Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions for Human Rights

Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions is the first comprehensive analysis of the role and impact of informal collaborations in the UN human rights treaty bodies. Issues as central to international human rights as the right to water, abortion, torture, and hate speech are often only clarified through the instrument of treaty interpretations. This book dives beneath the surface of the formal access, procedures, and actors of the UN treaty body system to reveal how the experts and external collaborators play a key role in the development of human rights. Nina Reiners introduces the concept of 'Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions' within a novel theoretical framework and draws on a number of detailed case studies and original data. This study makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on human rights, transnational actors, and international organizations, and contributes to broader debates in international relations and international law.

A Thematic Analysis of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc) State Party Reporting Mechanisms Related To Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc) is the most ratified human rights treaty. In this article, three intimately connected concepts will be explored in relation to the framework of the State Party reporting mechanism related to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: physical education, physical activity and sport (pepas). A documentary analysis of three key document types from the Treaty Body reporting mechanisms was undertaken, including State Parties Reports (n = 104), List of Issues (n = 126) and Concerns/Observations and Recommendations (n = 797). There was a very low prevalence of the concepts of physical education, physical activity and, to a greater extent, sport, in these three reports. Seven themes emerged after the qualitative analysis: sport programmes, school-based sport, legislation and policies, key agents, interdisciplinary approach, enablers of sport and miscellaneous. Increased questioning of States with regards to their implementation of the right to sport, the issuance of pepas-based recommendations and guidance on how to achieve these rights from the Treaty Bodies would assist in solidifying understanding of sport as a human right and increase the impetus on States to act for pepas provision.

Strategies for Reform: Facilitating Intersectionality in Human Rights Advocacy

An intersectional human rights framework offers victims of human rights violations the best chance to recover remedies that fully address the complex and structural dimensions of the violations. To be effective within any national, regional, or international human rights system, however, intersectionality must be part of the institutional culture. Members of the human rights bodies must be conversant with the theory and comfortable applying it in a variety of human rights scenarios. Chapter 7 explored the ways in which NGOs can facilitate intersectional analysis by engaging human rights bodies in the discourse of intersectionality. This chapter examines structural reforms within the UN human rights system that will foster intersectional analysis. Breaking down the silos in the treaty body system and creating opportunities for collaboration will help to facilitate system-wide intersectional analysis, all of which will benefit victims of human rights violations around the world.

Intersectionality in Treaty Body Decisions

This chapter uses the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) as a case study to explore the extent to which the UN treaty bodies have embraced intersectionality in their examination of individual complaints. In many cases, the UN treaty body system allows human rights victims to seek justice for rights violations by submitting a human rights complaint to one of the treaty bodies. The ability to bring a complaint to an international body offers victims a chance at compensation, remedies that may prevent future violations, and an acknowledgment that the state violated their rights. Although the complaint process cannot bring back a family member who was, for example, murdered by representatives of the state, holding the government accountable for its actions can be a powerful remedy for many victims. This chapter probes for evidence of intersectional analysis in one Committee’s consideration of individual complaints. The Committee’s jurisprudence reveals that it is moving toward an intersectional approach, which will enhance available remedies and lead to stronger human rights protection.

Intersectionality in the State Reporting Process

The human rights treaty bodies have increasingly engaged in intersectional analysis in the context of the reporting process, through which states that have ratified the treaty must report to the treaty body on their efforts to fulfil the treaty’s obligations. This chapter takes a deep dive into the reporting process, using CEDAW as a case study, to explore the extent to which intersectionality has surfaced in the Committee’s responses to state reports. This offers a barometer for assessing the Committee’s acceptance of intersectionality as an analytical framework more generally. The first half of the chapter discusses trends in the state reporting process, looking specifically at the frequency with which the Committee considers intersectionality in its analysis. This analysis reveals that the Committee is trending toward using an intersectional lens more consistently. Although it is impossible to draw definitive causal links between the discursive framing of intersectionality by various actors and the committee’s willingness to adopt an intersectional framework in any particular case, it is useful to think about how NGOs, reporting governments, and the committee itself may push the UN’s dialogue toward a more fulsome embrace of intersectionality in the decades to come.

Appeal Relating to the Jurisdiction of the ICAO Council

In two nearly identical judgments dated July 14, 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) reviewed a decision taken by the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in a dispute about aviation restrictions imposed on Qatar by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These cases represent the second time that the Court has heard an appeal concerning a decision of the ICAO Council, a treaty body which has executive, administrative, and dispute settlement functions. As in 1972, when the Court heard an appeal brought by India against Pakistan, the Court's 2020 judgments concern a Council decision on preliminary objections to jurisdiction and admissibility. These judgments not only reinforce the ICJ's findings in its 1972 judgment, which raised similar procedural issues, but they also highlight the scope and the limits of the Court's rare appellate function.

Toward Rejuvenated Inspiration with the Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology

How might the connections between anthropology and international law become more dynamic? I reflect upon this question in this essay using ethnographic insights from the documentary cycles of the UN Human Rights Committee, the treaty body monitoring state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Building on recent anthropological scholarship on international organizations, bureaucracy, and documents, this essay discusses the knowledge practices and legal technicalities that characterize the international community of human rights lawyers. In particular, I reflect on the legal fiction of difference governing UN treaty bodies’ operations and the empirical sameness of participants in different formal categories in the shared community of practice of human rights lawyers. I conclude by suggesting that anthropological insights could significantly enrich our shared understanding of the diverse and subtle effects of human rights monitoring. Simultaneously such insights may offer rejuvenated inspiration for those international lawyers tackling a sense of losing faith in their discipline, both as an influential tool of world improvement and an invigorating intellectual tradition.

Race Discrimination Effaced at the International Court of Justice

This essay examines the interpretation of the core international treaty dedicated to the elimination of racial discrimination, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and in particular how the prohibition on race discrimination applies to the treatment of migrants. This essay is timely, as CERD has travelled from the margins of human rights law to the center of the hottest interstate lawfare. At the time of writing, the first ever interstate dispute before any UN treaty body is before the CERD Committee, and CERD has been invoked in several interstate cases before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unfortunately, this crucible of adjudication has not marked an increase in principled interpretation. This essay critiques the recent admissibility ruling of the ICJ in Qatar v. U.A.E. for its marginalization of the prohibition of race discrimination, in particular the failure meaningfully to consider how nationality discrimination may constitute prohibited race discrimination.

THE INTERNATIONAL ENDORSEMENT OF CORPORATE SETTLEMENTS IN FOREIGN BRIBERY CASES

International anticorruption treaties create an almost universal requirement that States sanction legal persons for the crime of foreign bribery. However, the vast majority of corporate foreign bribery cases are ‘settled’ between governments and firms. Analysing key anticorruption instruments and treaty body reports, it appears there is a dearth of express rules on settlements in international law but a qualified implicit endorsement of domestic settlement laws and practices. The international regime is investigated in terms of its move towards common standards for the use of settlements, and whether recommendations are consistent with stated objectives. The analysis discloses an irony: States and international organisations fail to clearly articulate their expectations on settlements, while calling for transparent, effective and predictable domestic settlement rules.