International Law Commons^™

Principles On Effective Investigative Interviews: A New Instrument Of International Law, Juan E. Mendez, Matthew Ilsley

Human Rights Brief

International law absolutely prohibits torture and ill-treatment, yet such abuses remain prevalent and widespread. It most frequently occurs in the questioning of individuals by law enforcement, intelligence officials, and military personnel in the context of “fighting crime,” obtaining confessions, controlling detainees, and “counterterrorism.” The “Torture Memorandums,” exemplifying the deeply misguided practices used in the global fight against terror following the attacks of September 11, 2001, illuminated the pervasiveness of these practices.

The Forgotten Sexual And Gender-Based Violence Of The Vietnam-American War: Is Justice Too Late For Vietnamese Victims And Survivors?, Madison P. Bingle

Human Rights Brief

“The past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately.” —Desmond Tutu

The Vietnam-American War ended nearly fifty years ago. However, the atrocities committed during the war have had a devasting impact on the lives of persons involved long after the conflicts’ end. A particularly marginalized group within survivors and victims of the Vietnam-American War is Vietnamese women who experienced sexual and gender-based violence. And given the specific tactics of warfare employed during this war, including the use of …

Restraining The Heartless: Erosion Of Corporate Liability Under The Alien Tort Statute And The Path Forward For Victims Seeking Redress, Alexa M. Duffy

American University Law Review

The Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) is a U.S. federal law dating back to 1789 that allows non-U.S. citizens to file civil lawsuits in federal courts against individuals or entities for alleged international law violations. While originally interpreted to address piracy and the safeguarding of foreign diplomats, the ATS gained new relevance in the late twentieth century when it was used to hold individuals and corporations accountable for human rights abuses committed abroad, making it a critical tool in seeking justice for human rights violations.

This Comment argues that there is no longer a realistic federal forum for ATS suits against …

The Political Economy Of Due Diligence Legislation, Peter Draper, Andreas Freytag, Naoise Mcdonagh, Matthias Menter

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The policy challenge. Citizens and politicians in Western democracies have increasingly become aware of the importance of human rights, civil liberties, social rights, and sustainability issues as well as the different adherence to basic rights (such as equal treatment) all over the world. This trend has recently materialized in laws in the United States (US), Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. To varying extents, these oblige domestic businesses to comply with, and enforce, Western values and standards along their international supply chains. This values-based due diligence legislation has caused ongoing controversies over compliance costs, impacts on foreign relations – particularly with developing …

The Promise Of Collaborative Problem Solving In Enhancing Iam Effectiveness, Gina Barbieri

Perspectives

This essay analyses the effectiveness of collaborative problem-solving through mediation within accountability mechanisms, and considers ways in which western mediation principles should be enhanced to ensure fair outcomes given the power imbalance at play in development disputes. It also considers whether there is any scope to use problem solving principles to address questions of compliance, arguing for consideration of a hybrid approach to bolster tools available to IAMs, and so strengthen outcomes for communities.

Into The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death: War Crimes Committed In Service Of Russia's Crusade To Destroy Ukraine, Chris Galarza

American University National Security Law Brief

When Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine during the early morning of February 24, 2022, most in the American defense and diplomatic establishment were shocked and sure the war would be over in a few days. Credible open-source tactical and strategic analysis predicted that Ukraine’s regular military forces would be defeated in “days or weeks” as long as Russian military forces were determined to pursue their objectives. The United States Government was so sure that Kyiv was under imminent threat of capture that they offered to evacuate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy so that he could rule from exile, rather …

Collective Data Rights And Their Possible Abuse, Asaf Lubin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Right To A Healthy Environment And The Global South, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay explores the implications of the right to a healthy environment for the long-standing criticisms of international human rights law as a project and product of the Global North. It examines the Southern origins of the right to a healthy environment and its interpretations in regional human rights tribunals. The essay analyzes the responses offered by this evolving jurisprudence to various objections to human rights-based approaches to environmental protection. These include the human rights-based framework’s individualism, anthropocentrism, failure to address transboundary harm, and failure to challenge the economic law instruments that perpetuate environmental degradation.

