Abstract
Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada and New Zealand / Jatinder Mann (ed.). - Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ISBN: 3-319-53528-5
This edited collection explores citizenship in a transnational perspective, with a focus on Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and offers historical, legal, political, and sociological perspectives. The two overarching themes of the book are ethnicity and Indigeneity. The contributions in the collection come from widely respected international scholars who approach the subject of citizenship from a range of perspectives: some arguing for a post-citizenship world, others questioning the very concept itself, or its application to Indigenous nations.
This multi-disciplinary book addresses the ever-expanding notion of human rights within the 21st century. By analyzing the global dynamics of the mobilization of new actors, claims, institutions and modes of accountability, Brysk and Stohl assess the potential and limitations of global reforms.
Expanding Human Rights: 21st Century Norms and Governance / Alison Brusk and Michael Stohl (eds.). - Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017. ISBN: 1-78536-883-4
Expanding Human Rights gives a comprehensive overview of current human rights issues and the outlook for the future. The contributors present evidence of new methods for enforcing existing rights and new strategies for further development through in-depth analysis of campaigns and reforms from Eastern Europe, Japan, India, Africa and the US. These include rights of indigenous peoples, food and water rights, violence against women, child mortality and international financial and corporate responsibility.
This book will interest academics and advanced students in human rights, international affairs, political science and law. Policy makers and global human rights activists will find the analyses and insights concerning the expansion of rights and the often accompanying backlash to be of great use when approaching their next human rights campaign.
Freedom of Expression and Religious Hate Speech in Europe / Erica Howard. – Routledge, 2017. ISBN: 1-138-24381-7
In recent years, the Danish cartoons affair, the Charlie Hebdo murders and the terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris have resulted in increasingly strident anti-Islamic speeches by politicians. This raises questions about the limits to freedom of expression and whether this freedom can and should be restricted to protect the religious feelings of believers. This book uses the case law of the European Court of Human Rights to provide a comprehensive analysis of the questions: whether legal prohibitions of religious hate speech violate the right to freedom of expression; and, whether such laws should be used to prosecute politicians and others who contribute to current debates when they use anti-Islam rhetoric. A well-known politician who uses such rhetoric is Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He has been prosecuted twice for hate speech, and was acquitted in the first case and recently convicted in the second. These prosecutions are used to illustrate the issues involved in drawing the line between freedom of expression and religious hate speech. The author argues that freedom of expression of politicians and those contributing to the public debate should not be restricted except in two very limited circumstances: when they incite to hatred or violence and there is an imminent danger that violence will follow or where it stops people from holding or manifesting their religion. Based on this, the author concludes that the European Court of Human Rights should decide, if it is asked to do so, that Wilders conviction for hate speech violates his freedom of expression.
Human Rights and Drug Control: Access to Controlled Essential Medicines in Resource-Constrained Countries / Marie Elske Gispen. – Intersentia, 2017. ISBN: 1-78068-454-1
Globally, millions of people suffer health and socio-economic related problems due to the unavailability of controlled essential medicines such as morphine for pain treatment, which leaves them in disabling and sometimes degrading situations. Controlled essential medicines are medicines included in the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines, and whose active substance is listed under the international drug-control treaties. Their availability and accessibility therefore fall within the remit of both human rights and international drug-control law. Even though the unavailability of controlled essential medicines is generally caused by a multifaceted and complex interplay of factors, the current international drug-control framework paradoxically hinders rather than fosters the access to medicines.
Human Rights and Drug Control analyses a human rights interpretation of the international drug-control framework with an emphasis on advancing the access to controlled essential medicines in resource-constrained countries. Its approach goes beyond the more conventional legal analysis and includes an ethical analysis as well as two case studies in Uganda and Latvia. It first aims to identify a human rights foundation of drug control by examining how human rights norms would balance the underlying tension: some controlled substances have a clear, evidence-based medical benefit, yet also have the potential to be misused, which may lead to dependency disorders. This makes it evident that States should regulate this delicate equilibrium, the challenge being how they can do so legitimately in light of human rights norms.
