With the passage of Act 48 in May 2011, Vermont has become the first U.S. state to enact a law for a universal, publicly financed health care system. The state is on course for implementing a single payer system by 2017. This first breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for universal health...

In this article the author explores the role private international law (‘PIL’) could play in addressing human rights violations committed by a multinational company operating outside Europe − possibly in a conflict zone − in a civil action in Europe. The article examines the feasibility...

This chapter provides an general overview of, and introduction to, the scholarship, debates and controversies on fundamental social rights. It sketches the origin of the concept of social rights, showing how the distinct formation of European Social State and Anglo-American Liberal models of...

Biotechnology is a recognized research area that has increasingly advanced into new technologies and modern practices raising several legal, ethical and regulatory issues. The revolutionary speed of biotech innovations has had a significant impact on the protection of the rights of the...

The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights has been incorporated into European constitutional law ten years after it was adopted by the EU institutions. In that time the Charter developed from a ‘solemn proclamation’ to a persuasive authority before the European Courts and now a binding Charter...

Governments have recently been looking to deputise ISPs so as to regulate cyberspace more firmly. In particular, they have encouraged ISPs to take actions to address online copyright infringement, the online exchange of images of child abuse and the use of the Internet to promote terrorism....

Discussions about different modalities to deal with conflicts between 'fundamental rights' presuppose a common understanding of which norms form the category of 'fundamental rights'. Human rights analysts typically approach this issue only implicitly, by exclusively referring to human rights...

Conflicts between individual fundamental rights are both pervasive and problematic in the system of the European Convention on Human Rights. This paper is an attempt to illuminate these two dimensions, as well as a plea for taking conflicts of rights more seriously within the Convention legal...

So far, EU treaty law does not encapsulate any individually justiciable rights to a clean environment or to health. Th e article explores whether individuals can rely on the environmental duties embodied in the European Union Charter of Human Rights (EUCHR), and the European Convention on Human...

This chapter defends a simple proposition: rights matter. It is a troubling reflection of the current state of juridical thought that it is in relation to human rights law that the proposition is defended. In an effort to reclaim rights from the position of inconsequence to which they have been...