Human Rights Law Commons^™

The Children Of Science: Property, People, Or Something In Between?, Star Q. Lopez

ExpressO

How should states classify embryos? The war has often waged between two classifications, people versus property. But what if a state assumed something in between, finding the embryo to be a potential person entitled to special respect? If a state adopted this position, how would the law affect medical research?

Presuming embryos constitute potential persons, the debate would continue with how to define “special respect.” The status of a potential person runs along a spectrum between property and personhood. How one defines “special respect” determines where the potential person falls along this spectrum. Special respect would create a spectrum of …

The Role Of Women In Peacekeeping And Peacemaking: Devising Solutions To The Demand Side Of Trafficking, Connie De La Vega, Chelsea E. Haleynelson

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Superstition-Based Injustice In Africa And The United States: The Use Of Provocation As A Defense For Killing Witches And Homosexuals, Jennifer Dumin

ExpressO

This Article examines two different instances where strong cultural and religious beliefs suggest that an individual is justified in taking another’s life. Focusing primarily on South Africa and the United States, it argues that the rationale used to defend those who kill suspected witches and those who kill suspected homosexuals is the same – merely because a criminal holds a belief that the victim is evil, the criminal is somehow entitled to a lesser punishment. In the United States, those who readily recognize the absurdity of the witchcraft defense may have some difficulty in recognizing the same level of absurdity …

Enhancing Human Security: U.S. Policies And Their Health Impact On Women In Sub-Saharan Africa, Tamera Fillinger

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

A Sign Of "Weakness"? Disrupting Gender Certainties In The Implementation Of Security Council Resolution 1325, Dianne Otto

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article will examine whether efforts to implement the Resolution suggest new ways to address the old problems: the reliance on stereotyped gender representations to rally women in the cause of peace and the vexed strategic question of how movements for transformative change might influence the mainstream institutions of international law and politics. The first concerns the way that the category of gender is deployed by women's peace activism and by international institutions as they respond to it. The author’s question is whether it is possible to rally women to promote peace, while also challenging the gender dichotomies that underpin …

The United States As Global Sheriff: Using Unilateral Sanctions To Combat Human Trafficking, Janie Chuang

Michigan Journal of International Law

By situating the U.S. rise to dominance in historical and political context, this Article underscores the significance of U.S. unilateralism for international anti-trafficking law and policy.

The Equality Paradise: Paradoxes Of The Law's Power To Advance Equality, Marcia L. Mccormick

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper, written for Texas Wesleyan Law School's Gloucester Conference, ¿Too Pure an Air: Law and the Quest for Freedom, Justice, and Equality,¿ is a brief exploration of a broader project. Every civil rights movement must struggle with how to allocate scarce resources to accomplish the broadest change possible. This paper compares the legal and political strategies of the Black rights movement and the women's rights movement in the United States, comparing both the strategy choices and the results. These two movement followed essentially the same strategies. Where they have attained success and where each has failed demonstrates the limits …

Sexual Abuse Of Women In Prison: A Modern Corollary Of Slavery, Brenda V. Smith

Project on Addressing Prison Rape - Articles

This paper addresses the sexual abuse of women in custody as a more contemporary manifestation of slavery and discusses the congruencies and the differences that exist between the sexual abuse of women in custody and slavery. The paper charts the history of the parallel abolition and prison reform movements and examines their divergent paths arguing that the women's movement abandonment of prison advocacy has harmed the women in prison movement. The article concludes that the embrace of human rights norms has assisted in providing new avenues for redressing the sexual abuse of women in custody.

Feminist Legal Theory And Human Trafficking In The United States: Towards A New Framework, Cynthia L. Wolken

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Gender Equality And Women's Solidarity Across Religious, Ethnic And Class Difference In The Kenyan Constitutional Review Process, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

This paper examines Kenyan's women's struggle to gain new legal authority for gender equality and women's empowerment in the Kenya Constitutional Review process. Specifically it examines the efforts of the campaign to "safeguard the gains of women in the Draft Constitution," a campaign launched by a coalition of four civil society organizations in Kenya after the release of a new Draft constitution in 2002. Its focus is the 2002 Draft, the Draft's relationship to the current Kenyan Constitution and to recent constitutional proposals, from a gender perspective.