2023 Winter - Clihhr Newsletter, Cardozo Law Institute In Holocaust And Human Rights (Clihhr)

CLIHHR Newsletters

This Winter 2023 issue of the CLIHHR Newsletter highlights the Institute’s work in solidarity with communities affected by identity-based violence and mass atrocities. It features updates from the Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention Clinic, student and fellowship spotlights, international collaborations in Argentina, major public events including the Lemkin Award Ceremony, and faculty engagement in global human rights and humanitarian law forums. The newsletter reflects CLIHHR’s commitment to survivor-centered justice, Indigenous rights, restorative justice, and international accountability.

The United States’ Stringent Sovereignty: How Foreign Policy Framing Prioritizes Security Over Human Rights, Kathryn Parker

Scripps Senior Theses

American policymakers utilize valence framing, purposeful descriptions of outcomes as positive or negative, to influence the opinions of voters while maintaining the moral superiority felt by many citizens in the liberal Western hegemon. This study intended to combine the political theories of Constructivism and Realism to form Constructive Realism, a theory that emphasizes the significance of state power and norms as joint influences on constituents. Constructive realism was then applied to four case studies – the UN Security Council, International Criminal Court, Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. This study …

Are Threats To Impose Financial Sanctions An Effective Approach For The United States To Protect Lgbtq Rights In Africa?, Ryan J. Mcelhose

Emory International Law Review Recent Developments

No abstract provided.

Unsettling Human Rights Clinical Pedagogy And Practice In Settler Colonial Contexts, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caroline Bishop Laporte

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In settler colonial contexts, law and educational institutions operate as structures of oppression, extraction, erasure, disempowerment, and continuing violence against colonized peoples. Consequently, clinical legal advocacy often can reinforce coloniality—the logic that perpetuates structural violence against individuals and groups resisting colonization and struggling for survival as peoples. Critical legal theory, including Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), has long exposed colonial laws and practices that entrench discriminatory, racialized power structures and prevent transformative international human rights advocacy. Understanding and responding to these critiques can assist in decolonizing international human rights clinical law teaching and practice but is insufficient in …

Privatizing International Governance, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

The theme of this panel is “Privatizing International Governance.” As the opening vignettes should make clear, public-private partnerships of all kinds are increasingly common in the international system. Since United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's launch of the Global Compact in 2000, the United Nations has increasingly opened up to business entities. Now, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Global Compact, and the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights all encourage engaging with business entities as partners in developing and executing global governance agendas. These partnerships are seen by some as indispensable to sustainable development, international business regulation, climate change mitigation, …

A Guide To Mireille Delmas-Marty's “Compass”, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This essay appears as the Afterword (pp. 55-64) to a volume featuring an important work by the late Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941-2022) titled A Compass of Possibilities: Global Governance and Legal Humanism. A Collège de France de Paris law professor and one of the pre-eminent legal thinkers of her generation, Delmas-Marty and the essay’s author were longtime colleagues and collaborators. The volume contains an English translation of a 2011 lecture by Delmas-Marty, originally titled “Une boussole des possibles: Gouvernance mondiale et humanismes juridiques.” Amann’s essay surveys that writing, in a manner designed to acquaint non-francophone lawyers and academics with Delmas-Marty’s …

Ukraine's Push To Prosecute Aggression: Implications For Immunity Ratione Personae And The Crime Of Aggression, Rebecca Hamilton

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine dates back to its 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s southern peninsula, Crimea. It was Russia’s brazen full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, however, that captured global attention and put the crime of aggression – the resort to war in violation of the UN Charter3 – in the spotlight.

Conference On Sea Level Rise And International Law: Assessing Its Impacts On The Americas Opening Speech, Claudio Grossman

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This conference took place on July 26–27, 2022 during the 73rd Session of the International Law Commission meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, with virtual attendance via webinar made available by the American University Washington College of Law.

