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The European Convention on Human Rights allows its Contracting Parties to submit third-party interventions. This paper analyses the reasons for engagement of the states with the European Court of Human Rights beyond what they are strictly expected to do: respond in contentious cases and execute judgments. It is argued here that the states mainly engage with the Court for the purposes of self-interest. This paper fills the gap in the literature by substantiating this claim using empirical methods of content analysis of the case law and research interviews with the governmental representatives. Finally, this paper looks at the impact of third-party interventions on the Court's reasoning and concludes that the Court is aware of the aims of the national governments and bears those aims in mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most contested issues in UK public law is how to calibrate the appropriate intensity of proportionality review in human rights adjudication. Here, the challenge lies in formulating a theory of intensity of review that can both comply with the constitutional framework introduced by the Human Rights Act 1998 (' HRA') and accommodate courts' varying levels of competence in different areas of litigation. This paper attempts to sketch such a theory in two steps. First, it argues that to fulfil the constitutional expectations brought about by the HRA, a minimum rigour of proportionality review should be observed. This baseline consists of requiring the government to demonstrate to the courts by means of cogent and sufficient evidence that a rights-limiting measure satisfies the distinct stages of the proportionality test. Secondly, this paper highlights the ways in which compliance with this baseline can nonetheless accommodate the courts' varying levels of competence in different adjudicative contexts. In particular, courts can vary the intensity of review once the baseline level of review is reached and adjust the nature of the evidence required from the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European desire to ensure that bearers of EU rights are adequately compensated for any infringement of these rights, particularly in cases where the harm is widely diffused, and perhaps not even noticed by those affected by it, collides with another desire: to avoid the perceived excesses of an American-style system of class actions. The excesses of these American class actions are in European discourse presented as a sort of bogeyman, which is a source of irrational fear, often presented by parental or other authority figures. But when looked at critically, the bogeyman disappears. In this paper, I examine the European (and UK) proposals for collective action. I compare them to the American regime. The flaws and purported excesses of the American regime, I argue, are exaggerated. A close, objective examination of the American regime shows this. I conclude that it is not the mythical bogeyman of a US class action that is the barrier to effective collective redress; rather, the barriers to effective, wide-ranging group actions lie within European legal culture and traditions, particularly those mandating individual control over litigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will examine the legal standards of gender persecution and the evolving descriptor gender apartheid as a way to describe the status of women in Afghanistan. The paper also examines other complementary forms of legal accountability procedures to vindicate Afghan women's rights and hold perpetrators accountable under crimes against humanity. Although the current locus of the paper is focused on Afghan women, it has larger implications for all other crimes of gender persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances and defends the overlapping consensus view of human rights (OCV) as a political conception of human rights most consistent with John Rawls's normative account of a realistic utopia at the international level. Although some clues exist in The Law of Peoples to support this view, an innovative reconstruction is called for to complete the picture. This paper aims to offer such a reconstruction, which is predicated on two premises: first, the parties to the international original positions, which include decent nonliberal peoples (DNPs), are reasonable and worthy of liberal toleration; and, second, the protection of human rights proper is a module that can fit into all acceptable comprehensive doctrines at the international level, including societal comprehensive doctrines in DNPs. The first premise has been subjected to vehement liberal critiques and left for dead, and the second premise has not been taken seriously and relatively neglected. This paper defends these premises in turn to justify the OCV as constitutive of Rawls's normative account of a realistic utopia at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to question the dominance of human rights as the primary normative framework for European social media regulation, and academic research in this field. Analysing EU legislation and recent ECJ cases, it shows that issues like discriminatory content moderation, profiling, and promotion of stereotypes cannot adequately be addressed within a human rights framework. The centrality of individual rights in the EU legal regime not only fails to address collective issues, like platforms' influence on culture and social norms, but cannot even offer effective, equal protection to individuals. In policy debates, the depoliticised and individualistic language of human rights can legitimise corporate activities and downplay important questions about the political economy of this privatised, highly-concentrated, advertiser-funded industry. The paper also considers interpretations of human rights as structural conditions or collective values, and argues that they cannot fully overcome the limitations discussed here. Given the entrenched role of fundamental rights in EU law, critics of social media cannot avoid relying on them. However, academics should also seek to develop more explicitly political critiques, based on alternative normative visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an