marry is a flashpoint for expressing non-conformity with expected gender roles for heterosexual women, lesbians and gay men. This paper presents results from our study of 168 refugee decisions from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States where part of the claim for refugee protection concerned actual or threatened forced marriage. In the present discussion, we highlight our findings from …

No Shortcuts On Human Rights: Bail And The International Criminal Trial, Caroline L. Davidson

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

No Habeas For You! Al Maqaleh V. Gates, The Bagram Detainees, And The Global Insurgency, Michael J. Buxton

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Using Law And Education To Make Human Rights Real In Women’S Real Lives, Nancy Chi Cantalupo

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Three courses involving gender, human rights and global laws that the author teaches to two different groups (women’s/gender studies and international affairs undergraduates; and law students) demonstrate methods of making international human rights law and principles real to women’s real lives, as both an educational and activist project. By focusing on the linkages between “thinking globally” and “acting locally” in the area of gender and human rights, these courses suggest some ways of to educate and encourage students to actualize human rights laws and principles in their own communities and lives. The topics, methods and materials used in these courses …

Making Social Rights Conditional: Lessons From India, Madhav Khosla

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have witnessed important advancements in the discussion on social rights. The South African experience with social rights has revealed how such rights can be protected without providing for an individualized remedy. Comparative constitutional lawyers now debate the promise of the South African approach, and the possibility of weak-form judicial review in social rights cases. This article considers the Indian experience with social rights, and explains how it exhibits a new form of social rights adjudication. This is the adjudication of a conditional social right; an approach that displays a rare private law model of public law adjudication. This …

One New President, One New Patriarch, And A Generous Disregard For The Constitution:, Robert C. Blitt

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The government of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC)--the country's predominant religious group--recently underwent back-to-back changes in each institution's respective leadership. This coincidence of timing affords a unique opportunity to reassess the status of constitutional secularism and church-state relations in the Russian Federation. Following a discussion of the presidential and patriarchal elections that occurred between March 2008 and January 2009, the Article surveys recent developments in Russia as they relate to the nation's constitutional obligations. In the face of this analysis, the Article argues that the government and the ROC alike continue to willfully undermine the constitutional principles of …

Refugee Credibility Assessment And The "Religious Imposter" Problem, Michael Kagan

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Credibility assessment in refugee status determination (RSD) poses unique challenges when the outcome of asylum applications turns on the question of whether an asylum seeker is actually a member of a persecuted religious minority. These cases require secular adjudicators to delve into matters of religious identity and faith that are, by their nature, subjective and beyond the realm of objective analysis. This Article explores practical means of addressing this challenge through a case study of the RSD interviews of Eritrean asylum seekers in Egypt who based their refugee claims on Pentecostal religious associations. Analysis of the interview methods used in …

The Responsibility To Protect And The Decline Of Sovereignty: Free Speech Protection Under International Law, William Magnuson

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

State sovereignty has long held a revered post in international law, but it received a blow in the aftermath of World War II, when the world realized the full extent of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis on their own citizens. In the postwar period, the idea that individuals possessed rights independent of their own states gained a foothold in world discussions, and a proliferation of human rights treaties guaranteeing fundamental rights followed. These rights were, for the most part, unenforceable, though, and in the 1990s, a number of humanitarian catastrophes (in Kosovo, Rwanda, and Somalia) galvanized the international community to …

The Conflict Between The Alien Tort Statute Litigation And Foreign Amnesty Laws, Carlee M. Hobbs

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Since the landmark case Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, foreign individuals have increasingly utilized the Alien Tort Statute to raise claims of human rights violations in the United States federal courts. Defendants, however, have alleged that principles of international comity necessitate dismissal of the suit when the foreign country in which the human rights violations occurred has granted defendants amnesty. While the doctrine of international comity permits dismissal if the case requires a federal court to adjudicate the internal affairs of a foreign country, the Supreme Court held, in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, that the Alien Tort Statue grants U.S. courts jurisdiction over …

A Global Water Apartheid: From Revelation To Resolution, Itzchak Kornfeld

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

It is well settled in international human rights law that a human right to water exists. Nevertheless, to date, there has been little scholarship about what the practical contours of the right should be. If legal tools are to benefit the world's poor and disenfranchised, they cannot be void due to the impossibility of implementation. This is the problem with the purported human right to water: it is quixotic.

