Abstract
Aust H, The European Court of Human Rights: Current Challenges in Historical Perspective (Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2021)
This insightful book considers how the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is faced with numerous challenges which emanate from authoritarian and populist tendencies arising across its member states. It argues that it is now time to reassess how the ECHR responds to such challenges to the protection of human rights in the light of its historical origins.
Bogdanova I, Unilateral Sanctions in International Law and the Enforcement of Human Rights: The Impact of the Principle of Common Concern of Humankind (Brill Nijhoff 2022)
The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Are unilateral economic sanctions legal under public international law? How do they relate to the existing international legal principles and norms? Can unilateral economic sanctions imposed to redress grave human rights violations be subjected to the same legal contestations as other unilateral sanctions? What potential contribution can the recently formulated doctrine of the Common Concern of Humankind make by introducing substantive and procedural prerequisites to legitimise unilateral human rights sanctions? Unilateral Sanctions in International Law and the Enforcement of Human Rights by Iryna Bogdanova addresses these complex questions while taking account of the burgeoning state practice of employing unilateral economic sanctions.
Cannoot P, The Right to Personal Autonomy Regarding Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation: The Case of Belgium (Eleven International Publishing 2022)
This book investigates whether a legal framework based on personal autonomy regarding sex, gender and sexual orientation could enhance the legal status of LGBTIQ+ persons, using a Belgian context. In recent years, the fundamental rights of LGBTIQ+ persons have received increased legal attention at the international and national level. Considerable legal progress has been made in a short period of time, even though at the same time a divergent trend is occurring in several countries around the world. The Right to Personal Autonomy Regarding Sex, Gender and Sexual Orientation investigates whether a legal framework based on (the recognition of a right to) personal autonomy regarding sex (characteristics), gender (identity/expression) and sexual orientation could still enhance the legal status of LGBTIQ+ persons. To this end, it makes use of the Belgian legal order as an illustration of a Western national legal system that is responsive to human rights claims of sexual minorities, but remains anchored in heteronormative stereotypes. The author not only addresses the question to what extent the present legal framework recognises, protects and fulfils the rights of sexual minorities, but also how potential gaps in legal protection could be tackled. Specific attention is given to the role and value of the constitutional entrenchment of a right to personal autonomy over one’s sexual identity in advancing the inclusion of LGBTIQ+ persons in law.
Chen C and Renteln A, International Human Rights: A Survey (Cambridge University Press 2022)
This book provides an interdisciplinary overview of international human rights issues, offering an international coverage (especially the Global South). It considers the philosophical foundations of human rights, explores the interpretive difficulties associated with identifying what constitutes human rights abuses, and evaluates various perspectives on human rights. It then analyzes institutions that strive to promote and enforce human rights standards including the United Nations system, regional human rights bodies, and domestic courts. The book also discusses a wide variety of substantive human rights including genocide, torture, capital punishment and other cruel and unusual punishments. In particular, the book covers those understudied topics such as socio-economic rights, cultural rights and environmental rights. It also focuses on the rights of marginalized groups including children’s rights, rights of persons of disabilities, women’s rights, labor rights, indigenous rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, and media and human rights.
Haglund J, Regional Courts, Domestic Politics, and the Struggle for Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2020)
The international human rights regime has grown substantially over the past several decades. Yet, international human rights law faces significant enforcement challenges coupled with threats to its legitimacy in many parts of the world. As part of the international human rights regime, the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights allow individuals to file formal complaints with an international legal body, making them uniquely designed to ensure rights-related changes. This book focuses on regional human rights court deterrence, or the extent to which adverse judgments discourage the commission of future human rights abuses by instilling fear of the consequences of continued abuse. The central argument of the book is that regional court deterrence is more likely when the chief executive has the capacity and willingness to respond to adverse judgments from regional courts. Jillienne Haglund argues that the executive has greater capacity to respond to adverse judgments when human rights policy changes are relatively feasible and the state is fiscally flexible. Moreover, the executive has incentives to respond to adverse judgments with human rights policy change when the executive faces pressure from the mass public, economic elites, or political elites. This book draws comparisons across regional courts in Europe and the Americas using quantitative data analysis, supplemented with qualitative evidence from many adverse judgments rendered by the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, to explain the conditions under which adverse regional court judgments deter future human rights abuses.
Ilia S, Serious Violations of Human Rights: On the Emergence of a New Special Regime (Oxford University Press 2022)
This book analyses the use of the expression ‘serious violations of human rights’, and similar ones, such as ‘gross’ or ‘grave’, in international practice. It highlights some of the recurring responses and consequences to such violations and suggests that a new special regime - eponymous to the above-mentioned expression - was formed. This special regime is understood as substantively limited to a very specific issue-area of human rights violations. Within this regime, a series of monitoring mechanisms and procedures are in place to highlight, document, and record such violations; specific measures are taken to enforce compliance; and certain consequences arise focused on remedying the victims of such violations. As such, this special regime is comprised of at least four thinly interconnected components: the substantive, the monitoring, the enforcement, and the remedial ones. This monograph constitutes a first step towards the recognition of such a regime, allowing far more constructive and coherent elaboration in the future. Practice around this category of violations may well evolve in a different direction than the one suggested here. However, what becomes apparent from this work is that the serious violations of human rights are a key notion in the international legal order as it allows the international community to depict those factual situations requiring its attention and action.
