Why do national court judges refer to human rights treaties?: A comparative international law analysis of CEDAW

An analysis was conducted of 325 national judicial decisions across 55 jurisdictions, in which CEDAW was referred to in the reported decision. Despite predictions to the contrary based on previous scholarship, significant variations between courts in their interpretation of CEDAW occurred relatively infrequently, courts referred relatively seldom to interpretations of CEDAW by other national courts, and there was little evidence of transnational dialogic approaches to judging. An analysis of these results suggests that domestic judges invoking CEDAW act primarily as domestic actors who use international law in order to advance domestic goals, rather than acting primarily as agents of the international community in applying CEDAW domestically, or contributing to the transnational shaping of international law to suit national interests. The Article suggests an understanding of the domestic implementation of a human rights treaty as not only law, but a unique kind of law that performs a particular function, in light of its quality as something akin to hard and soft law simultaneously.

ARTICLE: On the Curious Disappearance of Human Servitude from General International Law

The following study considers the fragmentation of law which occurred in 1956 with regard to the law on servitude. As States were unwilling to go as far as the Universal Declaration on Human in establishing that "no one shall be held in [...] servitude", the negotiators of the 1956 Supplementary Conventions moved to expunge the very term 'servitude' from the text and to replace it with the phrase 'institutions and practices similar to slavery' which could then be abolished 'progressively and as soon as possible'. The negotiation history of the 1956 Convention clear demonstrate that the Universal Declaration on Human was the elephant in the room and that it ultimately lead to a fragmentation of the law as between general international law manifest in the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the one hand and international human rights law on the other. It is for this reason that, for instance the 2001 UN and 2005 Council of Europe trafficking conventions mention both 'practices similar to slavery' and 'servitude' as types of human exploitation to be suppressed in their definition of 'trafficking in persons'.

Towards an Emancipatory International Law: the Bolivarian reconstruction

In this article, we argue that a unique South American treaty known as ALBA—the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas—puts forward a cohesive counter-vision of international law rooted in notions of complementarity and human solidarity. We further argue that Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars might use this initiative as a springboard to push forward a long-overdue reform of the international legal regime. While, on its own, ALBA is unlikely to pose much of a challenge to the structural imbalances that permeate global society, when juxtaposed alongside the many initiatives of the Bolivarian Revolution, it appears to possess signi?cant democratic potential. With both scholarly and popular support, ALBA may even have the capability of sparking a renewal of a united Third World movement.