Human Rights Law Commons^™

Learning From The Past: Using Korematsu And Other Japanese Internment Cases To Provide Protections Against Immigration Detentions, Caleb Ward

Arkansas Law Review

One of the darkest periods in modern United States history is reoccurring with mixed public approval. During World War II, the United States government enacted executive orders creating a curfew, proscribing living areas, and forcing the exclusion and detention of all Japanese descendants from the West Coast. The United States justified these grievous freedom and equality violations through an increased need for national security “because we [were] at war with [Japan].” However, this perceived increased need for national security came from a fraudulent assessment showing any Japanese-American could be planning espionage or sabotage of the United States. After the war, …

The European Convention For The Prevention Of Torture And Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment: Genesis Of An Exemplary Model Of International Control On Human Rights, Giovanni Distefano

UAEU Law Journal

The 26 June 1987, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted the “European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which entered eventually into force two years later. Being closely intertwined with the European Convention of Human Rights (1950), the Torture Convention establishes a parallel monitoring system ensuring the respect of the subjective rights contained therein. In addition to the 1950 Convention, it introduces an absolutely novel mechanism aimed to address in a preventive and effective way the needs related to the protection of human dignity and other core human rights …

The Concept Of Torture And Other Forms Of Cruel, Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment: Study On The Jurisprudence Of International Oversight Mechanisms On Human Rights, Mohammed Khalil Al Mousa

UAEU Law Journal

Established principles of customary international law of human rights include prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. International Human Rights conventions and regional legislations recognize this principle. But the vast majority of these texts have not been exposed to the concept of torture and therefore cannot distinguish it from other prohibited forms of ill-treatment, with the exception of the United Nations Convention against Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and regional conventions limited to defining torture, there is no other definition in the human rights conventions that addresses this concept.

It is noteworthy to add …

Transparency Of Land-Based Investments: Cameroon Country Snapshot, Sam Szoke-Burke, Samuel Nguiffo, Stella Tchoukep

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Despite a recent transparency law and participation in transparency initiatives, Cameroon’s investment environment remains plagued by poor transparency.

In a new report focusing on agribusiness projects in Cameroon, CCSI and the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) find that:

• Communities continue to be excluded from decision-making around investments.
• The government pursues a top-down approach to concession allocation and remains reluctant to recognize all legitimate tenure rights.
• The government faces threats to its legitimacy as the grievances of citizens and investors alike lead to the barring of roads by communities and investor withdrawals.

CCSI and CED therefore call for:

• A …

Race And Representation: The Legislative Council In Hong Kong During The Reign Of Queen Victoria, Dongsheng Zang

Washington International Law Journal

Black Americans need not be told that racism is not accidental, nor is it marginal in their lives. The rest of the American society does. In fact, race is a foundational consideration in the development of democracy in Anglo- American history. This article attempts to demonstrate, through colonial history of Hong Kong, how white supremacy played a central role in shaping the British colonial policy during the nineteenth century—the reign of Queen Victoria. Hong Kong was ceded to the British Empire when two ideas in Victorian England were competing to dominate its colonial policy: one was anti-slavery, and the other …

Criminalization Is Not The Only Way: Guatemala’S Law Against Femicide And Other Forms Of Violence Against Women And The Rates Of Femicide In Guatemala, Sydney Bay

Washington International Law Journal

Femicide in Guatemala has not decreased over the past twelve years, despite government efforts to curb the practice. In 2008, Guatemala passed the Law Against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence Against Women, which defined and criminalized femicide. The Law also created regulatory agencies and courts focused on stopping femicide and other forms of violence against women in the country, including physical, sexual, emotional, and economic violence. But because the government lacks resources and it has received resistance from the agencies’ local levels, femicide and the violence against women has not diminished. Additionally, recent Supreme Court cases have weakened aspects …

Corporate Complicity In International Criminal Law: Potential Responsibility Of European Arms Dealers For Crimes Committed In Yemen, Marina Aksenova

Washington International Law Journal

This article examines the question of corporate complicity within the framework of international criminal law and, more specifically, at the International Criminal Court (ICC). It does so by referencing a communication to the ICC filed by several non-governmental organizations, inviting the prosecutor to examine potential criminal responsibility of several European corporate officials who are knowingly supplying weapons to the United Arab Emirates/Saudi-led coalition currently engaged in a military offensive in Yemen. This submission raises an important legal question of whether the ICC’s Rome Statute provides for the possibility to hold corporate officials accountable in cases of complicity in gross human …

American Judicial Rejectionism And The Domestic Court’S Undermining Of International Human Rights Law And Policy After Human Right Violations Have Occurred In The State, Jessika L. Gonzalez

