On October 8, 2016, the Ethiopian government officially declared a nationwide state of emergency in response to a year-long protest by members of Ethiopia's two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara. The Directive issued to implement the state of emergency institutes a new normative regime, astonishing in scope and scale, in which the de jure reversal of the...
In Human Rights Resolution 2005/74, the United Nations Commissionon Human Rights recognized the importance of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRis) in protecting human rights and called for further work to nurture their growth. In an effort to address critiques that it fell short of U.N. expectations for NHRis, in March 2014 Myanmar's government enacted the Myanmar National...
A global effort to combat statelessness and defend the universal right tonationality is currently underway. Nevertheless, questions persist about the proper scope of the right to nationality, the appropriate form of statelessness protection, and the legal limits of state discretion to deny or deprive an individual of nationality. These questions have animated a heated...
Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its dataonline for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with...
China recently has released two of its most prominent dissidents, Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan, into exile in the United States. The releases corresponded to major United States-Chinese diplomatic initiatives without broader gains in allowing political dissent, causing a number of commentators to refer to them as "hostage-diplomacy."
The title of this timely and innovative new journal raises basic questions about the connection between human rights norms and development norms. What is their hierarchical relationship? How does the content of one inform that of the other, if at all? Is the international legal order a 'bric-a-brac" or a "system"? Is it an aggregate of disparate elements haphazardly brought...
In the last several years, the government of Belize, through its Ministry of Natural Resources, has granted at least seventeen concessions for logging on lands totaling approximately 480,000 acres in the Toledo District, its most southern political subdivision. The rural parts of the Toledo District that are affected by the concessions are inhabited primarily by Maya people...
Guatemala was officially "at peace." The last of twelve peace accords had been signed. putting in place a broad mandate for reform to address many of the historical grievances of the country's marginalized and impoverished majority. Real hopes were born that a time of democracy and progressive change had finally arrived in Guatemala, after thirtysix years of terrible conflict...
This Article argues that economic, social, and cultural rights are the key to effectively realizing human rights in Africa. It contends that human rights discourse on the indivisible bundle of rights must be put into practice in the African context, where these rights are people's primary means of self-defense. First, the Article argues that African governments
This Article argues that the meaningful revitalization of Indigenous nations depends upon engaging in a process of indigenization, the active pursuit of a distinct developmental path, culture, and identity. Significant barriers to indigenization include not only political, economic, and social obstacles, but also psychological reliance upon the colonizing nation, the inability to...
The U.N. Security Council responded to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with a comprehensive regime of sanctions. This Article examines the claim that the highly planned policy contains elements of genocide and critically examines the international legal definition of genocide and its central requirement of specific intent. It argues that the conception of genocide contained in the 1948...
Most countries in transition from civil war face limited choices when imposing accountability for past atrocities. Some, like Mozambique, opt to grant unconditional amnesty. Other countries, like South Africa, have instituted a truth and reconciliation commission and granted limited amnesty, while yet others, like Rwanda, prosecute perpetrators of genocide, war crimes, and crimes...
This Article argues that the ambiguous normative regime currently governing unilateral humanitarian intervention provides an adequate legal framework for such intervention. The Article reviews the arguments typically made in support of a codified, strict normative regime, finding that strict normativity is unlikely to deter human rights violators more effectively than the current...
During the 1990s, the world bore witness to a startling number of atrocities, from the much-publicized massacres in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda, to the lesser known civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sudan, which themselves claimed millions. To David Rieff, author of books such as Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West and an experienced...
European citizenship establishes a precedent whereby the exercise and protection of rights - the practice of citizenship - is no longer contingent on residency within the jurisdiction of national citizenship. Free movement rights have allowed European citizens to cross borders and participate more nearly as political and legal equals within the host society. At the same time...
The U.S.-Cambodia Bilateral Textile Trade Agreement, signed on January 20, 1999, was remarkable for its inclusion of a labor standards provision that created incentives for the Cambodian garment industry to bring itself into substantial compliance with international labor standards and Cambodian labor law. The labor standards provision provided the impetus for the creation of a...
The definition and scope of intellectual property and associated laws are under intense debate in the emerging discourse surrounding intellectual property and human rights. These debates primarily arise within the context of indigenous peoples
In August 2001, a trial chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down the tribunal's first genocide conviction. In this landmark case, Prosecutor v. Radislav Krsti6, the trial chamber determined that the 1995 Srebrenica massacres-in which Bosnian Serb forces executed 7,000- 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men-constituted genocide. This Note...
As American troops entered Baghdad as a liberating force on April 9, 2003, a wave of looting engulfed the city. Iraqi looters ransacked government buildings, stores, churches, and private homes stealing anything they could carry and defacing symbols of the defunct Hussein regime. American authorities had not anticipated the magnitude or the fervor of the civil disorder. But the...
Seeking to play a greater role in an evolving world order, China faces pressure to conform to international legal norms and the rule of law. Strengthening the legal culture in China includes exploring new ways to train Chinese law students. Against this background of cultural and pedagogical change, clinical legal education has begun to take root in Chinese law schools. This Note...
Debate over the universality of human rights has typically focused on the extent to which international human rights law differs from local cultural practices and has generally sought to resolve these differences in favor of the international paradigm. Less attention, however, has been given to arguments that the international human rights paradigm may have something to learn...