This unique collection of essays has been compiled in honour of Professor Göran Melander, one of the founders of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI), in Lund, Sweden. Göran Melander served as the Institute’s first director and subsequently as the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The volume illustrates the complex relationship between dissemination of human rights standards and their application in human rights law, and thus serves as a tribute to Melander’s belief in and commitment to the dynamics of education in human rights law. The contributors are human rights scholars and activists, all colleagues and friends associated with various stages of Melander’s professional career.
European Convention on Human Rights – Article 10 – Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. In the context of an effective democracy and respect for human rights mentioned in the Preamble to the European Convention on Human Rights, freedom of expression is not only important in its own right, but it also plays a central part in the protection of other rights under the Convention. Without a broad guarantee of the right to freedom of expression protected by independent and impartial courts, there is no free country, there is no democracy. This general proposition is undeniable. This handbook is a practical tool for legal professionals from Council of Europe member states who wish to strengthen their skills in applying the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in their daily work.
This book explores the nature and scope of the provision requiring States to ‘ensure respect’ for international humanitarian law (IHL) contained within Common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. It examines the interpretation and application of this provision in a range of contexts, both thematic and country-specific. Accepting the clearly articulated notion of ‘respect’ for IHL, it builds on the existing literature studying the meaning of ‘ensure respect’ and outlines an understanding of the concept in situations such as enacting implementing legislation, diplomatic interactions, regulating private actors, targeting, detaining persons under IHL in non-international armed conflict, protecting civilians (including internally displaced populations) and prosecuting war crimes. It also considers topical issues such as counter-terrorism and foreign fighting. The book will be a valuable resource for practitioners, academics and researchers. It provides much needed practical reflection for States as to what ensuring respect entails, so that governments are able to address these obligations.
In this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of “world literature” and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call “the free and full development of the human personality.” Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism. Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature—imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.
The Oxford Handbook of International Human Rights Law provides an authoritative and original overview of one of the key branches of international law. Forty contributors comprehensively analyse the role of human rights in international law from a global perspective, examining its origins and principles, and measuring its impact on the world.
A collection of United Nations documents associated with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these volumes facilitate research into the scope of, meaning of and intent behind the instrument's provisions. It permits an examination of the various drafts of what became the thirty articles of the Declaration, including one of the earliest documents – a compilation of human rights provisions from national constitutions, organised thematically. The documents are organised chronologically and thorough thematic indexing facilitates research into the origins of specific rights and norms. It is also annotated in order to provide information relating to names, places, events and concepts that might have been familiar in the late 1940s but are today more obscure.
This book covers the developing field of open source research and discusses how to use social media, satellite imagery, big data analytics, and user-generated content to strengthen human rights research and investigations. The topics are presented in an accessible format through extensive use of images and data visualization.
Summary: This volume contains revised versions of a select number of research papers presented at a conference in Oslo, Norway, entitled "The New International Law." The conference was subtitled "Polycentric decision-making structures and fragmented spheres of law: what implications for the new generation of international legal discourse?" The current discourse of international law is certainly acquainted with the enormous challenges posed by rapid restructuring of domestic and international governance to conventional outlooks, theories and practices of international law. Today's research forefront thrives on studies that encapsulate, analyse and discuss the shift from a world made up of sovereign nation-states to today's inter-, supra- and transnational arrangements.
Sixty years since the end of World War II is two generations. And two generations is long enough to measure whether there has been a substantial change in direction in how mankind orders its affairs. It is clear that it has. Not just in matters of war and peace- there has not been a Third World War- but in its attitude to poverty, economic progress, human rights, its habitat and its relationship to the other sex and its offspring. In all there have been great strides forward that at the time of the ending of the war seemed barely conceivable. Conundrums of Humanity poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will China dominate the century?”. The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the hurdles yet to be overcome. They all depend for fruition, partly on building on the important work already accomplished, partly on creating a more benign and positive atmosphere in the world order and partly on demonstrating how the world can be even better in the future and thus giving the world’s peoples a sense of forward momentum.
