Explore the vast range of titles available.

Fifty years after the UN General Assembly adopted the two human rights covenants, this volume brings together contributions considering the key issues facing the international human rights system today, taking stock of the achievements of the covenants, assessing their current influence, and exploring the future challenges facing them.

This article explores specific reservations that are being declared to international treaties intended to protect human rights, and also whether the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties is sufficient to ensure such rights. The author considers if reservations declared by a state(s) are incompatible with the object and purpose of a treaty, and what consequences might follow if such a declaration(s) is made. To this end, the article investigates the practice of states that are party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Social and Economic Rights, United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the United Nations Convention against torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. These treaties were selected because they lay down significant principles for the protection of specific human rights, and also because they are frequently challenged through reservations which seek to alter fundamental provisions. On a theoretical level the regulation of reservations does not appear to be problematic, however on closer examination various reservations point to the inadequacy of current regulation in the 1969 Vienna Convention in terms of the protection of human rights. Accordingly, this article considers a major group of states that seek to become parties to treaties pertaining to human rights, but then make reservations with the intention of diluting fundamental provisions. Specifically, this applies to Islamic countries whose reservations claim incompatibility with Islamic law and by reference to their own cultural diversity. By objecting to the reservations, state parties must decide whether or not their reservation is compatible with the object and purpose of the treaty. According to provisions of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a treaty may prohibit reservations for some or all of the treaty’s provisions, which complicates the position of state parties. Indeed, the withdrawal of reservations can be considered more problematic after analysis of practical cases of various states than it is shown in theory. The author’s analysis is intended to ascertain whether or not the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties régime is suitable for the process of making reservations to the human rights treaties, and how the applicable regulation could be improved and thereby offer possible solutions to the problems outlined above.

Focusing on treaties jeopardized during the 'war on terror', The Extraterritorial Application of Selected Human Rights Treaties investigates whether and to what extent human rights treaties apply to states acting abroad. It proposes a way to accommodate conflicting interests, while preserving the effective protection of basic rights.

Despite the Hong Kong courts' seemingly robust protection of fundamental rights and civil liberties, enforcing family rights remains extremely difficult. While the right to family life is safeguarded by both domestic and international human right instruments, applicants in judicial review cases are usually not able to rely on it to challenge the decisions made by the immigration authority. This paper examines the challenges in enforcing the right to family life in Hong Kong's Dependant Policy with a particular focus on the Hong Kong Court of Appeal's recent decision in BI v Director of Immigration. The immigration reservation, entered into by the United Kingdom when ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, has become a justification for a restrictive immigration regime even after the transfer of sovereignty. The Hong Kong courts also repeatedly accord wide discretion to immigration authority. The courts' reluctance to scrutinize socio-economic policies reveals one of the key weaknesses in enforcing fundamental rights in Hong Kong by the way of judicial review.

Questions as to when a state owes obligations under a human rights treaty towards an individual located outside its territory are being brought more and more frequently before both international and domestic courts. Victims of aerial bombardment, inhabitants of territories under military occupation, deposed dictators, suspected terrorists detained in Guantanamo by the United States, and the family of a former KGB spy who was assassinated in London through the use of a radioactive toxin, allegedly at the orders or with the collusion of the Russian government — all of these people have claimed protection from human rights law against a state affecting their lives while acting outside its territory. These matters are extremely politically and legally sensitive, leading to much confusion, ambiguity and compromise in the existing case law. This study attempts to clear up some of this confusion, and expose its real roots. It examines the notion of state jurisdiction in human rights treaties, and places it within the framework of international law. It is not limited to an inquiry into the semantic, ordinary meaning of the jurisdiction clauses in human rights treaties, nor even to their construction into workable legal concepts and rules. Rather, the interpretation of these treaties cannot be complete without examining their object and purpose, and the various policy considerations which influence states in their behaviour, and courts in their decision-making. The book thus exposes the tension between universality and effectiveness, which is itself the cause of methodological and conceptual inconsistency in the case law. Finally, the work elaborates on the several possible models of the treaties' extraterritorial application. It offers not only a critical analysis of the existing case law, but explains the various options that are before courts and states in addressing these issues, as well as their policy implications.

Vertical Judicial Dialogues in Asylum Cases attempts to answer the question what international and EU law require from the national asylum judge with regard to the intensity of judicial scrutiny and issues of evidence.

The International Bioethics Committee (IBC) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is currently drafting a Universal Bioethics Declaration (“the declaration”). The content and even the name of the declaration has yet to be finalised, but it is expected to range widely over human and non-human bioethics. It appears likely to include many articles directly related to medical ethics. The declaration may well evolve, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, into a component of international customary law, or be the precursor to an International Convention on Bioethics. This article discusses whether this process will facilitate bioethics and, in particular, medical ethics, being subsumed by the normative system of international human rights.

Numerous governments have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by declaring states of emergency and restricting individual liberties protected by international law. However, many more states have adopted emergency measures than have formally derogated from human rights conventions. This Editorial Comment critically evaluates the existing system of human rights treaty derogations. It analyzes the system's problems, identifies recent developments that have exacerbated these problems, and proposes a range of reforms in five areas—embeddedness, engagement, information, timing, and scope.

It is conventional wisdom that the Reconstruction generation distinguished between civil rights, with respect to which the Fourteenth Amendment would require equality, and political and social rights, which would be excluded from coverage. This Article challenges that wisdom. It demonstrates that social rights were not a concept relevant to the coverage of Article IV’s Privileges and Immunities Clause, the precursor to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. Antebellum legal and political sources used the term “social rights” in a variety of ways, but none tracked the purported Reconstruction-era trichotomy of civil, political, and social rights; most uses of the term connected social rights to civil rights, which Article IV (and therefore the Fourteenth Amendment) reached. The harder question is whether the Fourteenth Amendment reaches “public” rights and privileges as opposed to “private” rights. A close examination of antebellum jurisprudence suggests that public rights were excluded from the scope of Article IV because they were privileges of “special” citizenship but not “general” citizenship common to the citizens “in the several states.” Public privileges are likely included under the Fourteenth Amendment, however, which guarantees the privileges and immunities of citizens “of the United States” within particular states, including the privilege of all U.S. citizens to the public privileges of their own states to which they contribute through general taxation. If this framing is correct, then both the interracial marriage and school desegregation cases are easier to sustain on originalist grounds than prior studies have suggested.

Everyone has a human right to science (RtS), as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Despite its significance for scientists and society, this right has not received the attention it deserves. To remedy this, the United Nations called for input from academic and scientific communities in 2009. Its Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is currently drafting a General Comment—a document of authoritative guidance to state parties on the normative contents of the RtS. The scientific community is therefore in a unique position to influence how this right is elucidated within a human rights context. Informed by a systematic review of the relevant literature, we first explore the history, importance, and content of the RtS. We then examine a few important topics that fall within the remit of the RtS but were absent or inadequately addressed in the extant literature, and conclude by discussing the implications of the RtS for science policy.