Suchergebnisse

This is the first single-authored comprehensive account of how human dignity has found expression in international law over the past two centuries. It provides a theoretical, historical and juridical exegesis of how human dignity moved from the fringes to the centre of the international legal system.

ABSTRACT
The question of human rights and energy has been traditionally framed as an analysis of limitations on energy transactions arising from substantive and procedural human rights. Whereas the negative externality framing of human rights sets safeguards against the adverse effects of energy transactions and thereby restrains how such transactions are conducted, it overlooks a more fundamental dimension, the conferral of entitlements. Indeed, human rights define entitlements over energy resources, setting competing claims that limit not only how energy transactions are conducted but also the very power to conduct them in the first place. The entitlement dimension of human rights also unveils a wider question, namely the competing claims of a variety of collective subjects against the entitlement of the territorial or coastal States. In other words, such reframing opposes two logics of international law, each based on a different conception of the source from which entitlements flow. This article investigates the externality-avoidance and entitlement function of human rights in the context of international energy transactions. It reviews the most relevant judicial and quasi-judicial practice at the international level to illustrate the implications of framing the function of human rights from one or the other perspective.

Abstract
The ordinary meaning of the term 'prevention' is to prevent harm from occurring. But what 'harm'? For over 170 years, the system now embodied in the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHRs) has answered this question by focusing on the prevention of disease 'spread' across countries, rather than on the 'spillover' of pathogens from animals to humans, which constitute the main source of pandemic risk today. This bias towards the containment of disease has deep roots. In the historical context from the IHRs emerged, focusing on pathogen spillover was beyond the possibilities of the science of the time; it was also pointless to the extent that the effort focused on pathogens which were already prevalent in humans, causing diseases such as cholera or plague. Transposed to the present day, this containment bias has important consequences for global health governance. Most importantly among these is that the global health security architecture still lacks a specific system to prevent spillovers of pathogens at the origin of outbreaks and subsequent spread of diseases such as COVID-19, SARS, MERS or Ebola. This article investigates the roots of this focus on containment. Relying on the proceedings of the International Sanitary Conferences that preceded the IHRs, as well as on an untapped documentary archive relating to the revision of the IHRs between 1995-2005, the article explains the reasons underpinning this enduring bias and its implications for global health governance.

AbstractIn its August 2019 decision inPortillo Cáceres v Paraguay, the Human Rights Committee recognised, for the first time, the existence of a connection between environmental protection and the right to life with dignity. This is not only a landmark decision for the Committee but also represents the consolidation of a body of case law and practice from the three regional human rights courts and other UN human rights bodies which has developed over the last quarter of a century. It also shows the potential of two important and widely debated paragraphs in the newly adopted General Comment No. 36 on the Right to Life, which describe environmental degradation as both an enabler of threats and a direct threat to the right to life. Such potential has been confirmed in another landmark decision of the HRC—Teitiota v New Zealand, relating to climate change as threat to life. This article draws onPortillo Cáceres v ParaguayandTeitiota v New Zealandto analyse this wider field of practice in order to clarify the connection between the right to life and environmental protection, as recognised by the Committee, and considers its potential impact on future litigation.

On April 8, 2016, the Egyptian government announced the signing of a "Convention of Demarcation of the Maritime Border" with Saudi Arabia (Convention). Under the Convention, the Red Sea Islands of Tiran and Sanafir lay in Saudi territory. The move was perceived by foreign and domestic observers as the abandonment by Egypt of a long-held territorial and maritime claim in exchange for a loan from Saudi Arabia, and it was challenged before the Egyptian courts. On January 16, 2017, the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court rendered a judgment annulling the act of cession of the islands on the basis of the Egyptian people's entitlement over them (Judgment). The Judgment triggered a domestic judicial saga, which only ended in 2018. Aside from the intriguing political dimensions of this incident, the Judgment, while interpreting the Egyptian Constitution of 2014, sheds light on some fundamental aspects of international law, namely: the identity of the "holder" of sovereignty and its relations with the "delegatee," i.e., the government; the contribution of human rights as an analytical frame for this issue; and the validity of a treaty concluded in violation of a state's treaty-making powers, a question for which there is limited practice.