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Abstract This paper discusses the system of minority protection of the League of Nations. Minority protection occupied a prominent place on the League’s agenda, which developed a significant expertise in the field. The League’s system of minority protection is often regarded as an experiment. With regard to both material and procedural aspects this assessment is certainly correct. In particular, minority protection based upon legally binding treaties and declarations gave rise to the question of how individual and group rights should be treated within the frame of an international political organization. The paper further examines whether at least some of the elements of the League’s minority protection system still persist in the context of contemporary international human rights law.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 27-31
Author(s):  
Giovanna Gilleri

International instruments fail to specify the meaning of gender identity. Yet gender identity has been invoked as a prohibited ground of discrimination, particularly in cases concerning trans persons. Trans existences fall outside the expectation of a correspondence between sex and gender. “Trans” is an umbrella term referring to people who do not identify with the sex attributed to them at birth. This broad definition encompasses pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals, as well as persons who have not undergone any medical intervention and do not conform to the social norms of expression and self-identification imposing the binary. Regional conventions do not define the concept of gender identity either. Documents issued by the United Nations (UN) and regional human rights bodies frequently rely on the category, without any clear explanation of the notion, or of what makes gender identity different from gender as such. Relying on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this essay argues that gender is an identity per se and challenges international law's treatment of gender and gender identity as distinct categories. Underlying this essay is the view that questioning the shape that the law gives to “gender identity” is the preliminary step to evaluating what protections human rights law can or cannot offer to individuals.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 22-26
Author(s):  
Dianne Otto

Queering international law involves dreaming. It requires stepping outside the framing presumptions of “normal” law to reveal and challenge the heteronormative underpinnings of the hierarchies of power and value that the law sustains. Reclaiming the nomenclature of queer from its history as a term of insult and dehumanization, queer theory interrogates the normative framework that naturalizes and privileges heterosexuality and its binary regime of gender. In its reclamation, “queer” gestures toward affirmative assemblages of new meanings and emancipatory imaginaries. In international law, queer theory has been used in many different ways. For some, queerly troubling the normative involves expanding the existing normal to be more inclusive of queer lives, as can often be seen in the field of international human rights law. As life-giving as inclusion is to those barely existing on the margins, without changing the terms of inclusion this approach risks leaving heteronormativity intact and may even buttress it, as with the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. For others, queering international law involves a more fundamental critique of its regimes of the normal that, together, regulate our relations with each other and the planet. The objects of queer theory's structural critique are the conceptual foundations of international law, which rely on heteronormativity as a fundamental organizing principle that helps to normalize inequality, poverty, exploitation, and violence. One example is the “civilizing mission” which justified colonialism and continues to animate present legal norms. As Teemu Ruskola argues in his seminal queer critique, international legal rhetoric attributed normative masculinity to (Western) sovereign states and cast the “deficient” sovereignty of non-Western states in terms of variously deviant masculinities which, together with their civilizational and racial attributes, justified their “penetration.” My “troubling” of international law's account of peace takes a queer structural approach and then outlines some alternative imaginaries suggested by queer theory and activism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Cekli Setya Pratiwi

This study examines the constitutionality of Indonesia’s Anti-Blasphemy Law, which has been challenged unsuccessfully at the Constitutional Court on three occasions, in 2009, 2012, and 2018. While the Court has acknowledged the law’s provisions are open to multiple interpretations, it insists on maintaining the law as it is, on the grounds that the right to religious expression is not absolute, as freedom and rights are restricted under Article 28J of the 1945 Constitution. The Court believes that canceling the law would create a dangerous legal vacuum. The ambiguity of the Court’s decisions on the constitutionality of the Anti-Blasphemy Law is illustrated in recent blasphemy cases that have not been explored in previous studies. This study uses a doctrinal legal approach to examine why the Anti-Blasphemy Law is flawed and to analyze to what extent the ‘particular constitutionalism’ approach influenced the Court’s decisions when declaring the constitutionality of the law. As such, the Court’s misinterpretation of the core principles of the competing rights – the right to religious freedom and the right to freedom of expression – and its standard limitation, have been ignored. The findings of this study show that in dealing with the Anti-Blasphemy Law, the Court has a narrow and limited recognition of human rights law. The Court’s fear of revoking the Anti-Blasphemy Law is based only on assumptions and is less supported by facts. The Court has failed to realize that the implementation of the flawed Anti-Blasphemy Law in various cases has triggered public disorder, with people taking justice into their own hands.


Author(s):  
Jernej Letnar Černic

In the chapter it is examined obligations of business in the field of socio-economic rightsThe author proceeds from the understanding of the importance of socio-economic rights to ensurethe livelihood of people and the creation of human opportunities, as well as their fundamental naturein terms of enjoying civil and political rights. The author is convinced that not only states, but alsocorporations, have certain obligations in the field of socio-economic rights. Because socioeconomicrights are linked to financial resources, corporations can make a significant contribution to securingthem in case of state fragility.The author analyzes international documents, compares national legal systems, as well as othersources (decisions of treaty bodies on human rights), and he concludes that corporate obligationsgain their legitimacy due to the horizontal application of national and international human rights law.It is noted that the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines forTransnational Enterprises, the UN Global Compact, the ILO Tripartite Declaration play a significantrole in promoting corporate human rights obligations in the field of socio-economic rights.The author also analyzes the significance of voluntary commitments of both individual corporationsand individual sectors that are generally the part of corporate policy and suggests their questionablelegal nature (lex imperfecta), as they do not provide sanctions for their violation.Analyzing the features of corporate obligations under socio-economic rights, the author takes asa basis the negative and positive dichotomy of human rights, as well as the approach embodied ininternational human rights law on three types of human rights obligations – to respect, protect, ensure.The author concludes that within each of the types of socio-economic rights obligations, corporationshave both preventive (negative and positive) and some corrective (negative and positive) obligations,especially where they control and/or or influence or in proximity of their operations.


Author(s):  
Snezhana V. Simonova

The article deals with the constitutional understanding of the place modern Internet platforms play in ensuring human rights. Some problematic aspects of the topic are illustrated through the lens of Russian and foreign legal practice, which has developed in connection with the functioning of wellknown digital platforms and promotion of information rights, digital security and privacy rights, freedom of speech within the boundaries of popular social networks, video hosting platforms, online services. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the latest novelties of Russian legislation aimed at regulating the status and new grounds for responsibility of digital platforms. The cornerstone question proposed by the author for discussion is the question of the best model of interaction between the state and digital platforms, as well as the conditions and limits of their responsibility for violations of human rights. The article analyzes the problem of inconsistency of terms of services with generally recognized standards of international human rights law, examines options for unifying the platform’s policies in relation to the content published on them, examines the phenomenon of “refusal of constitutional rights by contract”. Taking into account the deduced features of digital platforms as a space for the realization of human rights, the author’s view of the system of legal measures aimed at improving the standards of protecting human rights on digital platforms, is proposed as conclusions.


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