alternative epistemic worldview of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights (CR2R) as a norm. It examines how an Afrocentric interpretation of the CR2R norm can contribute to a relational system where corporations promote human rights in African host communities. It uses an African norm — Ubuntu — to reframe and reinterpret Pillar II in Afrocentric terms. It argues that this reframing is important for three reasons. First, Ubuntu reframing increases the CR2R norm's intelligibility in Africa because it clarifies and contextualizes the term 'respect' used in Pillar II. Second, reframing the CR2R norm through Ubuntu fills the ethical gap in the interpretation of the CR2Rnorm. Third, an Ubuntu-inspired interpretation insulates the CR2R norm from some scholars' critique that the CR2R norm's scope is narrow because it only encourages MNCs to avoid infringing on the human rights of others without prescribing positive obligations. This paper then examines channels through which Ubuntu can influence the CR2R norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly treatments of the human rights agenda tend to posit civil society organisations (CSOs) as its defender and the state and mainstream political actors as its violators. Even when raising the problem of an 'uncivil society', the literature labels these CSOs as reactive and hostile to the human rights agenda they perceive as 'Western' and 'foreign'. I argue that these treatments of the issue overlook another phenomenon: the emergence of CSOs that adopted the language of human rights and participated in its formal processes yet subtly redefined, subverted, and undermined the core commitments of the human rights agenda. This paper discusses such developments by referencing right-wing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Malaysia that redefined the parameters of the human rights agenda to undercut state commitments to protect religious freedom, sexuality rights, and gender minorities. Through actor and discourse tracing, this paper illustrates how right-wing Islamist NGOs employed a novel two-pronged strategy that no longer openly repudiated the human rights agenda but continued to erode, eviscerate, and reformulate its contents and principles. The first prong involved institutional measures of 'getting in' to gain legitimacy by participating as a stakeholder within local and international human rights processes. The second prong encompassed social strategies of 'pushing out', whereby actors and their networks mobilised populist pressure to expose, ostracise, and subvert established human rights norms, institutions, and actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on new data regarding judicial decisions involving religious and anti-religious expression to map the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. In particular, the paper assesses the extent to which free-expression decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights have favored claimants who are religious majorities, religious minorities, or secular elites. We find the U.S. doctrine relatively more libertarian and the European Court of Human Rights doctrine relatively more secularist, but both bodies of case law extend regular and substantial rights protection to religious minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of scholarship examining the impact of courts' social rights judgments, especially their distributive impact (ie the extent to which they deliver social rights-related goods and services to the poor and marginalised). Commentators have used this impact to evaluate the effectiveness of courts in realising citizens' social rights. This paper contributes to the scholarship by adding a new 'relational' dimension to our understanding of such impact. It uses the literature on the concept of trust from philosophy, sociology and other disciplines to analyse the impact that social rights judgments have on the relationship between citizens and the political branches of government, and argues that social rights judgments can modify two elements of this relationship that determine the dynamics at play in it: citizens' vulnerability to the political branches with respect to the relevant goods and services; and citizens' uncertainty about the political branches' exercise of control over the goods and services (which can promote the political branches' trustworthiness). By broadening our understanding of these judgments' impact, the paper offers a valuable lens through which to analyse social rights judgments and adds needed nuance to current debates about courts' effectiveness in realising citizens' social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses five constitutional developments in Central and Eastern Europe that can impact the domestic implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Using Czechia, Poland and Slovenia as examples, the paper highlights four potential drivers, namely: (1) the process of constitutionalizing human rights; (2) the proliferation of the doctrine of horizontal effect of constitutional rights; (3) the constitutional legitimacy of state intervention in the free market economy; and (4) the mechanism of judicial review. Furthermore, the author underlines the most significant challenge, which is increasing resistance to international norms in some countries, e.g., Poland. The paper concludes that the jurisprudence of the constitutional courts can facilitate the domestic implementation of the UNGPs, particularly Pillars I (State duty to protect human rights) and III (access to remedy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of solitary confinement (SC) is established within the literature as a common occurrence of torture within the prison system, and many international and national human rights organizations have called for its abolition. A somewhat more contentious topic in the literature is the practice of force feeding (FF) of hunger-striking prisoners. The paper aims to make a case against FF by establishing a parity argument that states the following: If SC is considered an immoral practice (and indeed it should be), it should follow that FF is morally impermissible as well. In conclusion, this paper will argue that FF of hunger-striking