Airbnb and Amenity: Is Short-Term Letting Reshaping How We Live in the City?

The popularity of short-term letting (STL) platforms like Airbnb has created housing and planning challenges for cities worldwide, including the potential impact of STL on the quality of life of nearby residents and communities. Underpinning this concern is an inherent tension in urban living between the rights and interests of individual residents and the collective rights and interests of neighbours. Through interviews with Australian Airbnb hosts, this paper examines how STL hosts navigate this tension, including how they frame their rights, how they seek to minimise impacts on neighbours, and how they perceive the role of regulation in balancing individual and community rights. In doing so, the paper contributes to both theory and policy debates about urban property rights and how ‘compact city’ planning orthodoxies are reshaping the lived experience of urban residents worldwide.

Bridging the Gap Between International Human Rights and International Cultural Heritage Law Instruments

With the activities of UNESCO in the recent decades international cultural heritage law has become its own area within public international law. By its very nature, namely its focus on cultural heritage and forms of cultural expression, it is closely linked to different human rights. However, this link has only really been realized in more recent instruments and even then not fully. States have obligations in both areas of international law. This raises the question of how to best accommodate State duties and rights under UNESCO instruments with individual and community rights under the respective human rights treaties. The author proposes to examine the functions of cultural heritage as one way in which to better bridge the gap between the two fields.

Strengthening Democracy in India through Participation Rights

This paper is contextualised around the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 in India, which recognises both individual and community rights of the Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers relating to forest land and forest produce. The Forest Rights Act, along with the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act 1996, also recognises decision-making power of the Scheduled Tribes to make decisions regarding claims on forest land. The paper argues that the recognition of such participation rights, broadly understood as the right to participate in specific decisions that impact our other rights, can be an important means for strengthening democracy in India. This creates space for oppressed communities who may face exclusion in other institutions, to directly participate in decisions involving their substantive rights. It holds the potential to deepen a deliberative version of democracy, creating space for discussion and deliberation within communities while deciding questions regarding their rights, rather than a version of democracy based on interest-bargaining and power-play. Participation rights may also serve as an important tool for oppressed people to secure their substantive rights, such as the right to forest land. The paper therefore contributes to wider debates around democracy and rights. It explores what we understand by ‘democracy’, advocating for a deliberative view of democracy. It explores how democracy relates to rights, both participation rights and substantive rights. Lastly, it evaluates the design of existing participation rights - the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 - to examine whether these are designed to deepen deliberative democracy and secure substantive rights. It concludes that existing participation rights are flawed, but there is potential to interpret these in a manner that strengthens deliberative democracy, and the ability of participation right to secure substantive rights to forests, by relying on the Indian Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in Orissa Mining Corporation.

Challenges in regulating priority setting in healthcare: A Finnish perspective on the lawmaker’s dilemma

Healthcare rationing presents multiple problems for the lawmaker. This article examines them through two legislative projects concerning Finnish healthcare and the scope of professional discretion awarded to physicians in priority setting. In attempting to enact norms to steer decision-making in priority setting, the lawmaker has to balance tensions between individual and community rights; for example, relating to legal safeguards, equal access, clinical autonomy, individual need, and transparency. Physicians exercise significant discretion over rationing in a context of rising pressure to contain costs, without support from precise decision-making criteria set in legislation. This raises concerns over the long-term legitimacy of priority setting in Finland. The article argues that legal research should provide analyses of legislative measures and the wider regulatory mix to ensure that priority setting frameworks are compatible with the right to health, and that best practices presented in international priority setting research are operationalized in legislative reforms.

Reconciling Liberalism and Communitarianism

This chapter explores the debate between liberalism and communitarianism. It shows that placing a high value on individuals and their rights does not entail sacrificing the common good or the good of the community. To begin with, both personal identity and individual rights are inseparably linked to membership in communities. Individuality and community are mutually constitutive, and the generation of social norms by persons in community with one another is the precondition and the source of all the rights that are actually operative in society. Furthermore, being reciprocal—consisting in mutually recognized entitlements and obligations to respect them—rights are not adversarial. They do not divide people from one another, nor do they set them against governments or states. At least in principle, then, individual and community rights are compatible.