The constitutional review process is part of a larger movement to democratize the …

Domestic Violence In The Haitian Culture And The American Legal Response: Fanm Ayisyen Ki Gen Kouraj, Mary Clark

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Modern Day Slavery In Our Own Backyard, Ellen L. Buckwalter, Meredith S. Salvaggio, Susan L. Pollet, Maria Perinetti

ExpressO

Trafficking in persons is one of the fastest growing areas of international criminal activity. Each year an estimated 600,000 – 800,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world’s borders. Approximately 2.5 million men, women and children are victims of trafficking at any point in time throughout the world. Approximately 14,500 – 17,500 individuals are trafficked annually into the United States, making the United States the third largest destination country in the world for victims of human trafficking.

In order to fight trafficking in the United States effectively, legislation at the state level, in addition to the federal …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

The W Visa: A Legislative Proposal For Female And Child Refugees Trapped In A Post-9/11 World, Marisa S. Cianciarulo

Working Paper Series

This article addresses an urgent humanitarian crisis affecting unaccompanied or abused refugee children and widowed, divorced, abandoned or abused female heads of refugee households. Such women and children suffer the consequences of the post-9/11 U.S. refugee resettlement backlog more severely than the general refugee population. They are far more at risk of life-threatening harm such as trafficking, sexual exploitation and rape. Moreover, they are far less likely to present a threat to U.S. national security than many people who are able to secure visas to the United States quickly and with fewer background checks. Despite their vulnerability and lack of …

The Evolving, Yet Still Inadequate, Legal Protections Afforded Battered Immigrant Women, Indira K. Balram

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

Global Sex Trafficking And The Trafficking Victims Protection Act Of 2000: Legislative Responses To The Problem Of Modern Slavery, Rosy Kandathil

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Human trafficking is becoming the fastest growing criminal activity in the world. Generally, trafficking is defined as the transportation of persons across international borders for labor purposes, by means of force, fraud, or coercion. Commerce directly related to human slavery yields approximately $7-$10 billion a year, trailing only behind drugs and weapons trade for international profit. According to recent congressional findings, over 700,000 human beings are trafficked across international borders each year, including approximately 50,000 women and children into the United States. Women and girl children are the primary targets for sexual exploitation into prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, and other …

Pornography As Trafficking, Catharine A. Mackinnon

Michigan Journal of International Law

In material reality, pornography is one way women and children are trafficked for sex. To make visual pornography, the bulk of the industry's products, real women and children, and some men, are rented out for use in commercial sex acts. In the resulting materials, these people are then conveyed and sold for a buyer's sexual use. Obscenity laws, the traditional legal approach to the problem, do not care about these realities at all. The morality of what is said and shown remains their focus and concern. The injuries inflicted on real people to make the materials, or because they are …

Paradoxes Of Health And Equality: When A Boy Becomes A Girl, Noa Ben-Asher

ExpressO

This paper is about an unusual child custody dispute between the parents of a six-year-old child and the child welfare services of Franklin County, Ohio. The conflict emerged when the child’s parents complied with their male child’s professed desire to be treated as a girl by attempting to enroll the child in the first grade as a girl. The paper treats this case as an exemplary test-case of contemporary co-dependence between scientific-medical discourse and liberal-rights discourse. The paper analyzes the positions of the two sides of the custody dispute according to the classic modern distinction between mind and body. On …

“Which One Of You Did It?” Criminal Liability For “Causing Or Allowing” The Death Of A Child, Lissa Griffin

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Profitable Proposals: Explaining And Addressing The Mail-Order Bride Industry Through International Human Rights Law, Vanessa Brocato

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article looks at the MOBI in the United States through the lens of international human rights. Part II will describe the MOBI. Part III will evaluate the MOBI within an international human rights framework. Part IV will examine current U.S. legislation relating to the MOBI. Part V suggests strategies for addressing the MOBI. Nations will not be able to solve the problem independently because the MOBI is a transnational phenomenon. Conducting a critique of marriage brokers in a human rights context can help place problems caused by the MOBI at the forefront of international debate. Applying current human rights …