Washington International Law Journal

Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd’s executions ignited protests across the world. These protests raised debate over the United States Supreme Court’s creation of qualified immunity for police misconduct. This in turn creates an appropriate opportunity to stop and take stock of United States law surrounding protections and immunities afforded to law enforcement officials, relative to international law and policy on law enforcement accountability and oversight. In doing so, this article uncovers how the American judiciary carries out a new form of American rejectionism powered by its use of qualified immunity doctrine, which in practice, results in a lack …

Pornography, Its Harms, And A New Legal Strategy: Research And Experience In Japan, Seiya Morita, Caroline Norma

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In this article we describe pornography’s harms in Japan, which are known about from surveys and research, and from the outreach and consulting activities of Japanese feminist-abolitionist groups. Among these are the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) and People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS). We then propose a renewed classification scheme for pornography’s harms that centrally considers the experiences of victims in Japan. Lastly, we consider various legal approaches to addressing the myriad harms we describe and suggest possibilities for a new legal strategy. The article’s research comes from Japanese-language materials produced by the above-mentioned activist groups, as …

Kū Kia‘I Mauna: Protecting Indigenous Religious Rights, Joshua Rosenberg

Washington Law Review

Courts historically side with private interests at the expense of Indigenous religious rights. Continuing this trend, the Hawai‘i State Supreme Court allowed the Thirty- Meter-Telescope to be built atop Maunakea, a mountain sacred to Native Hawaiians. This decision led to a mass protest that was organized by Native Hawaiian rights advocates and community members. However, notwithstanding the mountain’s religious and cultural significance, Indigenous plaintiffs could not prevent construction of the telescope on Maunakea.

Unlike most First Amendment rights, religious Free Exercise Clause claims are not generally subject to strict constitutional scrutiny. Congress has mandated the application of strict scrutiny to …

Let Indians Decide: How Restricting Border Passage By Blood Quantum Infringes On Tribal Sovereignty, Rebekah Ross

Washington Law Review

American immigration laws have been explicitly racial throughout most of the country’s history. For decades, only White foreign nationals could become naturalized citizens. All racial criteria have since vanished from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)—all but one. Section 289 of the INA allows “American Indians born in Canada” to freely cross into the United States if they possess at least 50% blood “of the American Indian race.” Such American Indians cannot be prohibited from entering the United States and can obtain lawful permanent residence status—if they meet the blood quantum requirement. Such racialized immigration controls arbitrarily restrict cross-border Indigenous …

Transparency For Whom? Grounding Land Investment Transparency In The Needs Of Local Actors, Sam Szoke-Burke

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Transparency is often seen as a means of improving governance and accountability of investment, but its potential to do so is hindered by vague definitions and failures to focus on the needs of key local actors.

In this new report focusing on agribusiness, forestry, and renewable energy projects (“land investments”), CCSI grounds transparency in the needs of project-affected communities and other local actors. Transparency efforts that seek to inform and empower communities can also help governments, companies, and other actors to more effectively manage operational risk linked to social conflict.

Troublingly, the report finds that:

• Disclosures around land investments continue …

The Aggravating Duty Of Non-Aggravation, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

International law's duty of non-aggravation requires states to avoid actions that might inflame an international dispute, both to maintain international peace and to preserve the effectiveness of judicial or arbitral proceedings. Yet parties on the receiving end of calls for non-aggravation --whether from the Security Council or at tribunal -- have little idea of what conduct they are expected to avoid. This state of affairs is most unfortunate in light of the centrality of this norm to the peaceful resolution of disputes and, in particular, examples of seemingly provocative and aggravating acts in recent years. This article attempts to give …

Reckoning: A Dialogue About Racism, Antiracists, And Business & Human Rights, Erika George, Jena Martin, Tara Van Ho

Faculty Scholarship

Video of George Floyd's death sparked global demonstrations and prompted individuals, communities and institutions to grapple with their own roles in embedding and perpetuating racist structures. The raison d'être of Business and Human Rights (BHR) is to tackle structural corporate impediments to the universal realization of human rights. Yet, racism, one of the most obvious of such barriers, has been a blind spot for BHR. While the field has contended with gender inequality, there have only been tokenistic nods to intersectional harms caused by business activities. The failure to address racism seriously undermines both the promise of BHR generally and …

Reckoning: A Dialogue About Racism, Antiracists, And Business & Human Rights, Erika George, Jena Martin, Tara Van Ho

Washington International Law Journal

Video of George Floyd’s death sparked global demonstrations and prompted individuals, communities and institutions to grapple with their own roles in embedding and perpetuating racist structures. The raison d’être of Business and Human Rights (BHR) is to tackle structural corporate impediments to the universal realization of human rights. Yet, racism, one of the most obvious of such barriers, has been a blind spot for BHR. While the field has contended with gender inequality, there have only been tokenistic nods to intersectional harms caused by business activities. The failure to address racism seriously undermines both the promise of BHR generally and …

