Human Rights Law Commons^™

Editorial: Special Focus On 'Dignity Takings And Dignity Restorations', Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Understanding Serious Bodily Or Mental Harm As An Act Of Genocide, Nema Milaninia

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

What is genocide? The typical answer immediately brings to mind incidents of large-scale killings like those in World War II, Rwanda, and Srebrenica. The same images, however, create an incomplete and potentially misleading picture of the crime. Genocide is a far broader concept than mass executions. The crime was deliberately designed to capture the variant and innumerable ways individuals or organizations might try to destroy racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups. And while certain acts, like rape and other acts of sexual violence, never formed part of the crime's initial understanding, these acts are now accepted as tools of destruction …

The Peace Vs. Justice Puzzle And The Syrian Crisis, Paul R. Williams, Lisa K. Dicker, C. Danae Paterson

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Those involved in peace negotiations often face the dilemma of balancing demands for justice with the imperative of stopping the conflict as quickly as possible. There are abiding ethical and moral debates surrounding this tension between peace and justice. In Syria—where the death toll has exceeded 470,000, 11 million have been displaced, and there are over 14,000 documented cases of death by torture—the peace versus justice puzzle is a living dilemma with which those involved in the peace process grapple with on a daily basis.

Is it morally permissible to allow conflict (and the attendant human suffering) to continue, …

Trapped: Cycles Of Violence And Discrimination Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Persons In Guyana, Ashley Binetti Armstrong

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Human rights fact-finding aims to uncover and describe human rights concerns to expose both the abuses themselves and the factors that enable their perpetuation. Giving voice to survivors and victims is central to the fact-finding methodology: After all, “. . . if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country . . . [o]ne goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most – and listens to their testimony.”

Through Georgetown Law’s Fact-Finding Practicum, the Human Rights Institute works with a small group of students on a cutting-edge human rights …

'The Pain I Rise Above': How International Human Rights Can Best Realize The Needs Of Persons With Trauma-Related Mental Disabilities, Mehgan Gallagher, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Administrative Chaos: Responding To Child Refugees - U.S. Immigration Process In Crisis, Lenni Benson

Articles & Chapters

The Immigration court is the wrong forum to consider the protection needs of migrant children. Worse still, our multiple agencies that adjudicate parts of children’s cases combined with the rapidly shifting policies are causing administrative chaos for the children and the system.

Finding The Forum That Fits: Child Immigrants And Fair Process, Lenni Benson

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

'Your Old Road Is/Rapidly Agin': International Human Rights Standards And Their Impact On Forensic Psychologists, The Practice Of Forensic Psychology, And The Conditions Of Institutionalization Of Persons With Mental Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Lynn Stuart Weiss lecture at the American Psychological Association yearly conference, sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Psychology Foundation, August 2016, Denver, Colorado.

For years, considerations of the relationship between international human rights standards and the work of forensic psychologists have focused on the role of organized psychology in prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghirab. That issue has been widely discussed and debated, and these discussions show no sign of abating. But there has been virtually no attention given to another issue of international human …

Politics, Power Dynamics, And The Limits Of Existing Self-Regulation And Oversight In Icc Preliminary Examinations, Asaf Lubin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Professor Lubin's contribution to volume 2 is titled, "Politics, Power Dynamics, and the Limits of Existing Self-Regulation and Oversight in ICC Preliminary Examinations," pp. 77-150.

Should the normative framework that governs the International Criminal Court’s (‘ICC’) oversight concerning preliminary examinations undergo a reform? The following chapter answers this question in the affirmative, making the claim that both self-regulation by the Office of the Prosecutor (‘OTP’) and quality control by the Pre-Trial Chamber (‘PTC’) currently suffer from significant deficiencies, thus failing to reach the optimum point on the scale between absolute prosecutorial discretion and absolute control. The chapter demonstrates some of …

Solitary Troubles, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

Solitary confinement is one of the most severe forms of punishment that can be inflicted on human beings. In recent years, the use of extreme isolation in our prisons and jails has been questioned by correctional officials, medical experts, and reform advocates alike. Yet for nearly the entirety of American history, judicial regulation of the practice has been extremely limited. This Article explains why judges hesitate to question the use of solitary confinement, while also providing a path forward for greater scrutiny of the practice.

Shifting Sands In The International Economic System: "Arbitrage" In International Economic Law And International Human Rights, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

International economic law is in the middle of rapid sea changes, arising from converging demands for deep reform on all fronts. These reforms range from current initiatives to recast the orthodox substantive guarantees of foreign market access, investment protection, prudential regulation and financial stability to states' choices between paths of unilateralism, bilateralism, regionalism, multilateralism, or some hybrid multi-speed variation between gradualism and compliance with economic commitments. They also include the formulation of different proposals to revise the dispute settlement mechanisms in world trade law, to rewrite the terms of investor-state dispute settlement, and to harden a definitive dispute settlement process …

Globalization Without A Safety Net: The Challenge Of Protecting Cross-Border Funding Of Ngos, Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer

Journal Articles

More than 50 countries around the world have sharply increased legal restrictions on both domestic non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) that receive funding from outside their home country and the foreign NGOs that provide such funding and other support. These restrictions include requiring advance government approval before a domestic NGO can accept cross-border funding, requiring such funding to be routed through government agencies, and prohibiting such funding for NGOs engaged in certain activities. Publicly justified by national security, accountability, and other concerns, these measures often go well beyond what is reasonably supported by such legitimate interests. These restrictions therefore violate international law, …

Is Religion A Threat To Human Rights? Or Is It The Other Way Around? Defending Individual Autonomy In The Ecthr's Jurisprudence On Freedom Of Religion, Andrea Scoseria Katz, Paulo Pinto De Albuquerque

Scholarship@WashULaw

Religious freedom is part and parcel of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR)’s broad catalogue of human rights. Yet in reality, religion and human rights can have a fraught, conflictive relationship. Is religion a threat to human rights? Are human rights a threat to religion?

