Complementarity: Towards Robust Human Rights Governance in the New Zealand State Sector

<p>Successive governments have committed New Zealand to implementing international human rights standards domestically. In terms of practical governance, what does this mean and how might effectiveness be measured? A face-value answer can be found in domestic laws and institutions relating to human rights. However, this thesis argues that the effective implementation of ratified international human rights goes well beyond what this thesis terms the law+litigation approach (crucial though that is). By tracing developments historically, analysing the policy and governance issues, and using case studies this research shows that effective implementation is characterised by a new concept: 'complementarity'. This concept is about an increasing coherence between a number of factors affecting the state sector which impact on the fostering and delivery of human rights. These include international and domestic dimensions, law and public policy, public fairness, administrative pragmatism, and proactive and reactive approaches to implementation. Greater complementarity is shown to produce another term suggested in the thesis: robust human rights governance. The opposite - fragile human rights governance - is also explored. As well as the complementarity model, this research also suggests there are six phases in New Zealand's human rights history. It is argued that the sixth most robust stage has been reached, but that there are elements of previous stages that are weak, developing or non-existent. Leading on from this 20 criteria to assess what effectiveness 'looks like' in relation to robust human rights governance are also developed. Although this is primarily a New Zealand study, the widespread adoption of human rights standards by many states inevitably means that the issues are relevant to other countries, even though there are always varying degrees of similarity-difference in constitutional background and developed or emerging human rights systems. This thesis shows the pathways, the mechanisms, the evolving frameworks and the approaches that would help to differentiate robust from fragile human rights governance. The tools in this research should therefore enable a more nuanced assessment of effectiveness in terms of robust human rights governance.</p>

Complementarity: Towards Robust Human Rights Governance in the New Zealand State Sector

<p>Successive governments have committed New Zealand to implementing international human rights standards domestically. In terms of practical governance, what does this mean and how might effectiveness be measured? A face-value answer can be found in domestic laws and institutions relating to human rights. However, this thesis argues that the effective implementation of ratified international human rights goes well beyond what this thesis terms the law+litigation approach (crucial though that is). By tracing developments historically, analysing the policy and governance issues, and using case studies this research shows that effective implementation is characterised by a new concept: 'complementarity'. This concept is about an increasing coherence between a number of factors affecting the state sector which impact on the fostering and delivery of human rights. These include international and domestic dimensions, law and public policy, public fairness, administrative pragmatism, and proactive and reactive approaches to implementation. Greater complementarity is shown to produce another term suggested in the thesis: robust human rights governance. The opposite - fragile human rights governance - is also explored. As well as the complementarity model, this research also suggests there are six phases in New Zealand's human rights history. It is argued that the sixth most robust stage has been reached, but that there are elements of previous stages that are weak, developing or non-existent. Leading on from this 20 criteria to assess what effectiveness 'looks like' in relation to robust human rights governance are also developed. Although this is primarily a New Zealand study, the widespread adoption of human rights standards by many states inevitably means that the issues are relevant to other countries, even though there are always varying degrees of similarity-difference in constitutional background and developed or emerging human rights systems. This thesis shows the pathways, the mechanisms, the evolving frameworks and the approaches that would help to differentiate robust from fragile human rights governance. The tools in this research should therefore enable a more nuanced assessment of effectiveness in terms of robust human rights governance.</p>

Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights

Africa throughout its postcolonial history has been plagued by human rights abuses ranging from intolerance of political dissent to heinous crimes such as genocide. Some observers consequently have gone so far as to suggest that human rights are a concept alien to African cultures. The International Criminal Court (ICC)’s focus on Africa in recent years has reinforced the region’s reputation as a hotspot for human rights violations. But despite Africa’s notoriety concerning human rights, Africa and the Shaping of International Human Rights argues that the continent has been pivotal for helping shape contemporary human rights norms and practices. Challenging prevailing Eurocentric interpretations of human rights’ origins and evolution, it demonstrates that from the colonial era to the present Africa’s peoples have drawn attention to and prompted novel ways of thinking about human rights through their encounters with the world at large. Beginning with the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo Free State in the 1880s and ending with the ICC’s current activities in Africa, it reveals how African events, personalities, groups, and nations have influenced the trajectory of human rights history in intriguing and critical ways, in the end enlarging and universalizing a major discourse of our time.

The Congo Free State, Atrocity Tales, and Human Rights History

Chapter One, which explores the colonial roots of human rights, suggests that ideas resembling modern human rights first emerged in the 1890s in response to atrocities in the Congo Free State. It shows that as reports of horrific abuses of Africans under Belgian King Leopold II’s rule circulated worldwide, a shocked international community, using language and concepts resembling contemporary human rights discourses, was stirred to challenge violations of Africans’ rights, propose ways to prevent future infractions, and demand punishments for perpetrators of mass atrocities. While these nineteenth-century visions of human rights did not immediately lead to an international system of human rights protection, the chapter suggests that they nonetheless represented an important precedent for contemporary human rights norms and institutions.

African Leadership in Human Rights: The Gambia and The Commonwealth Human Rights Commission, 1977–83

This article examines The Gambia’s campaign from 1977-83 for a new international mechanism to protect human rights in the Commonwealth of Nations. President Dawda Jawara’s crusade for a Commonwealth Human Rights Commission complicates the dominant scholarly interpretation of human rights history, which tends to dismiss or overlook African participation in the international human rights movement. The article explains The Gambia’s display of human rights idealism as a strategy to attract aid and legitimacy in the global arena. It also shows how The Gambia’s project was thwarted by the ‘Old Commonwealth’, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Western member states worked together to surreptitiously weaken and defeat The Gambia’s initiative, while deflecting blame and counting on ‘New Commonwealth’ governments in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific to play the role of antagonist. Overall, the article contends the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission was killed because it threatened illusions and assumptions about the human rights movement that were convenient for western powers. With the use of archival sources from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, this article spotlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of African and Global South actors in human rights history.

Liminality and Human Rights

Periods of liminality are moments in which cultural norms can be questioned, different values adopted, and social structures refashioned. A liminal approach to human rights history is revealing…

The World Refugees Made

This book explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions—colonies, protectorates, and provinces—in Africa and the Balkans, the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these “national refugees” into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, the book focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees. The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. The book's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history.