Civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face mounting challenges, especially in authoritarian states, where they encounter closures, persecution and smear campaigns. Consequently, their crucial work in advancing human rights, good governance and inclusive...

Civil society organisations (CSOs) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) face mounting challenges, especially in authoritarian states, where they encounter closures, persecution and smear campaigns. Consequently, their crucial work in advancing human rights, good governance and inclusive...

The UN Declaration of 24 September 2012 reaffirming the commitment of Heads of State and Government to the Rule of Law reflects the current uneasiness accompanying the application of just the concept. This short paper argues that it is due to discrepancies in its worldwide understanding and to...

Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on overlapping and closely related topics. Research on...

I investigate the effect of ratification of different human rights treaties adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Official Development Assistance (ODA) by donors of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). On average the ratification of an additional human rights treaty...