prisoners is a violation of their fundamental moral rights and constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment and, therefore, should be abolished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pressure on mental health services has not gone unremarked and is of widespread concern in England and Wales. This can have implications when a bed is being sought for a patient who has undergone a Mental Health Act assessment and is deemed to meet the criteria for being formally admitted to hospital. Once the 24 h period for assessment under section 136 of the Act has lapsed, the ongoing detention of the patient can lead to a legal grey area. Through a fictional example this paper examines the relevant case law and statute that may be used to continue the detention and explores the ethical problems that this may cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of state classification practices have long interrogated how official legal categories are constructed. This paper analyzes the construction of "victimhood" in Colombia as a feat that required negotiation among international human rights organizations, local civil society actors, and politicians across the partisan spectrum. The Victims' Law of 2011, which sought to provide widespread reparations to victims of the civil conflict, originated from the concerns of the human rights community, yet the deliberation process leading up to the law's passage reveals the extent to which elite historical narratives of the conflict unduly narrowed the universe of eligible victims. Using archival evidence from congressional debates from 2007 to 2011, this paper argues that the broad conception of victimhood originally inherited from United Nations guidelines came to be constrained by disproportionate influence from politicians' personal understandings of conflict history, shaped by anecdote and the selective use of historical evidence. These rationales interacted with budgetary constraints to ultimately restrict the victim category according to negotiated temporal boundaries of the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Propaganda and manipulation have long been employed to influence and shape individuals' thoughts and identities. In the advent of the digital era, these techniques have become more sophisticated and invasive, and are utilized to further various causes. This article investigates the extent to which international human rights law affords protection against manipulation techniques such as microtargeting and behavioral reading, which can negatively impact individuals' mental health and autonomy by threatening their right to construct their own identity. The right to freedom of thought in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 18), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 18), and the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 9) offers absolute protection to individuals' inner selves and covers the protection against manipulation on paper. However, in practice, the right has not received much attention and has not reached its full potential due to its abstract and ambiguous nature. This Article analyzes the preparatory works of these human rights law instruments, with a particular focus on the right to freedom of thought, to clarify its origins and the intention behind its creation. The Article contends that the historical origins of the right do not provide sufficient answers to the current issue and contribute to the ineffective application of the right against emerging manipulative practices. The Article also proposes potential ways to clarify and strengthen the legal framework related to the right to freedom of thought.

The expansion of privatisation in health care has been discussed extensively in most European countries and remains a hot topic nowadays. In China, privatisation results in considerable changes in its health care system, especially accelerating the ever-growing private medical institutions (PMIs). The rapid growth of PMIs raises the question of regulation for the Chinese government. Given the fact that few studies are available on the regulation of PMIs in China, I attempted to fill that gap by discussing the development of PMIs with a special focus on legal-regulatory strategies. After assessing current legal-regulatory strategies concerning PMIs, the paper identifies three major concerns regarding effective legal rules (i.e. weak coherence, inconsistency and legislative vacancy) and three difficult issues regarding government capacity (i.e. the negative effects of decentralised political structure, the low professionalism of bureaucrats and lack of reliability) that impede the well-functioning of regulatory agencies in China. As a plausible response, the paper recommends that the newly drafted basic health law should assign a separate chapter to regulate PMIs and also an independent regulatory body should be established to manage the issues of PMIs in China. Detailed recommendations are the practical implications of ICESCR General Comment No. 14. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the first international human rights convention to state expressly that discrimination includes the failure to provide reasonable accommodation. The duty has been described as transformative but has also been critiqued for its lack of structural impact. This paper evaluates the transformative potential of the reasonable accommodation duty encompassed by the Convention, and considers how its potential can be realised. It argues that the duty is transformative because of the substantive equality it provides for individuals, and because it requires both active engagement with persons with disabilities and proactive consideration of barriers to inclusion, in multiple contexts. However, it contends that full realisation of the duty's transformative potential depends on appropriate legislative formulation. This may be a problem in dualist states where application of the Convention is not automatic and pre-existing legislation may be perceived as satisfying the obligation. The paper supports this contention with an analysis of Irish law, arguing that the full transformative potential of the reasonable accommodation duty has not yet been achieved