Deportations For Drug Convictions In The United States And The European Union: Creating A More Compassionate Approach Toward Drug Convictions In The Immigration Law, Megan Smith

San Diego International Law Journal

This Comment begins by examining and comparing the legal framework for deportation and other immigration consequences for convictions of drug offenses in the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. This Comment then looks at the harsh effects of current immigration policy on individuals and marginalized communities. Finally, this Comment argues that immigration law should be reformed to adopt a more humanitarian approach toward non-citizens convicted of drug offenses. Deportation and other harsh immigration consequences for drug offenses levy disproportionately severe punishments toward vulnerable minority immigrant communities, exposing them to consequences much harsher than non-immigrants would face for …

Brief Of Human Rights And Labor Rights Organizations And Experts As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Janie A. Chuang

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

Since Congress first enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, it has expanded and strengthened it through successive reauthorizations. Congress has broadened the scope of the TVPRA in order to impose criminal and civil liability on individuals, corporations, and other legal persons who use, or knowingly benefit from ventures that use, forced labor, as well as those who aid and abet these practices. Through this legislation, Congress has bolstered efforts to hold traffickers accountable, opening the courthouse doors to victims of these egregious crimes.

The Ninth Circuit's decision below undermined the very statutory scheme Congress put in place to …

2022 Fall - Clihhr Newsletter, Cardozo Law Institute In Holocaust And Human Rights (Clihhr)

CLIHHR Newsletters

This Fall 2022 issue of the CLIHHR Newsletter highlights the Institute’s advocacy, scholarship, and clinical work amid rising global and domestic human rights challenges. It features reflections on antisemitism, reproductive rights, and the war in Ukraine, faculty engagement in international legal forums, student fellowships addressing the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples (MMIP) crisis, legal fellow spotlights, major public events on refugee law and gender-based crimes, and new staff appointments. The newsletter reflects CLIHHR’s commitment to accountability, survivor-centered justice, and atrocity prevention.

Defending Henrietta Lacks: Justification Of Ownership Rights In Separated Human Body Parts, Arseny Shevelev, Georgy Shevelev

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Since the time of Moore v. Regents of the University of California, it has become a well-established and widespread view that a person, when their separated body parts are misappropriated, is forced to limit themselves to fiduciary and other non-proprietary claims against those who violate the bodily inviolability of their separated parts. Now, with the filing of a lawsuit in defense of the rights in body parts of the victim of racial discrimination, Henrietta Lacks, the judicial system has an opportunity to justify itself by adopting a different perception of rights in human body parts. This Article focuses on the …

Rurality As An Intersecting Axis Of Inequality In The Work Of The U.N. Treaty Bodies, Amanda Lyons

Washington and Lee Law Review

Rurality intersects with other identities, power dynamics, and structural inequalities—including those related to gender, race, disability, and age—to create unique patterns of human rights deprivations, violations, and challenges in rural spaces. Therefore, accurately assessing human rights and duties in rural spaces requires attention to the dynamics of rurality in a particular context, the unique nature of diverse rural identities and livelihoods, the systemic forces operating in and on those spaces, and the intersections with other forms of structural discrimination and inequality.

Although much of the work of the U.N. treaty bodies has in fact addressed human rights situations in rural …

"In Countless Ways And On An Unprecedented Scale": Reflections On The Stockholm Declaration At 50, Rebecca Bratspies

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Conference: The 1972 Stockholm Declaration At Fifty: Reflecting On A Half-Century Of International Environmental Law / International Environmental Law At Its Semicentennial: The Stockholm Legacy / Hosted By The Dean Rusk International Law Center And The Georgia Journal Of International And Comparative Law On October 8, 2021 In Athens, Georgia And Online, Melissa J. Durkee

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Memoria, Verdad Y Justicia: Situacion Y Perspectivas Etudes: Premiere Partie: Justice Transitionnelle Et Reconciliation, Juan Mendez