This Article proposes a pragmatic solution to the potable water problem for the world's poor. The solution offered here is based on a model of privatized access to water grounded in …

Missed Opportunity: Congress's Attempted Response To The World's Demand For The Violence Against Women Act, Brenton T. Culpepper

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The Supreme Court's decision in U.S. v. Morrison struck down, as a violation of the Commerce Clause, § 13,981 of the Violence Against Women Act, that provided a private right of action for victims of gender-motivated violence to assert against their abusers. However, § 13,981 should have been affirmed as implementing legislation designed to fulfill U.S. obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and customary international law. Recognizing § 13,981 as implementing legislation serves as a foundation for the United States to restore itself as a legitimate human rights leader capable of both appreciating its own international …

Promoting Distributional Equality For Women: Some Thoughts On Gender And Global Corporate Citizenship In Foreign Direct Investment, Rachel J. Anderson

Scholarly Works

This essay applies a legal theory of global corporate citizenship to the question of women’s distributional equality in foreign direct investment. It proposes ways that a legal theory of mandatory global corporate citizenship can expand the ways we think about regulating transnational corporations and promoting gender equality.

Human Rights Without Foundations, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a good time for human rights. Not that they are respected more than in the past. The flagrant resort to kidnapping, arbitrary arrests, and torture by the United States of America (USA), and the unprecedented restriction of individual freedom in the USA, and in Great Britain (GB), cast doubt about that. It is a good time for human rights in that claims about such rights are used more widely in the conduct of world affairs than before. There are declarations of and treaties about human rights, international courts and tribunals with jurisdiction over various human right violations. They …

Embedded International Law And The Constitution Abroad, Sarah H. Cleveland

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores the role of "embedded" international law in U.S. constitutional interpretation, in the context of extraterritorial application of the Constitution. Traditional U.S. understandings of the Constitution's application abroad were informed by nineteenth-century international law principles of jurisdiction, which largely limited the authority of a sovereign state to its geographic territory. Both international law and constitutional law since have developed significantly away from strictly territorial understandings of governmental authority, however. Modern international law principles of jurisdiction and state responsibility now recognize that states legitimately may exercise power in a number of extraterritorial contexts, and that legal obligations may apply …

Inter-American System, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Inter-American System, Claudia Martin

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

As Old As The Hills: Detention And Immigration, Lenni Benson

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Prospective Parents And The Children's Rights Convention, Carter Dillard

American University International Law Review

This Article addresses the novel question of whether states parties can successfully implement the Children’s Rights Convention by placing legal obligations on prospective parents, thereby influencing not just a child’s environment, but also the procreation of that child. First, the Article takes a unique version of the child-centered perspective, one that recognizes that as we move back in time in the direction of and even before a child’s birth, our obligations to the child grow because our actions become ever more influential. The perspective also takes into account current moral theories of parental obligation to prospective children. The Article then …

Forced Eviction And Resettlement In Cambodia: Case Studies From Phnom Penh, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Rijie Ernie Gao, Elizabeth Joynes, Anna Cave, Jessica Mikhailevich

Faculty Scholarship

This Article culminates a project undertaken by the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic (“Leitner Clinic”) at Fordham Law School to examine the effects of land resettlement on communities that were forcibly evicted or are at risk of forced eviction from their homes, and, in particular, the effects of forced evictions on the Boeung Kak Lake community in central Phnom Penh and on people living with HIV/AIDS (“PLWHA”). This Article is based on field research the Leitner Clinic conducted in Cambodia in the fall of 2008. While in Cambodia, the Leitner Clinic interviewed families from four different communities: resettlement camps …

The Rule Of Law And Human Dignity: Reexamining Fuller’S Canons, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Lon Fuller offered an analysis of the rule of law in the form of eight ‘canons’ of lawmaking. He argued (1) that these canons constitute a ‘procedural natural law’, as distinct from traditional ‘substantive’ natural law; but also (2) that lawmaking conforming to the canons will enhance human dignity—a ‘substantive’ result. This paper argues the following points: first, that Fuller mischaracterized his eight canons, which are substantive rather than procedural; second, that there is an important sense in which they enhance human dignity; third, that they fail to enhance human dignity to the fullest extent because they understand it in …