in Ireland, and identifying the reasons for this. The paper examines the practical consequences of inadequate implementation and highlights pitfalls and best practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of rapid technological innovation and expensive new products, the paper calls for the generation of real-world data to inform decision-making and an international discussion on the affordability of new medicines, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Without these, the challenges of health judicialization will continue to grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews common advertising claims by egg freezing companies and evaluates the medical evidence behind those claims. It then surveys legal standards for truth in advertising, including FTC and FDA regulations and the First Amendment right to free speech. Professional standards for medical advertising, such as guidelines published by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and the American Medical Association (AMA), are also summarized. A number of claims, many of which relate to the targeting of younger women for eOC, are found to breach legal and ethical standards for truth in advertising. The ethical implications of misleading advertising claims are also discussed, and the central narrative woven by OC ads — that egg freezing is empowering to women — is examined. The paper concludes that a more balanced approach to the risks and benefits of OC is necessary to truly respect women's autonomy. Moreover, justice requires us to look beyond a medical procedure accessible only to a minority of women in order to address inequities in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores results from a survey of fifty-four trans students in two major universities in Ontario that sought to evaluate participants' access to on-campus facilities. Although both universities have made efforts to accommodate trans students in their use of washrooms, locker rooms, and student housing, the numerous barriers that participants encountered signals stark gaps in access. The results invite a critical reflection of three accommodation models that may be undertaken to address these barriers. By addressing each model's benefits and limitations, wherein the journey towards trans inclusion may generate a new set of exclusions, this paper complicates the notion of increasing access. This paper concludes by offering recommendations across these three models but concedes that challenges may persist until better facilities are reimagined and redesigned going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty years after the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force, where are we in our understanding of the relationship between tort and human rights? This paper argues that we are not as far along in our understanding as we could be. The reason for that has been the methodology we used to understand the relationship, focused as it was around remedies, limitation and causation. This paper proposes a new approach, based around the right rather than the remedy. It aims to theorise one particular cause of action – the duty in Osman v United Kingdom – to exemplify this approach. For English lawyers, who have historically used the framework of the forms of action to understand our own law, it is argued that this a good way to comprehend the European jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mistakes in assisted human reproduction procedures such as IVF, egg, sperm and embryo donation are surprisingly common, but tortious liability for such mistakes has not been addressed in the courts of England and Wales, or Ireland. This paper presents an argument in favour of a vindicatory approach to tortious claims arising from mistakes, where the claimants are the parents of the resulting, healthy, child. Drawing on the analogous tort of wrongful pregnancy, the paper provides a vindicatory account of the case of Rees v Darlington Memorial Hospital , and argues that Rees signposts the correct approach for tortious claims arising from mistakes in assisted human reproduction. It is argued that while the law should not compensate 'loss' flowing from the birth of a child, parents should be entitled to an award of damages to vindicate their right to reproductive autonomy. The paper explores vindication of the right to reproductive autonomy through the tort of negligence, but argues that vindication may be more effectively achieved through the creation of a separate tort which is actionable per se, strict liability, and expressly focused on vindication rather than compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After briefly sketching common-morality principlism, as presented in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, this paper responds to two recent sets of challenges to this framework. The first challenge claims that medical ethics is autonomous and unique and thus not a form of, or justified or guided by, a common morality or by any external morality or moral theory. The second challenge denies that there is a common morality and insists that futile efforts to develop common-morality approaches to bioethics limit diversity and prevent needed moral change. This paper argues that these two critiques fundamentally fail because they significantly misunderstand their target and because their proposed alternatives have major deficiencies and encounter insurmountable problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The democratic dialogue model is a domestic constitutional model of rights protection, which is used to explain and evaluate the relationship between domestic courts and legislatures. It is characterised by there being some capacity on the part of the legislature to respond to a court decision and it claims, among other things, to produce a 'better protection of human rights'. This paper examines whether the democratic dialogue model can be, and should be, applied to the relationship between state legislatures and, respectively, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union (the European Courts). The paper first demonstrates that this proposed application of the model differs from other accounts of dialogue hitherto applied at the transnational