Suchergebnisse

On May 12, 2016, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment hosted a one-day workshop on international investment and the rights of indigenous peoples. This outcome document synthesizes the discussions that took place during the May 12 workshop. The workshop was part of a series of consultations undertaken to support the Special Rapporteur's second thematic analysis on the impact of international investment agreements on the rights of indigenous peoples (available here). Held at the Ford Foundation in New York, the workshop brought together 53 academics, practitioners, indigenous representatives, and civil society representatives to explore strategies for strengthening the rights and interests of indigenous peoples in the context of international investment. The workshop provided an opportunity for participants to share their diverse perspectives, experiences, and insights regarding the intersection of international investment and human rights, and to discuss creative and pragmatic approaches to short and long-term reform of both the investment and human rights regimes, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that indigenous rights are respected, protected, and fulfilled. The workshop also built on an earlier report by the Special Rapporteur setting out her concerns regarding the impact of investment and free trade agreements on the human rights of indigenous peoples. That report, which was presented to the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, outlined direct and systemic impacts of investment and free trade agreements on the rights of indigenous peoples, and called for a more thorough review of the implications of these agreements to develop and implement effective options for reform. This outcome document summarizes discussions that took place regarding: the interaction between investment and human rights law; the key challenges facing stakeholders seeking to improve the content of investor-state contracts; and options for strengthening the human rights regime to address the challenges posed by international investment. Workshop discussions on all three topics highlighted the challenges that remain, and the need for further solutions for strengthening the rights of indigenous peoples in the context of international investment.

Mega-regional trade agreements represent the latest attempt of states to shape and to impact economic globalisation through international cooperation. They pursue a threefold goal: Increasing economic benefits for the participating countries through the reduction of non-tariff barriers to trade and investments 'behind the borders'; consolidating regional cooperation for geopolitical purposes and strengthening the regulatory capacity of the participating countries through elevating the setting of regulatory standards at the international level. In realising this goal, mega-regionals have to be able to react to market developments at the global level and to regulatory developments within the participating states. In order to serve their purpose, these agreements have to be dynamic. Such dynamisation can be achieved by joint committees of the participating countries equipped with decision-making rights. The CETA committee system represents an embryo of how a well-functioning governance structure of mega-regionals could look like. Yet, the more decision-making rights are delegated from national lawmakers to transnational treaty bodies, the more there is a need to ensure the democratic legitimacy when making use of delegated powers. This requires, at the national level of the participating states, a better inclusion of national Parliaments in the ex post control of such decisions. But also at the level of the international cooperation the delegation of extensive powers calls for an own mechanism to ensure the democratic legitimacy of the treaty bodies' actions. The establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly would be recommendable. As regards CETA and its governance, an enhanced inclusion in the ex post control of CETA committee decisions of the Parliaments of the contracting parties appears to be sufficient to close the detected democratic deficit because of its comprehensive scope. The powers currently conferred upon CETA bodies are more extensive than in any previous EU trade agreement but not so extensive it would require democratic control at CETA level.

The growing number of international causes and an intensification in the establishment of transnational networks in Africa are expanding a chain of interdependency which links an ever-larger and more diverse set of actors from North and South. It therefore seems relevant to revisit the debates of the 1990s concerning the dependency of 'African civil society' with regard to the North, through the concept of 'extraversion' within the political spaces of sub-Saharan Africa. First, it is argued that the conditions and effects of this internationalisation of protest actors are contradictory. Access to the international sphere is subject to two forms of competition: social and political. While universally determined by socially selective skills, such access also provides a vehicle for social ascension. Meanwhile, in the specifically African context, it is the object of intense political battles, representing as such both a 'refuge' and a resource, as well as a new source of coercion. Secondly, it is suggested that the specific modalities of relationships between actors from North and South tend to reproduce existing inequalities, with the effect that northern models of protest (in terms of both themes and tools) ultimately win out in African spaces. Finally, similarities in modalities of implementation, in vocabulary, in the skills demanded by internationalised mobilisations, and in the political and economic reforms introduced by external actors, lead to the hypothesis that these transnational mobilisations contribute to a reforming authoritarianism, that is to say to the implementation of reforms which depoliticise social and political issues and reproduce the established order. By repositioning mobilisations with access to the international sphere within the history of African political spaces, the concept of extraversion thus allows consideration of their impact as agent of both emancipation and domination.

The paper represents a preliminary and partial analysis of the information collected in a comparative 12-country study of the adjustment of national employment and social-welfare policies to the increasing internationalization of product and capital markets. After the postwar decades, when national governments were still able to control their economic boundaries, the first international challenge came in the form of the oil-price crisis of 1973/74, which confronted industrial economies with the double threat of cost-push inflation and demand-gap unemployment. It could be met if countries were able to achieve a form of Keynesian concertation in which expansionary monetary and fiscal policies would defend employment while union wage restraint could be relied on to fight inflation. For this solution, corporatist industrial-relations institutions were a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Since the second oil-price crisis of 1979-80 was met by restrictive monetary and expansionary fiscal policies in the United States, the steep increase of real interest rates in the international capital markets forced other central banks to raise interest rates accordingly. As a consequence, employment-creating investments could only be maintained if the share of profits in the national product was significantly increased. Under the pressure of rapidly rising unemployment, unions in most countries were forced to accept this massive redistribution from labor to capital. In the 1990s, finally, the international integration of product and capital markets has been constraining private sector employment as well as the financial viability of the welfare state. But now institutional differences among different types of revenue systems, welfare states and employment systems - Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Continental - create important differences in vulnerability that can no longer be met by standardized responses. The paper concludes with an examination of the specific problems faced by, and the solutions available to, the different countries included in the study.

AbstractStates often use reservations to modify their treaty obligations. Prior research demonstrates why states enter reservations and why states object to reservations, but little work explains why states withdraw them. We argue that states withdraw reservations in response to international social pressure. Using novel data on reservations and reservation withdrawals for the nine core international human rights treaties, our analyses reveal two factors that compel states to withdraw reservations: (1) pressure from peer states and (2) pressure from human rights treaty bodies conducting periodic reviews. While previous work emphasizes domestic factors, our research shows that the international community encourages states to withdraw reservations and strengthen their commitments to human rights and international law.

Abstract : This article proposes a reflection on the challenges of global environmental policy in the Anthropocene. Firstly, the inconsistency between the institutions of international environmental policy and the progressive degradation of the planetary boundaries is highlighted. Secondly, it is stated that, since the transition to Anthropocene requires the conscious construction of a new space of safe operation for humanity, it is necessary to radically modify the institutional structure of cooperation, based on international regimes: the transition from environmental politics to global governance. The fundamental milestone of this path is the overcoming of the international system of conservative hegemony, that is, the abandonment of the sovereignist tendencies - egotistical and short-term - on the part of its actors, particularly the great powers. Finally, a series of premises for the governance of the Anthropocene is proposed from the point of view of International Relations, with the post-sovereign transition as the main pillar.