International Studies in Human Rights - Böcker

What is the relationship between culture and human rights? Can the idea of cultural rights, which are predicated on the distinctiveness and exclusivity of a community’s beliefs and traditions, be compatible with the concept of human rights, which are universal and ‘inherent’ to all human beings? If we accept such compatibility, what is the actual content of cultural rights? Who are their beneficiaries: individuals, or peoples or groups as collective entities? And what precise obligations do cultural rights pose upon states or other actors in international law, or for the international community as a whole? International instruments on the protection of human rights do not provide self-evident answers to these questions. This book seeks to analyse these dilemmas and to assess the impact that they are having on international law and the development of a coherent category of cultural human rights.

The International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations in the 21st century. It seeks to secure the equal and effective enjoyment of human rights for the estimated 650 million persons with disabilities in the world. It does so by tailoring gerneral human rights norms to their circumstances. It reflects and advances the shift away from welfare to rights in the context of disability. The Convention itself represents a mix between non-discrimination and other substantive human rights and gives practical effect to the idea that all human rights are indivisible and interdependent. This collection of essays examines these developments from the global, European and Scandinavian perspectives and the challenge of transposing its provisions into national law. It marks the coming of age of disabilty as a core human rights concern.

The papers by international and Ethiopian scholars included in Human Rights and Development: Legal Perspectives from and for Ethiopia focus on the interconnectedness between the protection of human rights and the achievement of development. The book adds to the international debate by providing a unique insight into the Ethiopian perspective on the nexus between rights and development and by discussing how this nexus manifests itself in the Ethiopian context. The comparative and international frameworks and examples constitute a valuable resource for the debate on human rights and development in Ethiopia, which is currently taking place in the context of the developmental state approach pursued by the Ethiopian government.

In the first Commentary on the United Nations Principles on Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons – known colloquially as the Pinheiro Principles – Khaled Hassine and Scott Leckie outline the restitution rights of persons who have faced forced displacement and the loss of their homes, lands and properties. The Commentary compiles and analyzes in considerable detail the legal contents of the Pinheiro Principles - a consolidated international instrument generated by the United Nations in 2005 to provide a solid normative framework on these questions and which legal duties exist for states and the international community to secure them. The book will be of vital interest for all actors concerned with applying restitution rights in practice.

The European Convention on Human Rights is now crucial to decisions to be taken by the military and their political leaders in ‘hard power’ situations – that is, classical international and non-international armed conflict, belligerent occupation, peacekeeping and peace-enforcing and anti-terrorism and anti-piracy operations, but also hybrid warfare, cyber-attack and targeted assassination. Guidance is needed, therefore, on how Convention law relates to these decisions.That guidance is precisely what this book aims to offer. It focuses primarily on States’ accountability under the Convention, but also shows that human rights law, used creatively, can actually help States achieve their objectives.

This book aims to contribute to the global observance of the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948. It considers nature and development of international human rights law. It considers how human rights interact with other regimes such as intellectual property, foreign direct investment, corporate social responsibility, international environmental law, humanitarian law, refugee law, economic law, and criminal law. The book then presents human rights of vulnerable populations and sets out contemporary challenges and issues relating to human rights, such as globalisation, the effects of COVID-19, religion, nationality, and the implementation of economic, social, and cultural rights.

Corporate businesses are expanding nationally and globally. Given this proliferation, this edited book investigates and finds the inseparable nexus between businesses, human rights, and sustainable development. It comprehensively accommodates chapters on separate but interrelated aspects of this interface, providing collective cutting-edge information and critical analyses by outstanding scholars. Their intellectual contributions are invaluable to understand the role of business in protecting, preserving, and improving the human capital and natural resources for the future and fill up a void in the existing literature. The book will be a handy and useful resource book for corporate policymakers, government officials, legislators, academics, researchers, libraries, lawyers, judges, human rights specialists/activists, and anyone interested in the interaction between business, human rights, and sustainable development.

What does compliance with judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) look like in states on the spectrum of democratisation? This work provides an in-depth investigation of three such states—Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia— in the wider context of the growing 'implementation crisis' in Europe, and does so through a combined lens of theoretical insights and rich empirical data. The book offers a detailed analysis of the domestic contexts varying from democratising to increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which shape the states’ compliance behaviour, and discusses why and how such states comply with human rights judgments. It puts particular focus on ‘contested’ compliance as a new form of compliance behaviour involving states’ acting in ‘bad faith’ and argues for a revival of the concept of partial compliance. The wider impact that ECtHR judgments have in states on the spectrum of democratisation is also explored.

This volume deals with the basic human rights of aliens from the perspective of international and comparative law. It examines the rules regarding treatment of aliens and the extent to which these rules have been adopted in the domestic legislation of more than 40 different states. It aims to achieve two basic goals: 1) to define the status of aliens under international law, that is, which rights are granted to every person by international instruments; and 2) to establish whether this set of rules has been adopted by the domestic legislation of the states under review. The author classifies the basic human rights of aliens into seven different categories, namely: 1) fundamental rights; 2) private rights; 3) social and cultural rights; 4) economic rights; 5) political rights; 6) public rights; and 7) procedural rights. For each of these categories she reviews opinions of international legal commentators, decisions of international and regional tribunals, as well as national legislation, domestic court decisions, and opinions of local authorities.