These questions resist easy answers, yet an examination of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) suggests that, on the whole, the Court has been more successful in identifying threats posed by religious beliefs or organizations to human rights than vice-versa. As to the former, we examine case-law in two subject …

'Fraternité' In Echr Jurisprudence, Andrea Scoseria Katz, Paulo Pinto De Albuquerque

Scholarship@WashULaw

Solidarity rights can increasingly be found in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the preeminent rights-protecting body in the world. This article examples three specific spheres in which the ideal of solidarity has left its mark on the Court’s jurisprudence: (1) society’s obligation to its most vulnerable members; (2) the right to collective enjoyment of public goods like the environment; and (3) the rights of particular groups to self-development. It examines the manner and extent that such rights have been instantiated and the theoretical difficulties they pose to a human rights court.

Inaccessible Apexes: Comparing Access To Regional Human Rights Courts And Commissions In Europe, The Americas, And Africa Symposium: Comparing Regional Human Rights Regimes, Claudia Martin, Francoise Hampson, Frans Vilijoen

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The three well-established regional human rights systems (in Europe, the Americas, and Africa) aim to provide access to individuals to a decision and remedy based on the violation of human rights in the founding treaties. In this article, the notion of the "dispute pyramid," developed in sociolegal studies, generally, is adjusted to describe and help us better understand regional access. Access differs considerably across the three systems, and its major stumbling blocks present themselves at different stages. In the European system, most cases are dismissed at the admissibility phase. In the Inter-American system, most cases are weeded out at the …

The Peace Vs. Justice Debate And The Syrian Crisis, Paul Williams, Lisa Dicker, C. Danae Paterson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Peace negotiators often face the difficult decision of whether to pursue peace at the potential cost of achieving justice, or to pursue justice at the potential cost of achieving near term peace. There are abiding ethical and moral debates surrounding this tension between peace and justice. In Syria—where the death toll has exceeded 470,000, 11 million have been displaced, and there are over 14,000 documented cases of torture to the point of death—the peace versus justice debate is a living dilemma with which negotiators are currently grappling. This article strives to examine a timely facet of this multidimensional puzzle: how …

Humanitarian Regulation Of Hostiles: The Decisive Element Of Context, Geoffrey S. Corn

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Today, isolated force-on-force battles are considered a relic of the past. Instead, armed forces must expect to conduct combined arms maneuver operations in and around civilians and civilian population centers. And this expectation is only increased when anticipating operations against enemies who see embedding their vital assets in densely populated areas as a force multiplier. This perception is based on not only the inherent tactical advantages of embedding assets among civilian population centers (such as ready access to logistics and lines of communication), but also their recognition that the complexity of conducting operations against these assets in a legally compliant …

Proportionality Under International Humanitarian Law: The "Reasonable Military Commander" Standard And Reverberating Effects, Ian Henderson, Kate Reece

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The principle of proportionality protects civilians and civilian objects against expected incidental harm from an attack that is excessive to the military advantage anticipated from the attack. However, despite its status as a fundamental norm of international humanitarian law (IHL), key terms are not defined in relevant treaties nor do they benefit from critical judicial explanation. This has caused challenges for both academics and military commanders alike in explaining and applying the test for proportionality.

The Article expands upon two points that were raised and generated interesting discussion at The Second Israel Defense Forces International Conference on the Law of …

When Genealogy Matters: Intercountry Adoption, International Human Rights, And Global Neoliberalism, Barbara Stark

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Genealogy isn't what it used to be. Once genealogy was the route to "legitimacy," whether literally--a "fillius nullius," a child of no one, was illegitimate, a bastard--or more fancifully--a tastefully mounted family crest could be obtained for virtually any surname, for a price. Or genealogy referred to the painstaking search for roots, the recovery of a personal history, the excavation of a trajectory that would give meaning to the present. But we are all legitimate now. And DNA testing provides more information than anyone can process, including, for some, the refutation of cherished ancestral myths, a good chance of developing …

The Evolution And Identification Of The Customary International Law Of Armed Conflict, Sir Michael Wood

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Despite the many widely ratified treaties on the law of armed conflict (LOAC, also referred to as international humanitarian law (IHL)), customary international law remains of great importance in this branch of international law. So far as concerns international armed conflicts, customary international humanitarian law (CIHL) is of special importance in connection with states not party to Additional Protocol I of 1977. So far as concerns non-international armed conflicts, CIHL is of crucial importance for all states, since, for the most part, treaty provisions are rudimentary. The International Court of Justice has also had occasion to state that "a great …