Seismic Shifts: The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Gendered Fault Lines and Implications for International Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Shruti Rana
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Order ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
State Action ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Fault Lines

Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns created seismic shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, with lasting implications for human rights and international law. Arriving just as the international legal order was wobbling in the wake of a populist backlash and other great challenges, the pandemic intensified fault lines of marginalisation and state action, amplifying the forces that had already left the liberal international order in crisis and retreat. This article examines the pandemic’s impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic has reinforced public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the role of the state in protecting its people from harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have supported and expanded the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such divides and contribute to the further retreat of the liberal international order. Examining these fault lines and their implications can help us re-imagine a post-pandemic international legal order that offers more protection for human rights, even as multilateral institutions and cooperation sputter or fail.

scholarly journals Die Zukunft des Völkerrechts

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Tomuschat
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
World Order ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Positive Side ◽  
Normative Growth ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Fragmentation Of International Law

The international legal order today constitutes a truly universal legal system. It has received guiding principles through the United Nations Charter: ever since this ‘Constitution for the world’ began operating, sovereign equality of states, self‑determination of peoples, and human rights have been key components of this architecture, which has reached a state of ‘conceptual unity’ belying the talk of ‘fragmentation’ of international law that so fascinated scholars in their debates only a short while ago. The great peace treaties of 1648, 1815, and 1919, as Euro‑centric instruments influenced by the interests of the dominant powers, could not bring about a peaceful world order. After World War II, it was, in particular, the inclusion of the newly independent states in the legislative processes that has conferred an unchallenged degree of legitimacy on international law. Regrettably, its effectiveness has not kept pace with its normative growth. Some islands of stability can be identified. On the positive side, one can note a growing trend to entrust the settlement of disputes to formal procedures. Yet the integration of human rights in international law – a step of moral advancement that proceeds from the simple recognition that, precisely in the interest of world peace, domains of domestic and international matters cannot be separated one from the other as neatly as postulated by the classic doctrine of international law – has placed enormous obstacles before international law. It must be expected that the demand for more justice on the part of developing nations will subject the international legal order to even greater strain in the near future. Currently, chances are low that the issue of migration from the poorer South to the ‘rich’ North can be resolved.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE LEGITIMACY OF THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

Legal Theory ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Dynamic Process ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
International Order ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Epistemic Virtues ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
Over Time

The international legal order is beginning to take human rights seriously, yet sound justifications for claims about human rights are conspicuously absent. Philosophers have begun to respond to this “justification deficit” by developing theories of human rights. Although a philosophical conception of human rights is needed, it would not be sufficient. The justification of human rights is a dynamic process in which a provisional philosophical conception of human rights both guides and is fleshed out by public processes of practical reasoning structured by legal institutions. Whether the “justification deficit” can be remedied depends not only upon the content of human rights norms as set out in the major conventions and the arguments philosophers can marshal to justify them but also upon the epistemic virtues of the institutions through which the norms are specified, contested, and revised over time.

A Crime that Offends the Conscience of Humanity: A Proposal to Reclassify Trafficking in Women as an International Crime

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Tavakoli
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Crime ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
International Order ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Trafficking In Women ◽  
Women’S Human Rights ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Women's Human Rights

AbstractThe current international legal framework for the prosecution of trafficking of women needs to be revisited if trafficking is to be combated more effectively. The treatment of trafficking as a transnational, rather than an international crime denies its essence as a crime that offends the conscience of humankind and which strikes at the heart of international order. This failure is symptomatic of an international legal order that prioritises and affords greater protection to abuses of men's as opposed to women's human rights.

scholarly journals No cosmopolitan morality without state sovereignty

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 1072-1094 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjartan Koch Mikalsen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Common View ◽  
Ultimate Concern ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Common

This article takes issue with the common view that cosmopolitan normative commitments are incompatible with recognition of state sovereignty as a basic principle of international law. Against influential cosmopolitans, who at best ascribe a derivative significance to the sovereignty of states, the article argues that state sovereignty is not only compatible with, but also essential to the recognition of individuals as units of ultimate concern. The argument challenges a problematic distributive conception of justice underlying many cosmopolitans’ support for reforms of the international legal order towards a system where respect for basic human rights is the only criterion for political legitimacy. An alternative relational conception of justice makes it possible to see why there is an internal connection between the rights of individuals and the rights of states. The argument adds up to a novel defence of the so-called domestic analogy, which regards the territorial integrity of states as an international parallel to the bodily integrity of individuals.

International Legal Order as an Idea

1979 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International Order ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
International Legal Order

International law, its masters tell us, is “the vanishing point of jurisprudence.” So must be international politics, and all of international relations, for political theory. The recurrent and directing theme in political theory is the problem of order—how it is provided, maintained, altered, and so on. Order resides in orderly relations, that is, patterned and predictable relations, among people, but is abstracted from those relations as any arrangement of norms and institutions that distributes values among people. Among peoples, political theorists favor the alternative premise that anarchy, not order, reigns. By not existing, international order needs no explaining. Evidence to the contrary can be explained away as anomalous or ephemeral, and therefore not of theoretical interest. From this follows the dominance of concern for conflict and disorder and the paucity of theory in the study of international politics.