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

La evolucion de los principios de justicia transicional en el Derecho Internacional de los Derechos Humanos debe verse con un enfoque juridico que ponga de manifiesto la frondosa jurisprudencia que se ha poducido en respuesta a las trabas y obstAculos en diversos paises para la realizacibn de la justicia. Esto es especialmente cierto en America Latina, donde el sistenma interamericano de proteccion ha establecido con firmeza varias de estas obLigaciones internacionales del Estado. Pern no se trata de reglas aplicables solamente en el mbito interamericano, sino que se irproducen de diversas formas en otros sistemas regionales y tambidn en la …

Epidemics And International Law: The Need For International Regulation, Claudio Grossman

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

This article presents comments by the author made to open the Miami Law Review conference on Epidemics1 and International Law.2 Its main purpose is to refer to the impact of COVID-19 on different norms and legal regimes, focusing mainly on the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR), addressing areas of reform as well as the interactions of those norms with international human rights law. This will include the proposals of change for the 2005 IHR, designed to better protect vulnerable peoples in future global health crises. Some of the ideas presented in this contribution are included in a proposal that I …

Exploring The Bedrock For Earth Jurisprudence, Maria Antonia Tigre

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

This article calls for a reassessment of our core beliefs on how we relate to the environment through a deep dive into the philosophical foundations of environmental protection. With this purpose, it shows how Earth-centered discourses have existed in human societies and civilizations for millennia. Different religious and philosophical underpinnings all share a view of humanity as an integral part of an organic whole, revering all living things. While recent developments in jurisprudence may appear novel, they are somewhat latent and emergent. Theories of land ethics, rights of nature, Earth-centered environmental ethics, wild law, and Earth jurisprudence all build on …

Louis Henkin Memorial Lecture University Of Miami Law School, Juan Mendez

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

I am deeply honored to be invited to deliver this year's version of a lecture series honoring Professor Louis Henkin whose contributions to the development of international law-and very specifically to international human rights law - are and very long will continue to be remembered. I am also a bit overwhelmed as I notice that the organizers have put me in the company of wonderful colleagues and masters of this field, several of them my friends and persons whose work I admire. It is also especially gratifying for me to have the occasion of renewing contact with the Henkin family …

Transnational Migrant Deterrence, Anita Sinha

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The governance of global migration increasingly relies on what critical migration scholarship refers to as externalized control. Externalization encompasses limiting human mobility through the imposition of migration control measures by transit states, as well as by states that are geographically proximate to destination states. Destination states are at a minimum complicit in the creation and operation of these externalized migration control systems. To capture this phenomenon, this Article offers a reconceptualization of externalization as transnational migration deterrence. The objective ofthis nomenclature is to provide a framework that highlights the role of destination states, to build a lexicon of accountability for …

The Human Rights Due Diligence Standard-Setting In The European Union: Bridging The Gap Between Ambition And Reality, Jernej Letnar Černič

Global Business Law Review

Globalization has, over the past decades, erased borders between continents and countries. It has propelled international trade to previously unforeseen heights. Nonetheless, it has brought about not only positive impact, but also negative consequences for individuals and communities worldwide. Businesses have often been alleged to have been directly or indirectly involved in human rights violations. On the other hand, rights-holders have often found it difficult to enforce corporate human rights obligations and accountability either at home or abroad. Nonetheless, the field of business and human rights has in recent years witnessed seminal developments from the adoption of binding laws in …

Canadian Corporations Bound By The Phoenix: Setting The Path For The United States, Kelly Brickman

Global Business Law Review

This Note argues that the United States courts have jurisdiction to consider corporate liability for international law violations of human rights under the reasoning of the Supreme Court of Canada, in Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya. The United States Supreme Court has escaped holding such liability exists, but Canada has outlined how countries, such as the United States, no longer can avoid holding corporations liable under customary international law. Corporate liability for human rights violations committed abroad is a cutting-edge issue. The United States Supreme Court has considered the issue before, but the Court used different analyses and was …