Woodrow Wilson School Journal of Public and International Affairs
Institution:
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
Abstract:
The Honduras Poverty Assessment consistently suggests that low levels of growth and persistent poverty in Honduras are linked to low levels of human capital formation (World Bank 2006c). The Honduran education system faces the common problems of general service provision, including lack of affordable access, poor administration, low technical quality, low teacher accountability and stagnant productivity.
Just like the Supreme Court's decision in Medellin (see EJIL Editorial to Volume 19:2) some months ago, the ECJ's decision in Kadi is destined to become a landmark in the annals of international law. Whereas Medellin was generally excoriated as the low water mark of American constitutional and judicial insularity, gruesomely resulting in the actual execution of the principals, Kadi was mostly hailed as an example of the more progressive and open attitude of the ECJ, with the proof of the pudding in the eating – overturning the Council Regulations which gave effect to the measures adopted against the defendants pursuant to the Security Council Resolutions, and doing so on the grounds that they violate fundamental human rights and protections applicable within the legal order of the EU. There, the gallows; chez nous, liberty. Happy Ending.
In this issue we bring to conclusion our effort, spread over the year, to mark the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We already announced that we will not be attempting a synthetic retrospective of the 'life and times' of the Declaration. Instead, in this Finale we invited Jochen von Bernstorff to reflect not on the Declaration as such but on its reception in the literature – A Discourse on Discourse. 'The Changing Fortunes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Genesis and Symbolic Dimensions of the Turn to Rights in International Law' is the illuminating result of this reflection.
The article explores the genesis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the turn to rights in international law. To this end, it focuses on how international lawyers have received the Declaration in their contemporary doctrinal and political contexts. The fact that the political and moral importance of the Declaration from the very beginning outweighed its concrete legal significance invited intriguing scholarly reflections on the symbolic dimension of the document. Despite early sceptical voices about its legal and moral value, international lawyers welcomed and reaffirmed its significance during the 1960s and 1970s. While attention turned to human rights treaty law in the 1980s, the Declaration embodied the hope for a new era of human rights protection after the end of the Cold War. Throughout the 1990s a new scholarly defence of the universal character of the Declaration could be observed, later being accompanied by new insecurity and soul-searching in the face of institutional limitations. In general, the Declaration became synonymous with the turn to individual rights in international law, and whenever there was a sense of crisis because of institutional blockades or challenged foundations, the Declaration received new and increased attention. It symbolized unity in an increasingly fragmented and contentious institutional and political environment for international human rights protection. The story of its scholarly reception is therefore also a story of the failed and perhaps unattainable attempt fully to institutionalize international human rights in a cosmopolitan legal order.
Topic:
Cold War, Environment, Human Rights, and International Law
The topic of human rights was prominent in Pope Benedict 's address to the United Nations General Assembly in the year of the Universal Declaration's 60th anniversary. As with many of Pope Benedict's speeches, his 18 April address to the United Nations is one in which some rather complex ideas are expressed in a very condensed fashion. It is a speech that needs, as they say, to be 'unpacked'.
Human dignity and human rights are not lived as abstract concepts. They have tangible meaning and weight in the context and crucible of concrete human experience – history, freedom, reason, and community. This gap between universal and particular is the heart of the problem with which Christopher McCrudden's 'Human Dignity and Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights' wrestles, as well as the fulcrum of the earlier article of mine to which, in part, his work responds.
Together with developments in international criminal justice and humanitarian law, the human rights revolution in international law has had a profound structural effect on the international legal order as a whole; we are today only beginning to discern and to digest this effect, to say nothing of the broader consequences for global politics. New actors have been empowered in the international legal system (not only individuals but various kinds of non-state collectivities as well); conceptions of responsibility have been altered; classic notions, such as territorial sovereignty and recognition of statehood, have sometimes subtly and sometimes radically been reshaped or adapted; and the balance of institutional actors charged with interpreting and applying inter-national law has shifted towards courts and tribunals (a major theme of Petersmann) and away from diplomats and their ministers.
Topic:
Human Rights, Sovereignty, and International Affairs
All academics learn from discussion and criticism of their published views. Hence, I congratulated the EJIL editors, Alston in 2002 and Weiler in 2008, when they invited a response to my articles in EJIL. Following the insulting EJIL comments by Alston in 2002, this is the second time in my 37 years of academic teaching that a 'commentator' has imputed to me intoxicating views which I never expressed. Six years after the confabulations by Alston and Howse, Howse remains committed to misrepresenting rather than discussing my legal arguments. Clarifying, in fewer than 2,500 words, the reasons for this 'Alice in Wonderland non-discussion ' would have been more enlightening if my Australian and Canadian commentators had respected correct academic citation before publicly putting forth their aggressive legal phantasms. Here I want to suggest ways in which such an exchange may be more constructive.
A recent survey of young Europeans' opinions of national institutions has revealed, quite surprisingly, that armed forces enjoy the highest level of trust and prestige in a number of major European countries, well above parliaments, the judiciary, the church, political parties and business enterprises. The profound motivations underlying this assessment remain unknown – one can only conjecture that they are related to the increasing sense of insecurity among young generations and perhaps with the politics of fear – fear of terrorism, of immigrants, environmental disasters, of financial doom, and of the unknown – that have become widespread at the beginning of the 21st century. What is clear, however, is that in the perception of young generations, the armed forces still embody the core function of the state as guarantor of the security of citizens within the national territory.
The European Union has developed its security competence since 1992, thus putting pressure on its Member States to provide troops for the increasing number of EU peace operations being deployed to different areas of the globe. But with national militaries being rationalized and contracted the EU will inevitably follow the lead of the US, the UK, and the UN and start to use Private Military Contractors to undertake some of the functions of peace operations. This article explores the consequences of this trend from the perspective of the accountability and responsibility of both the corporation and the institution when the employees of PMCs commit violations of human rights law and, if applicable, international humanitarian law.