International Child Abductions: The Challenges Facing America , Charles F. Hall

ExpressO

International child abductors often escape domestic law enforcement and disappear without consequence or resolution. International child abductions occur too frequently; in the United States alone, the number of children abducted abroad every year has risen to over 1,000. Currently, 11,000 American children live abroad with their abductors. These abductions occur despite international treaties and the Congressional resolutions that have significantly stiffened the penalties for those caught. Effectively combating international child abductions requires drafting resolutions that are acceptable across the diverse societies and cultures of the international community. Without such resolutions to fill the gaps of current treaties this problem will …

Lysistrata, Women And War: International Law's Treatment Of Women In Conflict And Post-Conflict Situations, Emma L. Lindsay

ExpressO

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is powerful anti-war play often revived during times of international conflict. This paper uses Lysistrata to highlight and critique binary oppositions that underpin the treatment of women in conflict and post-conflict situations in the play and in international law. While many of the experiences of women and girls in war are similar to those of men and boys, there are important differences. Existing inequalities between women and men, and patterns of discrimination against women and girls, tend to be exacerbated in wartime. There are circumstances in which women suffer harms of a different kind and to a different …

Gay And Lesbian Rights To Procreate And Access To Assisted Reproductive Technology, John A. Robertson

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Human Rights Discourse To Secure Women's Interests: Critical Analysis Of The Implications, Renu Mandhane

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This article highlights the significant theoretical constraints of universalism, the tendency of human rights advocates to ignore the underlying cause of rights violations, as well as problems associated with the concept of and informal hierarchy between rights. The article suggests that there are certain circumstances in which INGOs that rely primarily on human rights language in their advocacy efforts may wish to supplement their analysis with explicit reference to feminist legal theory in order to more effectively secure women's interests globally. These ideas will be developed with ongoing reference to the recent and successful campaign initiated by Nepali women to …

Sexual Slavery And The International Criminal Court: Advancing International Law, Valerie Oosterveld

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article explores the advancement of the international crime of sexual slavery, from its initial inclusion in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court through further development in the delineation of the ICC's Elements of Crime document. This Article begins with a detailed exploration of the negotiation process that led to the inclusion of the crime of sexual slavery in the Rome Statute. The first Section describes the decision to include both sexual slavery and enforced prostitution as crimes, as well as the debate on listing sexual slavery as a crime separate from that of enslavement. Next, the Section …

Copyright Infringement, Sex Trafficking, And Defamation In The Fictional Life Of A Geisha, Susan Tiefenbrun

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Memoirs of a Geisha has sold and made millions for Arthur Golden since 1997. This is his first novel, and it has earned him worldwide acclaim. A feature film version directed by Steven Spielberg is in the works. The book is translated into more than twenty languages. This article uses the book and the legal controversy that ensued after its publication to ask, and hopefully answer, two questions: First, is the geisha tradition as described by Golden in his fictional biography a variant of sex trafficking and sexual slavery which, despite possible cultural justifications, should be abolished by law? Second, …

The Last Line Of Defense: The Doctrine Of Command Responsibility, Gender Crimes In Armed Conflict, And The Kahan Report (Sabra & Shatilla), Sherrie L. Russell-Brown

ExpressO

“THE LAST LINE OF DEFENSE” addresses using the doctrine of command responsibility - the doctrine according to which military and non-military leaders can be held individually criminally responsible for the crimes committed by their subordinates - before the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a way to prevent gender crimes in armed conflict. The prevention of gender crimes in armed conflict is an important issue for a variety of reasons. One extremely important reason is the connection that the United Nations has cited between the AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa and rape in armed conflict. In addition, in the August 25, …

Bridging The “Divide” Between Feminism And Child Protection Using The Discourse Of International Human Rights , Sherrie L. Russell-Brown

ExpressO

“Bridging the Divide” is an essay that addresses the perceived tension or “divide” between feminism and child protection. While, in theory, women’s and children’s rights are not necessarily antithetical, the policies that have been devised (allegedly to preserve and promote those rights) are, at times, at odds. For example, the policy of social services to remove a child from the home of the mother, rather than assist both mother and child by the creation of a better home environment, is certainly at odds with rights of the mother. To simplify the issue greatly, the right of women to have and …

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 …

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 …