Kent R, Remedies for Human Rights Violations: A Two-Track Approach to Supra-National and National Law (Cambridge University Press 2021)
An innovative book that provides fresh insights into the neglected field of remedies in both international and domestic human rights law. Providing an overarching two-track theory, it combines remedies to compensate and prevent irreparable harm to litigants with a more dialogic approach to systemic remedies. It breaks new ground by demonstrating how proportionality principles can improve remedial decision-making and avoid reliance on either strong discretion or inflexible rules. It draws on the latest jurisprudence from the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights and domestic courts in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Hong Kong, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Separate chapters are devoted to interim remedies, remedies for laws that violate human rights, damages, remedies in the criminal process, declarations and injunctions in institutional cases, remedies for violations of social and economic rights and remedies for violations of Indigenous rights.
Kolanoski M, Juridification of Warfare and Limits of Accountability: An Ethnomethodological Investigation into the Production and Assessment of Legal Targeting (Brill Nijhoff 2022)
The book provides an empirical account of the laws that regulate today’s scenes of armed conflict by looking into the details of one particular military incident and its ex-post legal accounting. Empirically, the book focuses on a highly controversial airstrike in Afghanistan (2009), in which large numbers of civilians were identified as combatants and killed as such. The incident lends itself to reflect upon the relation between the violation of procedural rules and the violation of the international laws of armed conflict. The ethnomethodological Law-in-Action research investigates the practical details of legal accountability and explores how the event shaped and specified the legally required protection of civilians in armed conflict. Exploring the collaborative and systematic work that goes into the ‘application of law’ at the military and the judiciary site, the study develops an empirical respecification of the concept of ’juridification of warfare.
Moya D, Aliens before the European Court of Human Rights: Ensuring Minimum Standards of Human Rights Protection (Brill Nijhoff 2021)
This volume conducts an analysis of the ECtHR’s case law in the area of migration and asylum, exploring the role of the Court in this area of law. Each chapter deals with the case law on one specific ECHR article that is relevant for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. In addition, the volume is enriched by two additional studies which deal with issues that are treated in a transversal manner, namely vulnerability and the margin of appreciation. The volume systematises the case law on aliens’ rights under the ECHR, offering readers the chance to familiarise themselves with or gain deeper insight into the main principles the Strasbourg court applies in its case law regarding aliens.
Newman D, Research Handbook on the International Law of Indigenous Rights (Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2022)
This ground-breaking Research Handbook provides a state-of-the-art discussion of the international law of Indigenous rights and how it has developed in recent decades. Drawing from their extensive knowledge of the topic, leading scholars provide strong general coverage and highlight the challenges and cutting-edge issues arising in international Indigenous rights law.
Reiertsen M, Effective Domestic Remedies and the European Court of Human Rights: Applications of the European Convention on Human Rights Article 13 (Cambridge University Press 2022)
An essential companion to any practitioner and academic working with human rights law, in particular the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 13 ECHR is the most important provision on remedies in the European context. Remedies have significant consequences for how any human right is secured and enforced.
Rogers D, Human Rights in War (Springer 2022)
This volume is the most comprehensive and up-to-date compilation of in-depth analyses on human rights violations committed in war. It offers myriad perspectives on the content and application of legal protections offered to civilians, including women, children and the elderly, and to others who are no longer active in the fight. A series of carefully researched case studies illustrates the extent to which human rights violations occur in recent and current armed conflict, and signals the ways in which these violations are dealt with. Each of the contributing authors has been selected on the basis of their international academic reputation and/or professional standing within the human rights field. Given the alarming numbers of people harmed in recent and current armed conflict, this book will be of great interest to researchers, policymakers and opinion-shapers alike.
Rogers D, Wars, Laws, Rights and the Making of Global Insecurities (Palgrave Macmillan 2022)
This book offers a political analysis of war, international law, and human rights, and the important interconnections among them. It questions why war features as a foundational problem in contemporary world affairs and explores how international law is used to manage this and other types of political violence. Challenging conventional thinking that understands war as a problem to be solved and law as an antidote to organized but unruly violence, this book situates the promotion and protection of human rights within the wider context of the modernist project, particularly during the epoch of the Anthropocene. Taking a critical perspective that draws on concepts found in the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, this book casts new light on the ways in which the politics of war, law and rights produces profound insecurities for the human species as well as for other life forms and life systems on this planet.