Incoherence is a term that is all too often associated with the public international law regime. To a great extent, its incoherence is arguably a natural consequence of the fragmented nature of both the development and overall scope of the discipline. Despite significant achievements since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), a coherent human rights regime that is properly integrated with other branches of public international law is still lacking. This book explores this incoherent approach to human rights, including specific challenges that arise as a result of the creation and regulation of legal relationships between parties (state and non-state) that sit outside of the human rights framework, with a view to considering how it may be remedied. Divided into three parts, the collection provides a critical exploration of various challenges and barriers related to the absence of human rights in some instances, contemporary emergence of rights, and a lack of rights fulfilment in others. These three situations are considered within the wider context of, and difficulties facing, a human rights-based approach to international law. Each of the three parts aligns with one of the three prime responsibilities and duties of states in respect of international human rights: to promote, to protect and to fulfil. The contributions represent different perspectives in international law and human rights and how the global agenda of promoting human rights, the rules-based international order and multilateralism requires further strengthening – the lens of incoherence providing a means to understand particular inconsistencies. Chapters focus upon subjects including international investment law, international financial contracts, the arms trade, indigenous peoples’ rights, rights of peasants, the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, the right to food and transitional justice. Presenting a critical exploration of key contemporary challenges and the implementation of human rights law in different contexts, the collection will be of interest to a wide-ranging audience of international law and international relations scholars and practitioners, and students of law, politics and globalisation across the world.

Today international law is everywhere. Wars are fought and opposed in its name. It is invoked to claim rights and to challenge them, to indict or support political leaders, to distribute resources and to expand or limit the powers of domestic and international institutions. International law is part of the way political (and economic) power is used, critiqued, and sometimes limited. Despite its claim for neutrality and impartiality, it is implicit in what is just, as well as what is unjust in the world. To understand its operation requires shedding its ideological spell and examining it with a cold eye. Who are its winners, and who are its losers? How - if at all - can it be used to make a better or a less unjust world? In this collection of essays Professor Martti Koskenniemi, a well-known practitioner and a leading theorist and historian of international law, examines the recent debates on humanitarian intervention, collective security, protection of human rights and the 'fight against impunity' and reflects on the use of the professional techniques of international law to intervene politically. The essays both illustrate and expand his influential theory of the role of international law in international politics. The book is prefaced with an introduction by Professor Emmanuelle Jouannet (Sorbonne Law School), which locates the texts in the overall thought and work of Martti Koskenniemi.

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is human dignity, why is it important, and what is its relationship to human rights? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it clarifies the network of concepts associated with dignity. Paramount within this network is a core notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, which calls us to support people's pursuit of a flourishing life by affirming both negative duties not to block or destroy, and positive duties to protect and facilitate, the development and exercise of the valuable capacities at the basis of their dignity. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, this book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific human rights, including contested ones, such as the rights to democratic political participation and to decent labour conditions. Finally, this book's dignitarian approach helps illuminate the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between the basic requirements of human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.

This book examines how the judicialization of politics, and the politicization of courts, affect representative democracy, rule of law, and separation of powers. This volume critically assesses the phenomena of judicialization of politics and politicization of the judiciary. It explores the rising impact of courts on key constitutional principles, such as democracy and separation of powers, which is paralleled by increasing criticism of this influence from both liberal and illiberal perspectives. The book also addresses the challenges to rule of law as a principle, preconditioned on independent and powerful courts, which are triggered by both democratic backsliding and the mushrooming of populist constitutionalism and illiberal constitutional regimes. Presenting a wide range of case studies, the book will be a valuable resource for students and academics in constitutional law and political science seeking to understand the increasingly complex relationships between the judiciary, executive and legislature.

An analysis of the UN human rights treaty bodies, their methods of interpretation, their effectiveness and issues of legitimacy.

Poverty, inequality, and dispossession accompany economic globalization. Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, as well as human rights, are implicated in the construction of misery, and how international law is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, the authors confront the unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. International law must abide by the requirements of justice if it is to make a call for compliance with it, but this work claims it drastically fails do so. In a legal order structured around neoliberal ideologies rather than principles of justice, every state can and does grab what it can in the economic sphere on the basis of power and interest, legally so and under colour of law. This book examines how international law on trade and foreign investment and the law and norms on global finance has been shaped to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of others. It studies how a set of principles, in the form of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), that could have laid the groundwork for a more inclusive international law without even disrupting its market-orientation, were nonetheless undermined. As for international human rights law, it is under the terms of global capitalism that human rights operate. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This book challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is "for" or "against" international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it.

International efforts to construct a set of standardised human rights guidelines are based upon the identification of agreed key values regarding the relationships between individuals and the institutions governing them, which are viewed as critical to the well-being of humanity and the character of being human. This publication considers these issues of justice at the national, regional, and international levels by analysing civil, political, economic and social rights aspects.