Integrated Human Rights in Practice: Rewriting Human Rights Decisions / Eva Brems and Ellen Desmet (eds.). - Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017. ISBN: 1-78643-379-6
This book aims to introduce concrete and innovative proposals for a holistic approach to supranational human rights justice through a hands-on legal exercise: the rewriting of decisions of supranational human rights monitoring bodies. The contributing scholars have thus redrafted crucial passages of landmark human rights judgments and decisions, ‘as if human rights law were really one’, borrowing or taking inspiration from developments and interpretations throughout the whole multi-layered human rights protection system. In addition to the rewriting exercise, the contributors have outlined the methodology and/or theoretical framework that guided their approaches and explain how human rights monitoring bodies may adopt an integrated approach to human rights law.
International Human Rights / Jack Donnelly. – Westview Press, 2017. ISBN: 0-8133-4948-6
International Human Rights examines the ways in which states and other international actors have addressed human rights since the end of World War II. This unique textbook features substantial attention to theory, history, international and regional institutions, and the role of transnational actors in the protection and promotion of human rights. Its purpose is to explore the difficult and contentious politics of human rights, and how those political dimensions have been addressed at the national, regional, and especially international levels.
The fifth edition is substantially revised throughout, including updates on multilateral institutions, particularly the UN’s Universal Periodic Review process, regional systems, human rights in foreign policy (including a chapter on U.S. policy), humanitarian intervention, globalization, and (anti)terrorism and human rights. The book also includes a new chapter on the unity of human rights, and new case studies exploring the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Procedures mechanisms, Myanmar, and Israeli settlements in West-Bank Palestine. Chapters include discussion questions, case studies for in-depth examination of topics, and ten “problems” tailored to promote classroom discussion on topics such as the war in Syria, hierarchies between human rights, and much more.
The Limits of Fundamental Rights Protection by the EU: The Scope and the Development of Positive Obligations / Malu Beijer. – Intersentia, 2017. ISBN: 1-78068-455-X
The concept of positive obligations is familiar to various legal systems which seek to protect fundamental rights. This concept means that states are required to take active measures to protect fundamental rights, such as, for example, adopting a general legal framework to regulate same-sex relationships in order to ensure protection of the right to private life. In Europe, positive obligations have, in particular, been developed in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from the 1970s onwards. The ECtHR has explained that positive obligations are necessary to ensure that fundamental rights are of practical value and effective for everyone.
The ECtHR is not the only supranational court in Europe that protects fundamental rights. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) also protects fundamental rights within the scope of EU law. So far, no concept of positive obligations has been developed by this Court, and the question has been asked whether such a development can indeed occur under EU law. After all, the EU is a rather special international organisation which has specific, mainly economic, interests to protect. It is also unclear whether the EU has competence to undertake regulatory action to actively protect fundamental rights.
Based on the insights obtained from the development of positive obligations by the ECtHR, this volume analyses whether and how positive obligations could be incorporated into EU law. The relevant provisions laid down in the EU Treaties and the EU Charter, the case-law of the ECJ and the specificities of the EU system are studied to find out where there is scope for recognition of the concept of positive obligations under EU law, and what limitations would apply to this.
The Postdiaspora Condition: Crossborder Social Protection, Transnational Schooling, and Extraterritorial Human Security / Michel Laguerre. - Springer International Publishing, 2017. ISBN: 3-319-52260-4
This book aims to fill a void in the literature on the contributions of the state to the social protection, educational training, and human security of its overseas citizens. Additionally, Michel S. Laguerre seeks to explain the rise of the postdiaspora condition: an emancipatory metamorphosis of diaspora status. Laguerre pays particular attention to the crossborder services that the state provides, transfrontier mechanisms developed by various institutions, as well as extraterritorial forms of management and governance. He sheds light on complex crossborder arrangements and management, the multiplicity of crossborder agencies and organizations, and the promulgation of new laws that provide a legal basis for these extraterritorial undertakings by the state. The ability of emigrants to hold citizen status—and to enjoy access to the same rights and privileges as those offered to residents of the homeland—sets the cosmonational context for the performance of the postdiaspora condition.