level. It examines how exactly the model can be applied to the relationship between national legislatures and the European Courts and it demonstrates that the model provides an explanatory framework for the interactions between the institutions. It argues that the normative claims of the domestic dialogue model are achieved when the model is applied in the proposed way, but it acknowledges that the achievement of those normative claims might not always be desirable at the transnational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The merits and means of accommodating non-binary populations into UK law is becoming an increasingly important issue for policymakers, judges, scholars and legal professionals. Following Elan-Cane's Supreme Court challenge to binary passport sex markers in 2021, the UK Government face another challenge this year concerning non-binary recognition on birth certificates. While an additional third sex option is perhaps the most well-known reform option for the current binary system, other options have been suggested, including additional multiple sex options and/or removing sex from the birth certificate. While scholars and policymakers debate the merits of these, little is known about non-binary people's own preferences towards these options. This paper therefore presents original empirical data on non-binary attitudes towards these options, demonstrating the various perceived opportunities and drawbacks of each, and reflecting on the possible consequences of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade. The European Court of Human Rights is also expected to decide on several abortion cases. In this paper, the interpretative approaches of both courts are compared. Whereas the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decided on an originalist approach to the Constitution, the highest European court has always regarded the European Convention on Human Rights as a living instrument. As a result, domestic laws regulating the interruption of pregnancy are seen by the Strasbourg court as interferences with a fundamental right, the right to respect for private life. Although member states of the Council of Europe enjoy a wide margin of appreciation with regard to the circumstances in which abortion will be permitted, its highest court put forward the state's positive obligation to secure pregnant women's right to effective respect for their physical and psychological integrity in several landmark judgments. In this way, it ensures the existence of effective mechanisms in countries with a poor record of implementing the right to a lawful abortion. Albeit at a minimum, the Strasbourg court offers protection, whereas the U.S. Supreme Court no longer does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the extent to which conscientious objections to vaccination qualify for protection under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Drawing on an examination of the nature of conscience and the ethics of vaccine refusal, it argues that a narrow category of reasons for refusal to be vaccinated can be differentiated from more general 'vaccine hesitancy'. In relation to conscience objections of this kind, it engages in a systematic analysis of the applicability of the ECHR, both in relation to compulsory vaccination, and so-called 'vaccine passports'. It concludes that states can – and in some situations must – recognise conscientious objections under the ECHR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The premise of Russia's 2012 "Foreign Agents" Law, one of the first such laws restricting foreign funding for non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), is that foreign monies equal foreign agendas. Since then, over 50 countries have adopted similar laws using a similar justification. This paper interrogates this claim of foreign donor influence through examining legal mobilization by human rights NGOs at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). We track donor support for litigation by providing an overview of all foundation grant flows relating to strategic litigation for 2013–2014, and then matching the granting activities of two major U.S. foundations over 14 years to human rights NGO participation in cases before the ECtHR. Further, through case studies of Russian NGOs, we assess the causal role that donor support has played in facilitating their increased involvement in ECtHR litigation. The combined analysis indicates broad patterns of private foundation support to litigating NGOs, but uncovers no evidence that foreign donors were "pushing" NGOs toward litigation as a strategy, but instead more evidence suggesting that NGOs convinced donors to support human rights litigation. Despite the inaccuracy of the justification underpinning Russia's foreign agent law, the law threatens the survival of human rights organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant issue in combatting the Covid-19 pandemic is the need to enhance developing states' access to Covid-19 vaccines. The present paper considers the request for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights in relation to Covid-19 technologies and treatments submitted to the World Trade Organization and analyses a key argument against the proposed waiver: that the compulsory licensing provisions set out in the TRIPS Agreement are sufficiently flexible to help states get access to vaccines. The compulsory licensing flexibilities set out in TRIPS, including the amendment to TRIPS in Article 31 bis , are evaluated, to explore whether compulsory licensing could be an effective tool in helping developing states to access Covid-19 vaccines. Key issues are explored from a human rights perspective to examine whether a rights-based approach to the compulsory licensing provisions could offer further insights as to how the provisions could be more workable, to enhance access to medicines and vaccines for developing states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exclusion of improperly obtained evidence is often discussed in relation to criminal proceedings, but not civil proceedings, where concerns about wrongdoing of state actors and deprivation of liberty are not usually present. It is sometimes assumed that