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4441. Inventing Human Rights: A History

Author:
Bronwyn Leebaw
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
In the second half of the eighteenth century, epistolary novels became popular in France and England, people began listening to the opera in silence rather than walking around to converse with friends, and efforts were made to prevent theater-goers in Paris from disrupting performances by coordinating their coughing and farting. For Lynn Hunt, these changes in the daily lives of Europeans are intrinsically related to the development of universal human rights. In this rich and beautifully written work, Hunt argues that human rights rely upon our ability to empathize with strangers. The changing habits and experiences of late-eighteenth-century Europe fostered new understandings of individuality and empathy, which would support the expansion of rights.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
Europe, Paris, France, and England

4442. The Resurgent Idea of World Government

Author:
Campbell Craig
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The idea of world government is returning to the mainstream of scholarly thinking about international relations. Universities in North America and Europe now routinely advertise for positions in ''global governance,'' a term that few would have heard of a decade ago. Chapters on cosmopolitanism and governance appear in many current international relations (IR) textbooks. Leading scholars are wrestling with the topic, including Alexander Wendt, perhaps now America's most influential IR theorist, who has recently suggested that a world government is simply ''inevitable.'' While some scholars envision a more formal world state, and others argue for a much looser system of ''global governance,'' it is probably safe to say that the growing number of works on this topic can be grouped together into the broader category of ''world government''—a school of thought that supports the creation of international authority (or authorities) that can tackle the global problems that nation-states currently cannot.
Topic:
Government and Governance
Political Geography:
Europe and North America

4443. Briefly Noted

Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
This section contains a round-up of recent notable books in the field of international affairs.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Europe

4444. North Caucasus Weekly: Rebels Reportedly Kill Dozens of Servicemen in Ingushet

Author:
Mairbek Vatchagaev
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
Following the capture of the foothill villages of Muzhichi and Yandare in Ingushetia on the evening of October 16 (North Caucasus Weekly, October 16), militants from the Ingush Jamaat “Shariat” carried out another series of high-profile actions against Russian troops. According to various sources, more than 50 Russian military personnel were killed and wounded in two assaults by the militants on the Galashki Highway on October 18, which would make this the most audacious attack by the jamaat members in Ingushetia to date. According to the media reports, the attack on the Russian military motorcade took place on the Alkhasty-Surkhokhi road in Ingushetia's Nazran district at ten in the morning. According to Ingush Prosecutor General Yury Turygyn, only two soldiers were killed and five were wounded in the attack. All of them were from Interior Ministry detachments based in the village of Alkhasty (RIA Novosti, October 18) According to Turygyn, the assault was carried out by members of “illegal armed formations” with the purpose of destabilizing the situation in the region. Turygyn, however, was apparently referring to the casualties in an attack on another column of servicemen that had occurred earlier on October 18, and the Regnum News Agency quoted a source in the Interior Ministry department forIngushetia's Sunzha district as saying that all the soldiers in the column targeted in the second attack were killed except forone and that the total number killed was around 50. The surviving serviceman was transported to the Sunzha Central District Hospital, the source said (www.regnum.ru/news/1071507.html). Thus, according to the Ingush police, two attacks took place, not one, as the Ingush Prosecutor General's Office claims.
Topic:
Security and Ethnic Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Asia

4445. Future of Energy Transportation in Eurasia after the Georgia Crisis

Author:
Saltanat Berdikeeva
Publication Date:
09-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Insight Turkey
Institution:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Georgia's military gamble in South Ossetia in August 2008 opened a Pandora's Box of misfortunes. Tbilisi is now faced with the loss of its breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, meanwhile creating a potential opportunity for Russia to assume a much-coveted control over the energy transit routes passing through Georgia. While the conflict has further spoiled the relations between the West and Russia, setting in motion stiffer competition between the two to secure the energy sources of Central Asia and Azerbaijan, the pragmatic calculations of the players involved in the Eurasian energy game may eventually change the tone of the game. With unresolved issues surrounding doubts over the sufficiency of energy supplies and the availability of means to deliver them from Central Asia and the Caucasus to Europe, Russia's preeminent position as a supplier of energy to the West will be maintained.
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Central Asia

4446. Status of Forces and Status of Mission Agreements under the ESDP: The EU's Evolving Practice

Author:
Aurel Sari
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The conduct of EU military and civilian crisis management operations in third states within the context of the European Security and Defence Policy has presented the EU with new administrative and operational challenges in recent years, including the need to define the international legal position of such operations and their personnel during their presence abroad. In some cases, the EU has entered into agreements with host states to determine the legal status of EU crisis management operations, while in other cases the application of already existing arrangements has been extended to them. The status agreements negotiated directly by the EU confer more extensive privileges and immunities on EU operations and their personnel than current international practice in this area would warrant. Despite opposition to this policy within the EU, it has remained in place under the two model status agreements adopted by the Council of the European Union in 2005 to serve as a basis for negotiations with prospective host states in all future EU operations. Even though no norm of international law compels the EU to request only such privileges and immunities as are absolutely necessary for the purposes of an operation, its practice of negotiating extensive privileges and immunities does not sit well with the growing emphasis on the accountability of peace support operations. This article offers an overview of the evolution of the EU's practice of concluding status agreements in the context of the European Security and Defence Policy and examines the key provisions of the two model status agreements.
Topic:
Security
Political Geography:
Europe