The Degradation of the International Legal Order? The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics, Bill Bowring, Routledge-Cavendish, 2008

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 193-207
Author(s):  
Robert J. Knox
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
International Legal Order

AbstractBill Bowring’s book attempts to argue for a Marxist account of international law that embraces it as a tool for progressive politics and revolutionary change. He argues it is necessary to give a substantive account of both, locating them in the real struggles of the oppressed. Specifically, he locates human rights in the three great revolutions ‐ the French, the Russian and the anticolonial. However, this revolutionary heritage has been ‘degraded’ by recent events. As such, it is necessary to adopt ‘revolutionary conservatism’, invoking international law’s origins against its current degradation. This review argues that, owing to international law’s indeterminacy, Bowring’s project is susceptible to imperial appropriation. This means, however, that Bowring cannot give an account of why we should use international law. It then argues that Bowring’s account of Pashukanis is wrong, and that Pashukanis’s work can better make sense of Bowring’s insights and international law more generally.

Francisco Suárez S.J. on the End of Peaceful Order among States and Systematic Doctrinal Scholarship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Schaffner
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
State Action ◽  
Peace And Justice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Francisco Suarez

This chapter argues that the work of Suárez, like that of other theologians and natural lawyers, offers an insightful (albeit imperfect) articulation of the values of peace and justice which continue to underpin the international legal order. Suárez reminds us that the practical reasoning of all upright statesmen, citizens, and lawyers is guided by the idea of a peaceful and just order among states. Peace and justice are potentialities which individuals and whole nations can establish and preserve, as well as fail to establish or preserve, through their co-ordinated actions. His work remains insightful precisely because most of today’s accounts of international law neglect the role of peace and justice as a starting point of legal reasoning, a goal of state action, and even a source of international law.

Immanuel Kant and Jurisdiction in International Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 80-96
Author(s):  
Stephan Wittich
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Cosmopolitan Law ◽  
Traditional Understanding

This chapter discusses Immanuel Kant’s notion of jurisdiction. Kant’s work contains several thoughts and ideas on the scope of regulatory state activities that may well be read as pertaining to the exercise of imperium in the sense of jurisdiction how it is commonly used today. In his philosophical sketch on Perpetual Peace, Kant proceeded from a traditional understanding of jurisdiction as coexistence between states as a cornerstone of international law. In this traditional view, jurisdiction is nothing more than a reasonable mutual delimitation of jurisdictional spheres based on territoriality or personality. Yet, at the same time, he also developed a visionary idea of cosmopolitan law which would significantly affect the traditional rules of jurisdiction, especially the personality principle through the emergence of individual rights. Kant’s approach thus foreshadowed a development towards an anthropocentric international legal order epitomized by the concepts of human rights and universal jurisdiction.

scholarly journals Marx, Lenin and Pashukanis on Self-Determination: Response to Robert Knox

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Bowring
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Right ◽  
Irish Question

AbstractThis response to Robert Knox’s very kind and constructive review1 of my 2008 book The Degradation of the International Legal Order: The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics gives me the opportunity not only to answer some of his criticisms, but also, on the basis of my own reflections since 2008, to fill in some gaps. Indeed, to revise a number of my arguments. First, I restate my attempt at a materialist account of human rights. Next I explain why, for me, the right of peoples to self-determination is absolutely central to a materialist understanding of human rights; and also fill a serious gap in my own account in the book. This leads me not only to a reply to Robert Knox on the question of ‘indeterminacy’ in international law, but also to a disagreement with him on the use or misuse of the language of self-determination. My fourth section returns to our very different evaluations of the significance and meaning of the work of Yevgeny Pashukanis, and what, for me, is Pashukanis’s misunderstanding, for reasons consistent with his general theoretical trajectory, of Marx and Lenin on the Irish question. Finally, I present an outline of a re-evaluation of Marx’s principled position on self-determination.

Coordination of Different Principles and Values in International Law

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-250
Author(s):  
Riccardo Pisillo Mazzeschi
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Transition Phase ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
A Value ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Jus Cogens ◽  
Ideological Change

The theme of coordination between different principles and values is becoming central to contemporary international law. This is because the latter has become a broad and complex legal system and is going through a phase of profound transformation. This also implies a paradigmatic and ideological change of the international legal order, which tends to shift from a law of rules to a law of values. In this transition phase, conflicts occur especially between the principles of ‘old’ international law and the principles of ‘new’ international law. In this paper it is claimed that, in international law, three different methods are used to try to resolve the antinomies between conflicting principles: a) a ‘traditional positivist’ method; b) a ‘modern positivist’ method; c) a ‘value-based’ method. These three methods are strictly linked to three different conceptions on the sources of general international law and on the means for identification of that law. This article examines separately the three methods and the practical results to which they arrive, using as a main example the conflict between principles on international immunities and principles on fundamental human rights. The conclusion is that the interpreter should today avoid the ‘traditional positivist’ method, because it is now unsuitable for the reality of contemporary international law. Instead, he should use both the ‘modern positivist’ method and the ‘value-based’ method, coordinating them among themselves. Keywords: Conflicting Principles, Antinomies, Sources of International Law, Jus Cogens, Immunities, Fundamental Human Rights, Access to Justice, Balancing

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