judges in civil proceedings in England and Wales had no discretion to exclude relevant and reliable evidence based on how it was obtained (as a distinct concern from exclusion of evidence of little probative value) prior to the enactment of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998. This paper seeks to demonstrate that this is wrong, arguing that a number of sources of power to exclude evidence on the basis of how that evidence was obtained have arisen in England and Wales, and that these are not attributable to the Civil Procedure Rules. There is a discretion which enables exclusion of evidence where this is 'in the interests of justice', and a discretion to do with the administration of justice. It may be possible to break these down further, to concerns over abuse of the court's own procedures, and executive illegality. Analysing the decisions leading to these developments reveals the importance of human rights concerns to recognition of exclusionary discretion in civil proceedings, and for informing the content of the discretion/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of takings of property highlight the increasing penetration of state power into private life. Controversies regularly surround compensation provisions. Many academic analyses and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have supported the proposition that market value offers the best approximation of just compensation. However, full market value compensation may not be guaranteed if the taking of property fulfils certain legitimate objectives of the 'public interest'. To unpack the complexity surrounding compensation provisions under the European Convention on Human Rights, this paper adopts and develops a 'law-and-community' approach – an important dimension, not previously investigated in the study of takings of property – which sees 'community' as networks of social relations, and views law as not only grounded in community but also existing to regulate communal networks. This paper then identifies the limits of both Art 1, Protocol 1 of the ECHR and the current approaches to compensation in the light of this law-and-community approach. In so doing, the paper makes a distinctive contribution by offering a new socio-legal interpretation of controversies surrounding compensation for takings of property beyond the private/public divide and by proposing an alternative framework of engaging law and regulation in wider social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Equality and Human Rights Commission was created in 2006 with wide-ranging powers to protect human rights, promote equal opportunities and encourage mutual respect between different groups. Alongside the Commission, individuals through the courts, and sector-specific enforcers (such as ombudsmen and regulators) have also been given equality and human rights enforcement powers. Within this enforcement landscape, the Commission has struggled to craft an enforcement role for itself. For the first time, this paper, through the mapping of these different actors in their shared regulatory space, outlines a role for the Commission in equality and human rights enforcement. This role consists of three primary tasks: (i) taking action that courts and sector-specific enforcers are unable to perform; (ii) overcoming some of the limitations of private enforcement in the courts; and (iii) coordinating and supporting sector-specific enforcers. The paper concludes by exploring how the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) can effectively fulfil this role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dementia is a growing issue in the United Kingdom (UK) with over 800,000 people affected. Of these people, in excess of 40,000 are aged under 65 years. Thus, a significant number of individuals may be experiencing symptoms of dementia while in employment. In addition, as working lives extend, the potential impact of dementia on the workplace could be substantial. However, to date, there has been little research on experiences of dementia in the workplace. The research that exists highlights the lack of support for workers with dementia. Dementia may be considered to be a disability under the Equality Act 2010. Therefore, the legislation potentially provides a framework for individuals to request that their employer make reasonable adjustments to support their continued employment. International human rights law is potentially another tool that could be utilised to obtain necessary adjustments. This paper argues that in developing the evidence base on workplace experiences of dementia, it is important that the legal framework be considered. This paper reviews the existing literature on dementia in the workplace and embeds this in the legislative framework in order to establish a cross-disciplinary research agenda. While the paper focuses on the UK legal context, the argument presented in the paper is still relevant to other national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By addressing the question "Are the roles and values of stakeholder participation qualitatively different for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and national human rights institutions (NHRIs), and if so, how?" this article dissects stakeholder participation in UN human rights treaty body activities. First, it normatively posits that stakeholder participation in treaty body activities carries three values, which weigh differently based on the actor and the treaty body activity concerned: facilitating "bounded" national deliberations, promoting international deliberations on human rights treaty standards, and supplementing the treaty bodies' fact-finding capacity. It offers concrete normative guidance for treaty bodies on their engagement with NGO and NHRI participation to maximize the benefits of these values. It then empirically analyzes their current practice in light of the above-mentioned normative guidance. This article contributes, first, to the theorization of stakeholder participation in treaty body activities, which has been discussed but only in generalized or fragmented ways in previous studies. Second, it supports the effectiveness and legitimacy of treaty bodies by endorsing their practice that