Privacy as Virtue: Moving Beyond the Individual in the Age of Big Data / Bart van der Sloot. – Intersentia, 2017. ISBN: 1-78068-505-X
Privacy as Virtue discusses whether a rights-based approach to privacy regulation still suffices to address the challenges triggered by new data processing techniques such as Big Data and mass surveillance. A rights-based approach generally grants subjective rights to individuals to protect their personal interests. However, large-scale data processing techniques often transcend the individual and their interests.
Virtue ethics is used to reflect on this problem and open up new ways of thinking. A virtuous agent not only respects the rights and interests of others, but also has a broader duty to act in the most careful, just and temperate way. This applies to citizens, to companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook and to governmental organizations that are involved with large scale data processing alike.
The author develops a three-layered model for privacy regulation in the Big Data era. The first layer consists of minimum obligations that are independent of individual interests and rights. Virtuous agents have to respect the procedural pre-conditions for the exercise of power. The second layer echoes the current paradigm, the respect for individual rights and interests. While the third layer is the obligation of aspiration: a virtuous agent designs the data process in such a way that human flourishing, equality and individual freedom are promoted.
Religion, Equality and Employment in Europe: The Case for Reasonable Accommodation / Katayoun Alidadi. - Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2017. ISBN: 1-5099-1137-5
Using a comparative and socio-legal approach that emphasises the practical role of human rights, anti-discrimination law and employment protection, this book argues for an enforceable right to reasonable accommodation on the grounds of religion and belief in the workplace in Europe. In so doing, it draws on the case law of Europe’s two supranational courts, three country studies –Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK – as well as developments in the US and Canada. By offering the first book-length treatment of the issue, it will be of significance to academics, students, policy-makers, business leaders and anyone interested in a deeper understanding of the potentials and limits of European and Western inclusion, freedom and equality in a multicultural context.
Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights / Linde Lindkvist. - Cambridge University Press, 2017. ISBN: 1-107-15941-5
Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) is widely considered to be the most influential statement on religious freedom in human history. Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides a groundbreaking account of its origins and developments, examining the background, key players, and outcomes of Article 18, and setting it within the broader discourse around international religious freedom in the 1940s. Taking issue with standard accounts that see the text of the Universal Declaration as humanity’s joint response to the atrocities of World War II, it shows instead how central features of Article 18 were intimately connected to the political projects and visions of particular actors involved in the start-up of the UN Human Rights program. This will be essential reading for anyone grappling with the historical and contemporary meaning of human rights and religious freedom.
Unaccompanied Children in European Migration and Asylum Practices: In Whose Best Interests? / Mateja Sedmak, Birgit Sauer, Barbara Gornik (eds). – Routledge, 2018. ISBN: 1-317-27536-5
The book approaches the concept of the best interests of unaccompanied minors from an interdisciplinary perspective drawing on legal, political and psycho-social concepts.
It offers a child-participating approach to the topic incorporating data from interviews with unaccompanied minor migrants.
When Human Rights Clash at the European Court of Human Rights: Conflict or Harmony? / Stijn Smet and Eva Brems (eds). – Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN: 0-19-251568-3
The notion of conflict rests at the heart of the judicial function. Judges are routinely asked to resolve disputes and defuse tensions. Yet, when judges are called upon to adjudicate a purported conflict between human rights, they face particular challenges and must address specific questions. Some of these concern the very existence of human rights conflicts. Can human rights really conflict with one another, in terms of mutual incompatibility? Or should human rights be interpreted in harmony with one another? Other questions concern the resolution of real conflicts. To the extent that human rights do conflict, how should these conflicts be resolved? To what extent is balancing desirable? And if it is desirable, which understanding of balancing should judges employ? This book seeks to provide both theoretical and practical answers to these questions.
Within and Beyond Citizenship: Borders, Membership and Belonging / Roberto Gonzales and Nando Sigona. - Taylor & Francis, 2017. ISBN: 1-138-28552-8
Within and Beyond Citizenship brings together cutting-edge research in sociology and social anthropology on the relationship between immigration status, rights and belonging in contemporary societies of immigration. It offers new insights into the ways in which political membership is experienced, spatially and bureaucratically constructed, and actively negotiated and contested in the everyday lives of citizens and non-citizens.