Recent publications

Davaanyam O and Krajewski M (eds), Exploring Corporate Human rights Responsibilities in OECD Case Law (Springer 2025)

This open access book consolidates a collection of scholarly papers presented at the academic conference titled “Corporate Human Rights Responsibility in OECD Case Law: Actors, Issues, Responsibilities, and Remedies”, held on 4 and 5 May 2023. The conference was organized by the OECD Case Law Project at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

The book is divided into three sections. The first examines how NCP cases interpret corporate responsibilities, including financial institutions, on human rights and environmental issues, focusing on climate change and conflict-affected zones. It also highlights how OECD cases address corporate accountability and its impact on the revised OECD Guidelines and the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

The second section critically evaluates the NCP mechanism's effectiveness, assessing whether it provides substantive remedies and how well NCP mediation resolves disputes. It offers both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the grievance processes in line with UNGP effectiveness criteria.

The third section explores the NCPs role in global corporate responsibility frameworks, particularly its potential influence on shaping mandatory due diligence obligations through frameworks like the CSDDD, reinforcing corporate accountability in international business practices.

Additionally, the book offers key recommendations for policymakers, NCP experts, and practitioners on improving the NCP system to ensure more meaningful outcomes for human rights violations.

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Grech O, The International Law of Peacebuilding: Engaging the Conflict Resolution and Peace Community (Routledge 2024)

This book contributes to the debate on the international law of post-conflict peacebuilding and suggests a need for closer connections between practitioners and lawyers.

The work argues that significant benefits accrue when lawyers and conflict/peace practitioners, and scholars work with each other to develop a normative framework for building peace. It also attempts to bridge the divisions that exist between lawyers and the conflict resolution/peace community in the specific context of the international law of post-conflict peacebuilding. After introducing the key concepts of the international law of peacebuilding, the book explores aspects of the relationship between lawyers and peacebuilding practitioners and offers ideas about how this relationship might be improved. It then proceeds to identify some principles and processes developed by conflict resolution specialists that may inform and influence discrete parts of the international law of peacebuilding. The work concludes by identifying sites and ways in which international lawyers and conflict resolution/peace specialists may engage with each other to shape this branch of international law.

This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, international law and International Relations.

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Nikitina J, Human Rights Discourse: Linguistics, Genre, and Translation at the European Court of Human Rights (Routledge 2025)

This book explores the concept of human rights as constructed in language, shedding light on discursive and professional practices at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as differentiated from other judicial institutions offering human rights defence mechanisms. It unveils the system of genres at the ECtHR adopting a holistic outlook, which caters for an interdisciplinary readership including both language and law professionals. The genres, along with the underlying professional practices and interdiscursive mechanisms, are described following the lifecycle of cases, starting from the initial application to the Court and ending with institutional press releases and execution of judgments, which foster greater democratic participation. The Court is depicted through its plurality of voices and stakeholders, acknowledging the non-monolithic nature of judicial discourse. The work follows the knowledge migration path from national into international justice and traces how national, and linguistically divergent, elements are recontextualized in a supranational context. It problematizes the coexistence of institutional and outsourced legal translation as well as their potential effects on the discourse of human rights. The book covers issues of legal terminology, phraseology, dialogism, pragmatics and knowledge dissemination dynamics. The study will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and translators working in the areas of Law and Language, Linguistics, Translation Studies and Genre Studies.

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Odih P, Black British Postcolonial Feminist Ways of Seeing Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan 2024)

This book traces the feminine soul of Afrobeat from tumultuous colonial (her)stories through to the vibrant heterotopias of the urban spaces and times of Black British youths of African racial heritage. Communicative action is a human right, as per the portents of the United Nations in its 1948 declaration, which recognizes the human right to communication. Borne from the cultural political struggles against persistent coloniality in post-independence Nigeria, Afrobeat is communicative action. Afrobeat is the music of Nigerian dissent, that has become the music of an African diaspora. Unique in its way of seeing intergenerational decolonial diaspora studies through the refracted prism of Nigerian Afrobeat, this book's extensive empirical and theoretical basis is directed toward the question: How to be Black British born in a country that colonized our maternal ancestors? It will be of interest to scholars and students in gender studies, African studies, decolonial studies, sociology, and media studies.

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Ostow R, Curating Human Rights: Displaying, Combating and Obscuring Human Rights Violations in Museums (Routledge 2025)

Curating Human Rights conceptualizes the human rights museum as a dynamic cultural-political genre that interacts with multiple social activist, state and corporate stakeholders.

Drawing upon ethnographic and archival research on seven human rights museums in six countries, Ostow examines specifically what these museums do when they set out, or purport, to promote human rights. This includes the stories they visualize, display strategies, educational and other activities, internal structures, the way they position their visitors, the parameters of the human rights they address and the politics of pleasing their multiple stakeholders. The book also explores the contradictions and political and corporate pressure that contributes to foregrounding some human rights violations and ignoring or obscuring others. Ostow also examines the reactions to each museum in the local and national press, and by local visitors, politicians, donors and other stakeholders. The book ends with a discussion of the success and limitations of museums for promoting human rights, and policy recommendations to enhance their effectiveness. Curating Human Rights considers whether these museums are appropriate for, and effective at, promoting human rights - and if they address the pitfalls that have been identified.

Curating Human Rights provides new perspectives on the field of human rights education and activism and will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, human rights, culture and communication.