Developing International Guidelines For Protecting Schools And Universities From Military Use During Armed Conflict, Steven Haines

International Law Studies

One consequence of armed conflict, especially that of a non-international character, is serious damage done to vital societal infrastructure. Education–schools and universities–can be severely disrupted, even subject to attack. Targeting of schools may not invariably be unlawful if educational facilities are being put to military use. Such use may itself not be unlawful but it can result in schools being transformed from civilian objects into military objectives–and subject, therefore, to lawful targeting. This was a problem highlighted by humanitarian NGOs a decade ago and led to the formation, by both NGOs and United Nations agencies, of the Global Coalition to …

Formation And Development Of The Prosecutor's Supervision Over The Compliance Of Laws In Investigation Of Crimes In The Sphere Of Information Technologies, Atobek Ravshanovich Davronov, Atobek Davronov

ProAcademy

The rapid growth of information technologies naturally determines the interest of researchers in them from various fields of science. Law, including criminal law, is no exception. Currently: a separate branch of law is being formed - information law. Despite this, until now in science unified approaches to the analysis of information and legal phenomena have not been developed. The article analyzes the formation and development of prosecutorial supervision over the execution of laws in the investigation of crimes in the field of information technology, and also studied the process of the emergence of information technology as a type of crime …

Prosecutor's Supervision Over The Legality Of The Preliminary Investigation And Inquiry During The Qualification Of Crimes In The Field Of Information Technology, Atobek Ravshanovich Davronov

ProAcademy

Correct, that is, consistent with the principles of criminal law and criminal law, qualification of a crime ensures accurate and full application of the complex of norms of criminal and criminal procedure laws. Depending on the qualification of the crime, criminal law issues are resolved about punishment, release from criminal liability and punishment, parole, calculation of convictions, amnesty. The qualification of crimes is important for initiating a criminal case, determining the subject of proof, ensuring the rights of the accused and applying other criminal procedural norms. This scientific and practical article is devoted to the prosecutor's supervision over the correct …

Humans Long Ignored: Revisiting Nepa's Definition Of "Human Environment" In The Era Of Black Lives Matter, Travis D. Jones

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Stories Of Syrian Refugees From Za’Atari- The Second Largest Refugee Camp In The World: A Review Of Salam Neighbor, Christine A. Wernet

Societies Without Borders

Salam Neighbor is a moving documentary which explores the human rights issues plaguing Syrian refugees. Two young film makers, Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple, immerse themselves in Za’atari, the second largest refugee camp in the world, located just across the Syrian border in Jordan and home to over 85,000 refugees. They provide the viewer with an inside understanding of how refugee camps work and they humanize Muslim refugees. They are warmly welcomed into the camp and they are befriended by refugees like Ismail, Raouf, and Ghoussoon. The despair and vulnerability of these individuals who have chosen peace over war is …

Diminishing Global Power, Downgrading Human Rights: Making Sense Of American Foreign Policy Under Donald Trump, Timothy M. Gill

Societies Without Borders

President Donald Trump has generated much confusion concerning his foreign policy approach, and he has often displayed contradictory positions on an array of issues. Trump has, for example, praised authoritarian leaders in Eastern Europe, but condemned them in Latin America. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of Trump’s foreign policy approach, and its novelties and continuities, by putting his administration into comparative-historical focus alongside Bush II and Obama. I analyze their foreign policy approach by using Michael Mann’s IEMP model of power to draw out their distinctive qualities. Similar to Mann’s own analysis of Bush II, I …

Global Human Rights Organizations And National Patterns: Amnesty International’S Responses To Darfur, Joachim J. Savelsberg

Societies Without Borders

This article provides an analysis of Amnesty International and its efforts to establish a global, human rights-based narrative on the mass violence in Darfur, Sudan, during the first decade of the 21^st century. Interviews show how Amnesty’s narrative resembles that of the judicial field. Respondents insist that justice, once achieved, will help reach other goals such as peace. Relative unanimity in representing the violence supports the notion of globalizing forces highlighted by the world polity school, but national conditions also color narratives, in line with recent literature on national contexts of INGO work and a long tradition of neo-Weberian …

Sorting Out Concern: European Attitudes Toward Human Trafficking, Jennifer A. Cheek, Lindsey Peterson