4447. Import, Export, and Regional Consent in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Author:
Gerald L. Neuman
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has elaborated a significant body of human rights jurisprudence through interpretation of regional human rights conventions and the adaptation of European and global precedents and global soft law. The Inter-American Court has also aspired to influence outside its region by offering innovative interpretations of human rights and by identifying norms as jus cogens. The Court's methodology in recent years has appeared to give insufficient consideration to the consent of the regional community of states as a factor in the evolutive interpretation of a human rights treaty. The article illustrates and criticizes that trend, and contends that greater attention to indicia of regional consent could improve the acceptance and effectiveness of the inter-American human rights system.
Topic:
Human Rights
Political Geography:
America and Europe

4448. Redesigning the European Court of Human Rights: Embeddedness as a Deep Structural Principle of the European Human Rights Regime

Author:
Laurence R. Helfer
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is the crown jewel of the world's most advanced international system for protecting civil and political liberties. In recent years, however, the ECtHR has become a victim of its own success. The Court now faces a docket crisis of massive proportions, the consequence of the growing number of states subject to its jurisdiction, its favourable public reputation, its expansive interpretations of individual liberties, a distrust of domestic judiciaries in some countries, and entrenched human rights problems in others. In response to this growing backlog of individual complaints, the Council of Europe has, over the last five years, considered numerous proposals to restructure the European human rights regime and redesign the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This article argues that these proposals should be understood not as ministerial changes in supranational judicial procedure, nor as resolving a debate over whether the ECtHR should strive for individual or constitutional justice, but rather as raising more fundamental questions concerning the Court's future identity. In particular, the article argues for recognition of 'embeddedness' in national legal systems as a deep structural principle of the ECHR, a principle that functions as a necessary counterpoint to the subsidiary doctrine that has animated the Convention since its founding. Embeddedness does not substitute ECtHR rulings for the decisions of national parliaments or domestic courts. Rather, it requires the Council of Europe and the Court to bolster the mechanisms for governments to remedy human rights violations at home, obviating the need for individuals to seek supranational relief and restoring countries to a position in which the ECtHR's deference to national decision-makers is appropriate.
Topic:
Government and Human Rights
Political Geography:
Europe

4449. The History of International Legal Theory in Russia: a Civilizational Dialogue with Europe

Author:
Lauri Mälksoo
Publication Date:
02-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This review essay examines the main breaks and continuities in the history of international legal theory in Russia. In particular, it draws on works by leading Russian international law scholars: Peter Pavlovich Shafirov (1670-1739), Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens (1845-1909), Baron Mikhail Taube (1869-1956), Vladimir Emmanuilovich Hrabar (1865-1956), Fyodor Ivanovich Kozhevnikov (1893-1998) and Grigori Ivanovich Tunkin (1906-1993). The reception of these theoreticians' works in today's Russia is also examined. The history of the discipline in Russia opens itself up as a civilizational dialogue with (Western) Europe. The main questions have been: Is international law universal or fragmented; what is the progressive force in international law? The Russian theory of international law has moved from proving that 'we too are civilized/European' in the early 18th century to an aspiration towards Western European civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries to the break with the West and an affirmation of Russia's own distinctiveness and primacy in the 20th century. Those who hurriedly celebrated Russia's reunion with Europe (and Western liberal theory of international law) following the end of the Cold War should not lose sight of the longer historical perspective and especially the experiment of the 'civilizing'/Europeanizing/liberalizing project in 19th century Russian and Baltic German international law scholarship.
Topic:
Cold War and International Law
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

4450. The European Union as Situation, Executive, and Promoter of the International Law of Cultural Diversity – Elements of a Beautiful Friendship

Author:
Armin Von Bogdandy
Publication Date:
04-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Cultural diversity is an important political and legal topos in the European Union. At the same time, the concern for cultural diversity gives reason for grave reservations towards the Union. This article intends to assist, on the basis of international law, in distinguishing appearance and reality. The Union will be analysed first as a situation of the application of the international law of cultural diversity, secondly as the regional executive of this international law, and thirdly as its global promoter. It shows that international law and Union law reinforce each other. The former conveys to the Union instruments to pursue European unification which at the same time serve its own implementation. Furthermore, it does not set limits to European unity since it protects only cultural pluralism but not state-supporting distinctiveness. A prerequisite for this consonance is that the Union's constitutional law allows for political unity without cultural unity and that international law remains mute about important questions on European unification. The international law perspective thus does not fully exhaust the problem: conformity with international law alone cannot dissipate concern for the future of cultural diversity in the Union.
Topic:
International Law and Culture
Political Geography:
Europe