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Prityi M, Human Rights and Environmental Protection: Environmental Procedural Rights in the EU, India and China (Routledge 2025)

This book explores the complex relationship between human rights and environmental protection. It analyses the concept of environmental procedural rights from a comparative perspective in the European Union, India, and China. Arguing the need to apply a holistic approach which acknowledges the interlinkages between democracy, environmental protection, and climate change, it examines both theoretical and practical dimensions of the topic, with case studies drawn from empirical research. The work highlights the important role of environmental procedural rights at the intersection of environmental law and human rights, emphasizing the need for effective channels of communication between citizens and public authorities. The study calls for the taking into account of non-binding recommendations, such as the Maastricht Recommendations on Promoting Effective Public Participation in Environmental Matters for developing public participation procedures in a manner that allows authorities to tailor these to the needs and situations of marginalized people. The book will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy makers working in the areas of Environmental Law, International Human Rights Law and Transnational Law and Governance.

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Rojszczak M, Bulk Surveillance, Democracy and Human Rights Law in Europe: A Comparative Perspective (Routledge 2025)

This book discusses contemporary standards of legal safeguards in the area of bulk electronic surveillance from the perspective of the European legal model. Bulk, or untargeted, surveillance, although traditionally associated with the interception of electronic communications, is increasingly used as a convenient tool for collecting information on large groups of society. The collection of redundant information, which is intrinsic to bulk surveillance, is no longer a side effect but an important objective of the use of bulk powers. As a result, untargeted surveillance is everywhere increasingly being implemented, and without any clear link to state security or crime-fighting objectives. This work examines the origins of untargeted measures, explores their mechanics and key concepts, and defines what distinguishes them from other forms of surveillance. The various elements of the legal safeguards in place, which are fundamental to protecting individuals from the risks of abuse of power, are analysed in detail. The book discusses not only the different standards of legal safeguards, but also gives examples of their implementation in individual European countries. It also examines the relationship between the development of the global data market and untargeted surveillance powers, in particular in the context of the risks associated with algorithmic surveillance, client-side scanning, the privatization of surveillance – or surveillance as a service – and the increasingly widespread use of preventive content filtering mechanisms. The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of law, international relations, public policy, engineering and sociology. It will also appeal to professionals dealing with various aspects of the use of surveillance measures, such as experts, members of the legislature and law enforcement agencies.

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Roy-Trudel E, Human Rights and Subjectivity: Imagining a Sensing and Feeling Human (Routledge 2025)

This book draws on a range of theoretical frameworks to challenge the limited conception of subjectivity upon which human rights are based.

The book focuses on some of the ways in which dominant discourses are in tension with human rights’ fundamental claim to universality by ignoring multiple ways of being. Different theoretical and methodological approaches are used to analyse this creation of exclusions. These include Hannah Arendt's figure of the refugee, posthumanist critiques and non-Western critical theories such as Black, Indigenous and decolonial approaches. Often these approaches are used in isolation, but together, they reveal how the dominant concept of subjectivity has always needed an ‘Other’ and that the ‘human’ at the heart of human rights is not a universal concept. The book also pursues an analysis of visual discourses in the field of international human rights, with a focus on the ways in which exclusions are represented and entrenched through the visual. It argues that international human rights are based on a vision-centred sensorium and certain processes of reasoning that exclude emotions. Finally, the book considers how international human rights could embrace other forms of thinking and being in the world and recognize different sensory experiences.

This original perspective on the limits of human rights will appeal to legal theorists, socio-legal scholars, and others working in politics, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies with an interest in contemporary approaches to social justice and critical approaches.

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Todres J and Kilkelly U (eds), Children's Rights and Children's Development: An Integrated Approach (New York University Press 2025)

Children's rights and child development frameworks are critical to understanding children's lived experiences, advancing child wellbeing, and implementing children's rights. However, research in the two fields has proceeded largely on separate tracks. Children's Rights and Child Development seeks to forge opportunities to deepen understanding about children's rights in light of the scientific research on child development to inform fresh perspectives on research, law, and policy affecting children.

Drawing on existing literature, studies, and research, Children's Rights and Child Development provides an in-depth examination of the fundamental stages in childhood development – early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. The book goes beyond the often very general language in law and policies that considers children as a homogenous group. It delineates how the rights of young people can be understood at each stage of development and how this can, and should, inform law and policy on children's rights.

Integrating children's perspectives with the expertise from leading scholars in children's rights and child development, Todres and Kilkelly reveal how an integrated approach to child rights and child development can be most impactful to child advocacy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in child advocacy, offering insight into how the rights of young people can be understood at different stages of development, in a developmentally appropriate and rights compliant manner.

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White M, Surveillance Law, Data Retention and Human Rights: A Risk to Democracy (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2025)

This book analyses the compatibility of data retention in the UK with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The increase in the use of modern technology has led to an explosion of generated data and, with that, a greater interest from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In the early 2000s, data retention laws were introduced into the UK, and across the European Union (EU). This was met by domestic challenges before national courts, until a seminal ruling by the Court of Justice in the European Union (CJEU) ruled that indiscriminate data retention was incompatible with EU law. Since then, however, the CJEU has revised its position and made certain concessions, particularly under the guise of national security. This book focuses on data retention in the UK with the principal aim of examining compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This is explored through a variety of ways including providing an account of democracy and why secret surveillance poses a threat to it, a history of data retention, assessing the seriousness that data retention poses to fundamental rights, the collection of rights that are affected by data retention which are crucial for a functioning democracy, the implications of who can be obligated to retain (and what to retain), the idea that data retention is a form of surveillance and ultimately, with all things considered, whether this is compatible with the ECHR. The work will be an invaluable resource for students, academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the areas of privacy, human rights law and surveillance.