Societies Without Borders

Human trafficking is a global phenomenon, which is sometimes conflated with other cross-national social problems. While trafficking certainly occurs within countries, much of it occurs across borders. In this paper we examine one of the only available datasets that addresses individual concern about human trafficking: the Eurobarometer 2003. Individual concern about human trafficking matters, especially in democracies, because government policy is in part shaped by citizen preferences. When democratic governments are not responsive to citizens, they risk being voted out in the next election cycle. What we find is that concern for human trafficking varies by gender, age, marital status, …

Immigrant Voices: How Do Patterns Of Expressive Forms Of Civic Engagement Differ Across Immigrant Generation?, Renee Stepler, Hiromi Ishizawa

Societies Without Borders

Prior research suggests that immigrants in the U.S. are less likely to civically engage than the native-born, but few studies have systematically examined whether levels of expressive engagement differ by immigrant generational status – particularly in the case of contacting a public official and boycotting or buycotting products for political or social reasons. Using the Current Population Survey, November 2011 and 2013 Civic Engagement Supplements, this study examines whether these forms of expressive engagement differ across immigrant generational status, and by race and ethnicity within immigrant generations. In accord with classical assimilation theory, the findings show that the first generation …

Determinants Of Open Attitudes Towards Foreign Nationals In Japan, Shigemi Ohtsuki

Societies Without Borders

With a declining birth rate and an aging population, Japan needs to open the door to immigrants in order to maintain its workforce. "Multicultural Coexistence" or “tabunka-kyosei” in Japanese is commonly used to describe the relationship between Japanese people and foreign nationals in Japan. Unfortunately, the definition of this term is entirely unclear. This study defines "Multicultural Coexistence" based on two conceptions, “Willingness for Communication” and “Support or Opposition for the equality of rights.” The analyses are based on quantitative data; a sample of 1,823 Japanese persons and a second sample of 292 foreign national persons living in …

Comparing Ignorance: Imagined Immigration And The Exclusion Of Migrantsin The U.S. And Western Europe, Daniel Herda Phd

Societies Without Borders

There exists a well-documented tendency among citizens to perceive immigrant populations as much larger than indicated by official statistics. This misperception has been linked to desires to halt the flow off immigration or restrict immigrants’ rights, raising concern about the consequences of pervasive faulty information. However, ignorance extends beyond questions of population size. There are also many qualitative misperceptions upon which individuals base their opinions about foreigners. In particular, citizens are likely to hold incorrect perceptions about the legal status of the typical immigrant (i.e. documented vs undocumented). The current study takes a unique approach by simultaneously examining both quantitative …

Who Says Human Rights Are Not Respected? A Cross-National Comparison Of Objective And Subjective Ratings, Rob Clark

Societies Without Borders

Country ratings of human rights conditions are now quite popular in macro comparative analysis. However, little is known as to whether (or to what extent) these scores correspond with mass sentiment in each country. Do “objective” ratings from the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli-Richards index (CIRI) correspond with “subjective” ratings issued by the public? In this study, I answer this question, drawing from the most recent wave of the World Values Survey (2010 – 2014), in which respondents from 59 countries are asked to assess the level of respect for individual human rights in their country. The findings …

Rainbows For Rights: The Role Of Lgbt Activism In Gay Rights Promotion, Victor Asal, Amanda Murdie 8495795, Udi Sommer

Societies Without Borders

Are advocacy efforts successful in improving the de jure rights of sexual minorities? In this paper, we argue that the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights NGO movement has been a powerful force in the struggle against sexual discrimination. However, the work of LGBT organizations is much harder in areas of the world where pre-existing public attitudes are not supportive of the rights in question. By focusing on the issue of sexual minority rights, we are able to see how underlying public attitude divergence on a human rights issue can influence advocacy success. We test the implications of our …

International Differences In Support For Human Rights, Sam Mcfarland Ph. D.

Societies Without Borders

International differences in support for human rights are reviewed. The first of two sections reviews variations in the strength of ratification of UN human rights treaties, followed by an examination of the commonalities and relative strengths among the five regional human rights systems. This review indicates that internationally the strongest human rights support is found in Europe and the Americas, with weaker support in Africa, followed by still weaker support in the Arab Union and Southeast Asia. The second section reviews variations in responses to public opinion polls on a number of civil and economic rights. A strong coherence in …

A Bibliometric Analysis Of Human Trafficking In The Wake Of Natural Disasters, Shashikala Gurpur Dr, Manika Kamthan Dr, Vartika Tiwari Ms.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study is based on the bibliometric analysis of research publications that focus on highlighting the interlinkages between natural disasters and human trafficking as its aftermath. The main objectives of the study are to determine the frequency of such publications and also to establish that the problem of trafficking as a result of natural disasters has not received enough attention from the researchers. The data was collected from the Scopus database using VOSviewer software. Literature written from 2000 to October 2020 were perused. The study consisted of a total of 66 documents which are classified into articles, letters, editorials conference …