is consistent with the guidance and finding space for improvement. Finally, it provides a rationale for establishing and strengthening NHRIs by showing that NHRI participation has unique roles distinct from those of NGOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the first-ever rule of law conditionality procedure in September 2022, a resolution was adopted by the European Parliament which declared that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, as it had turned into a 'hybrid regime of electoral autocracy'. Against this background, this article explains the business and human rights (BHR) gap in Hungary and presents its consequences for the Ukrainian refugee crisis. We first provide a general overview of the role of business in the development and consolidation of the Orbán regime over the past 13 years, highlighting how businesses are both agents and victims of legal and political developments. The paper distinguishes four types of 'business': multinational and foreign companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; local companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; multinational companies that are targets of restrictive and repressive populist rhetoric and economic policies; and the 'rest', the remainder that try to avoid becoming targets of oligarchic takeovers. The article also documents how the state and other stakeholders are failing to meet their commitments under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The next part of the article assesses how companies are responding to the refugee crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, Hungary's neighbour. If the government does not adopt Pillar I and Pillar III of the UNGPs, what room for manoeuvre do companies have? The focus here is on how companies, domestic and foreign, multinational enterprises (MNEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), engage in humanitarian (and human rights) crisis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This DiF paper analyses the 2021 Consultations for Central & Eastern Europe and Central Asia, conducted as part of the process underlying the United Nations Working Group 'Report on human rights-compatible international investment agreements'. These consultations led to three unique conclusions concerning International Investment Agreements ('IIAs'), which were absent in other consultations: (i) the 'regulatory chill' caused by IIAs with respect to human rights regulations is moot in authoritarian and 'hybrid' regimes in this region, (ii) IIAs tend to be perceived in this region as tools to protect human rights, which can spill over to other areas of socio-economic life, and as a source of inspiration and a model for building similar protections in such other areas, and with the potential to (iii) have a positive impact on the development of domestic laws (and their relationship with the rule of law and good governance reforms in developing host states). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to examine the legitimacy of Ryukyuans/Okinawans' right to self-determination (RSD) under international human rights law. To this end, it first details the evolution of the RSD from the traditional right to independence for colonial peoples, to the continuing right to self-governance for wider groups of peoples, which is followed by an analysis of holders of the RSD. The paper then turns to Ryukyu/Okinawa to discuss the RSD of its peoples. Three historical events, the Disposition of Ryukyu, the Treaty of San Francisco, and the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, are analysed from a legal perspective, followed by an examination of the peoplehood of Ryukyuans/Okinawans. These lead to the conclusion that the Ryukyuans/Okinawans may legitimately claim that they possess the "unexercised" RSD as a quasi-non-self-governing people, and that they are entitled to claim the RSD as a "people" under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and other United Nations declarations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International human rights specialists and libertarian philosophers have rarely pursued meaningful exchanges, but this paper probes some of their common ground. In recent years, leading international monitoring bodies have developed a principle described here as the 'Libertarian Principle of Human Rights' (LPHR). It runs as follows: Governments cannot legitimately recite public morals as a sufficient justification to limit individual human rights. That principle might seem obvious in many societies today, but throughout history, including the history of liberalism, any notion that certain individual interests must trump religious or customary beliefs has stood as the rare exception. The seemingly Western and secular suggestion of a libertarian principle inherent within human rights may seem at odds with the view that human rights ought to reflect diverse cultural traditions; however, LPHR underscores an anti-authoritarianism, which, it is argued, must form part of any serious conception of human rights. LPHR can be substantiated even for highly controversial rights, such as LGBTQ+ rights, suggesting that it applies a fortiori to more settled rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-legal status determines the differential rights to residence, work and social welfare that accrue to migrants depending on their particular immigration status. This paper presents analysis of original empirical data generated in qualitative interviews with migrants who had both made a claim for asylum and experienced conditions of forced labour in the UK. Following an outline of the divergent socio-legal statuses assigned to individual migrants within the asylum system, early discussions in the paper offer a summary of key aspects and indicators of forced labour. Subsequent sections highlight the significance of socio-legal status in constructing such migrants as inherently vulnerable to severe exploitation. It is concluded that immigration policy and, more particularly, the differential socio-legal statuses that it structures at various stages of the asylum process, helps to create the conditions in which severe exploitation and forced labour are likely to flourish among