Human rights are universally recognized. Their enforcement, however, often requires the action of particular states. This paper examines private law reme-dies in tort in several Member states of the European Union to remedy human rights violations occurring outside the European Union. It concludes that the laws examined are examples of universal jurisdiction and rights and duties of private persons under international law, which are two key elements of the post-Westphalian state system.
The so-called right to property, sometimes called the right of property, divides opinion, central to some systems of belief. Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 of the European Court of Human Rights ("P1-1") consists of three sentences. However, the complicated inter-relation of these three sentences is still not resolved despite half a century of case-law. The aim of this note is to try and discern a pattern, if any, in the Court's thinking. Adapted from the source document.
Institutions that monitor violations of human rights, particularly of victims living outside their home countries, will often name the victims' countries of origin in their reports. This article looks at this understudied practice and argues that it unintentionally creates bilateral retaliation dynamics between the victims' home country and the country violating the victims' rights. The article defines retaliation and explains why countries care about violations of their citizens' rights that take place abroad. Through empirical analysis, the article shows that countries retaliate in response to violations of their citizens' rights which have been identified and publicized by the UN Committee Against Torture. I use a new dyadic dataset on the abuse of foreigners' human rights, as identified by Amnesty International and the Committee Against Torture, to test the hypothesis that a country's abuse of foreigners from a peer country is associated with that peer country's abuse of rights of citizens from the observed country. I then examine the Syrian–Lebanese case to trace the process of retaliation. These analyses support the hypothesis that countries retaliate against violations of their citizens' rights abroad.
Abstract Since 1965, nine UN human rights treaties have been adopted. Surprisingly, we know little about the conditions under which states arrived at the negotiation table because there has been no serious attempt to empirically identify the unique attributes of pre-negotiation in this context. This article examines the pre-negotiation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons (CRPD), drawing on diverse qualitative data sources such as interviews with state and non-state participants. Informed by a constructivist perspective, this study identifies esteem-seeking behavior as a key motivation for some states to negotiate. The article also shows how a transnational advocacy network influenced the pre-negotiation process by leveraging states' esteem-seeking ambitions and appealing to their reputation as a way of pushing parties to negotiate. Additional tactics that the transnational advocacy network employ at the international level to expedite negotiations are also identified.
This article is about national identity, political interest and the creation of international human rights regimes. Geographically, it is focused on Western Europe and the very recent process of establishing the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Both national identity and political interest are seen as important determinants of this process, defining its discourse and outcome. The relationship between the two is complex and recursive. They influence each other to an extent that warrants seeing them as mutually constitutive. On one hand, the social, political and economic projects elites engage in have to resonate positively with dearly held elements of national identity but have also the power to modify them. Being a psychological phenomenon, on the other hand, national identity is a dynamic concept that employs common historically defined memories, traditions and customs but is also subject to the influence of the political context within which it operates.
