Book Review: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights and Disability Law

Book Review

Germany v Italy:The Triumph of Sovereign Immunity over Human Rights Law

This article analyses the doctrine of State immunity within the context of the recent judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concerning the Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v Italy: Greece intervening). The object of this article is to explore the implications of the State immunity from foreign judicial proceedings in cases of jus cogens crimes. Challenging the assumption that the law of immunity is merely procedural in nature, this article argues that there can be no immunity in cases of undisputed international crimes.

Human Rights in Irish Prisons

Ireland is bound by several international instruments in the area of prisoners’ rights and penal policy and the ongoing reform in the Irish prison system means that the time is opportune to consider the extent to which these legal obligations are currently met and to evaluate what needs to be done to ensure greater compliance. The aim of this article is thus to examine Ireland’s record in prisoners’ rights against international standards and to determine where reform needs to take place in order to ensure full respect for the rights of prisoners in Irish law, policy and practice.

Courts and Consociations: Human Rights versus Power-sharing

Consociations are power-sharing arrangements, increasingly used to manage ethno-nationalist, ethno-linguistic, and ethno-religious conflicts. Current examples include Belgium, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Burundi, and Iraq. Despite their growing popularity, they have begun to be challenged before human rights courts as being incompatible with human rights norms, particularly equality and non-discrimination.

Courts and Consociations examines the use of power-sharing agreements, their legitimacy, and their compatibility with human rights law. Key questions include to what extent, if any, consociations conflict with the liberal individualist preferences of international human rights institutions, and to what extent consociational power-sharing may be justified to preserve peace and the integrity of political settlements.

In three critical cases, the European Court of Human Rights has considered equality challenges to important consociational practices, twice in Belgium and then in Sejdic and Finci v Bosnia regarding the constitution established for Bosnia Herzegovina under the Dayton Agreement. The Court's decision in Sejdic and Finci has significantly altered the approach it previously took to judicial review of consociational arrangements in Belgium. This book accounts for this change and assess its implications. The problematic aspects of the current state of law are demonstrated. Future negotiators in places riven by potential or actual bloody ethnic conflicts may now have less flexibility in reaching a workable settlement, which may unintentionally contribute to sustaining such conflicts and make it more likely that negotiators will consider excluding regional and international courts from reviewing these political settlements.

Human Rights and the United Kingdom Supreme Court

After setting the scene by explaining the constraints which are placed on the Justices of the UK Supreme Court, this book considers how human rights are conceptualized by the Court in general and how in particular the procedural questions thrown up by the Human Rights Act have been dealt with so far. It then examines on a right-by-right basis the Justices' position on all the European Convention rights and some additional international human rights standards incorporated into UK law.

Human Rights in Northern Ireland in 2011

This chapter surveys and comments on the developments in the legal protection of human rights in Northern Ireland during the year 2011.

GSP+ and Human Rights::Is the EU's Approach the Right One?

Among the purposes of the EU’s GSP+ programme is to link human rights to trade incentives, with the idea of using such incentives to promote developing countries’ adoption of the values found in core human rights treaties. With the re-renewal of the GSP (and GSP+) programmes to take effect in January 2014, it is fruitful to examine their efficacy and consistency with WTO law. In this article, I argue the GSP+ programme is not only ineffective in obtaining an improvement in human rights conditions for the vast majority of the world’s population, but it is also incompatible with WTO law. A stick-based regime where human rights abuses are linked to trade sanctions is a better way to proceed. After outlining the GSP+ system, and its linkage of human rights and trade, I analyse its efficacy and WTO consistency. Having shown that it is ineffective and contrary to WTO law, I argue that trade sanctions based on a PPM distinction and/or GATT XX(a) may be the appropriate means of linking trade and human rights. The article ends with some concluding remarks on the need for the careful design of such a system.

Güler and Öngel v Turkey: Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Strasbourg’s discourse on the justified use of force

This article discusses the discourse on the justified use of force in the Strasbourg Court’s analysis of Article 3. With particular focus on the judgment in Güler and Öngel v Turkey, a case concerning the use of force by State agents against demonstrators, it addresses the question of the implications of such discourse, found in this and other cases, on the absolute nature of Article 3. It offers a perspective which suggests that the discourse on the justified use of force can be reconciled with Article 3’s absolute nature.