asylum seekers and refugees in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the future of migrants with acute heart problems and without permanent permission to remain in the country where they are seeking asylum. What does the country they have traveled to owe them? Specifically, what healthcare services are they entitled to? This may seem a niche problem, but numbers of migrants with acute heart problems could increase in the future. Besides, similar problems could be raised by, for instance, traumatized migrants with acute needs for healthcare services for other serious conditions. The paper identifies the issues and some positions on them. Arguments for and against these positions are explored. This particular set of problems in healthcare ethics creates several challenges, at both national and international levels, concerning access to transplantation, public willingness to donate organs, optimal use of organs, justice and fairness, and potential conflicts of law, politics and ethics, as well as issues revolving around interaction and communication (or lack of it) between agencies and professions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary laws have been responding to the challenges of ageing societies. Elder people have gradually become a special, if not disadvantaged, social group to be protected, cared for, and even censored by law in the name of protection. The UN has long discussed a Convention to protect the distinctive human rights of old persons while invoking the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to protect the dignity of senior citizens. Under national laws, adult-guardianship, welfare, and medical laws are strengthened in the name of better elder care, yet forcing old people to give up the freedom and autonomy that they have enjoyed throughout adulthood. This paper thus argues for the socio-legal construction of "elderhood" to respond to the special needs of senior citizens to maintain individual dignity. By observing narrative accounts of elders in care, socio-legal images of Taiwan elderhood may be presented for analyses. A proposal is then made to suggest the socio-legal construction of the individual dignity of elder people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her important and well-known discussion "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," Mary Anne Warren regrets that "it is not possible to produce a satisfactory defense of a woman's right to obtain an abortion without showing that the fetus is not a human being, in the morally relevant sense." Unlike some more cautious philosophers, Warren thinks that we can definitively demonstrate that the fetus is not a person. In this paper, Warren's argument is critically examined with a focus especially on the question of the foundation and the boundaries of the moral community. The fundamental thesis of the paper is that Warren's approach is flawed for at least four reasons: (1) that being a person is not as obviously central to having full moral rights as Warren assumes, (2) that her exclusivism regarding moral status has dubious moral consequences independent of the abortion issue, (3) that it is not clear that a fetus is not a person, even on Warren's own criteria, and (4) her criteria for personhood are themselves suspect.

This paper reports on an innovative survey of long-term care facilities for older people in the Argentine city of La Plata. It applies a range of qualitative methodologies, including a clandestine audit conducted by older people living in the community. The paper pays particular attention to the types and availability of services, perceived quality and the rigour of regulatory processes. It finds that there has been a rapid growth in the availability of formal services, but that there are many gaps in provision, especially for older people with complex care needs. There are strong indications that service quality is uneven and, in some cases, this amounts to the contravention of basic human rights. State regulation is hampered by institutional fragmentation and weak governance. A wider set of expert interviews and the limited available published information indicate that these findings are unlikely to be exceptional, and that similar issues affect rapidly emerging long-term care systems in many low- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Circumvention tourism is a form of medical tourism that occurs when individuals travel abroad to receive treatments that are a prohibited in their home county but permitted in a destination country. This paper explores this question: Should individuals be punished by their home countries for engaging in circumvention tourism? Guido Pennings, Richard Huxtable, and I. Glenn Cohen have all argued for what I call "formalist accounts" of circumvention tourism. That is, they try to show that certain types of circumvention tourism should or should not be punished in principle. Against them, I show that questions about circumvention tourism's punishability cannot be answered in the abstract. Whether individuals should be punished depends too much on the prima facie morality of the treatments being performed and the prohibitions being circumvented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper explores how corporations, through their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities, can help to effect positive developmental change. We use research on institutional change, deinstitutionalization, and institutional work to develop our central theoretical framework. This framework allows us to suggest more explicitly how CSR can potentially be mobilized as a purposive form of institutional work aimed at disrupting existing institutions in favor of positive change. We take the gender institution in the Arab Middle East as a case in point. Our suggestion is that the current context of the Arab Spring, which combined with increasingly obvious endogenous institutional contradictions, has created a fertile ground for shaping change processes within the gender institution. Finally, we provide concrete examples of CSR initiatives that regional corporate actors can engage in for positive developmental change supporting women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]