After 9/11, the United States and its allies took measures to protect their citizens from future terrorist attacks.  While these measures aim to increase security, they have often been criticized for violating human rights.  But violating rights is difficult in a constitutional democracy with...

While the United Nations and NGOs are pushing for global judicialization of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs), little is known of their consequences. We provide evidence of the effects of introducing three types of ESCRs into the constitution: the rights to education, health and...

Constitutions are commonly regarded as uniquely national products, shaped by domestic ideals and politics. This paper develops and empirically investigates a novel hypothesis, which is that constitutions are also shaped by transnational influence, or “diffusion.” Constitutional rights can...

In December 2007 the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in its latest Guantaacute;namo Bay cases, Boumediene vs. Bush and Al Odah vs. United States. Interestingly, the argumentation offered in this litigation was almost exclusively domestic - international human rights law did not feature in...

Recent court decisions, for instance in South Africa and Latin America, have held states bound to respect and serve HIV/AIDS patients' human rights to indicated and available medical care. HIV/AIDS is estimated to affect over 36 million people worldwide, including 16.4 million women of...

Each year an estimated 515 000 women die of complications of pregnancy and childbirth, 7 million more suffer serious health problems and 50 million suffer adverse health effects. Over 98% of deaths occur in resource-poor countries. However, poverty alone neither justifies nor necessarily...

A Review Essay on the 2008 report of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and Transnational corporations and other business enterprises, Professor John Ruggie to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Protect, Respect and Remedy: a Framework for...

Chapter 22 of Marie Breen-Smyth, Ashgate Companion to Political Violence (2012): Within the dominion of counter-terrorism, policy choices can be stark. One must determine in institutional terms whether the response is to be predominantly military or policing and, cutting across that boundary,...

The root of most Human Rights discussions in Africa stems from the input of foreigners, either Europeans, the English. This tracing of everything human right to the whites gives the impression that they introduced the better morality, better religion, better idea of right as distinct from wrong...