Category: Human Rights (page 1 of 2)

A watershed moment, for Strasbourg and our human rights

By Professor Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos, Head of Department, The City Law School

Once again, we are confronted with the politicisation of the European Court of Human Rights. But at the highest political level, and not just in the UK, this time. Nine European governments have issued a joint letter where they express the wish to ‘launch a new and open-minded conversation about the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ (in relation to immigration), explaining they want to ‘restore the right balance’ and that they will work together to further this ambition.

Credit: Council of Europe

The Italian and Danish PMs are leading on this initiative, with Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland co-signing the joint letter. Interestingly, the UK is not one of the signatories, when it has arguably been the member of the Council of Europe that has been making the most (deafening, at times) noise about its dissatisfaction with modern interpretations of the Convention and its willingness to moderate the effect of the ECHR in the UK if not to withdraw from the Convention altogether.

The letter starts with the co-signatories reaffirming their ‘firm belief’ in ‘European values, the rule of law and human rights’, their commitment to ‘a rule-based international order’, ‘the inviolable dignity of the individual’ and ‘role of multilateral institutions’. It continues with strong statements about the signatories being ‘leaders of societies that safeguard human rights’, for whom these ‘rights and values […] are both crucial and fundamental and […] constitute cornerstones of [their] democratic societies’. You can sense a ‘but’ coming (in the letter) at this point. ‘It is necessary to start a discussion about how the international conventions match the challenges that we face today’, points out the letter, going on the reverse on the ‘firm belief’ in everything that preceded this observation. ‘What was once right might not be the answer of tomorrow’, and the ‘the world has changed fundamentally since many of our ideas were conceived in the ashes of the great wars’, we read next. These enigmatic proclamations about our world take concrete shape and the focus is finally placed on what has motivated this letter when we are then told that ‘we now live in a globalized world where people migrate across borders on a completely different scale’, that ‘irregular migration has contributed significantly to the immigration to Europe’ and that some migrants have ‘chosen not to integrate, isolating themselves in parallel societies and distancing themselves from our fundamental values of equality, democracy and freedom’, while others ‘have chosen to commit crimes’. In other words, the letter offers legal migration, illegal migration, and failure of integration policies, including where they manifest themselves through the actions of criminal foreign nationals, as a diagnosis of what has fundamentally changed in our world, before suggesting that the remedy is something to do with the ECtHR, more specifically ‘a need to look at how the European Court of Human Rights has developed its interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights’, since the  Court ‘has extended the scope of the Convention too far as compared with the original intentions behind the Convention, thus shifting the balance between the interests which should be protected’.

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Reimagining Prosperity – Toward a new Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU

Conclusions from Prof Marija Bartl’s presentation at the ISEL City Law School about her new book “Reimagining Prosperity – Toward a new Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU”

By Laura Vialon

On the 20th of March Marija Bartl, Professor of Law at the University of Amsterdam, came to City Law School to present her new book on prosperity in the EU which came out in November last year as open access, available on Cambridge Core. The book argues that a clear imaginary for a shared prosperity in the EU is needed (again), while at the same some efforts in that regard have been already made, attempting to leave neoliberalism behind. For showing that EU policy is becoming “thicker” again, Professor Bartl analysed a variety of important policy fields – consumption, technology, industrial policy and corporate policy.

Professor Bartl passionately and eloquently guided the audience through her three main theses that (1) democracies need prosperity. Prosperity for Bartl means neither economic growth or mass consumption, but a “credible route to material and social basis of a good life” for the current and future generations. We need to have trust in this better future, this is what holds societies together and this trust has been eroded from the 1990’s onwards and heavily crushed after the 2008 financial crisis. Prosperity has become more concentrated in the hands of the few and trust in democracy and its institutions dwindled.

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A dire crossroads for migrant victim-survivors

By Dr Adrienne Yong

Whilst the majority of us consider the home a safe and comfortable place, for one in five people aged 16 and over, it represents a place of fear and violence if they are victim-survivors of domestic abuse. However, what is often lost amongst the already devastating facts and figures about domestic abuse is the reality for those victim-survivors who are also immigrants subject to the harsh realities of the UK’s strict immigration laws.

At the end of April 2021, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 came into force, representing a sea change in law around domestic abuse in England & Wales. Before this, governance and legislation on protecting against domestic abuse was fragmented, with domestic abuse undefined in the law. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 sought to address many of these problems. It would have been legitimate cause for optimism about the future of victim-survivors’ rights in England & Wales, if it was not for one significant oversight.

When the Domestic Abuse Bill was being debated by the Government, the problem of migrant victim-survivors’ rights regularly surfaced as a problem demanding urgent attention. It was a key campaign focus of many migrant women’s charities, known as “by-and-for” organisations,  and the subject of many tabled amendments, particularly by the House of Lords.

But why exactly does being an immigrant make the situation of a victim-survivor of domestic abuse any different? It all comes down to the way the law impacts on those who are both at the mercy of an abuser and the strict immigration laws in the UK. The latter is known as the hostile environment policy, which has existed since 2012. For years, victim-survivors of domestic abuse who found themselves also subject to UK immigration law were in a unique position of fear – already fearful of consequences from abusers and the authorities when reporting their experiences of domestic abuse, but also fearful of whether they would risk deportation because of also being precarious migrants.

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Cosmopolitanism from within and the ‘third model’ of immigration regulation

By Prof Francesca Strumia, The City Law School

Set under the palms of Florida’s Key West, the Truman Little White House, originally a winter retreat for US President Harry Truman and now a public museum, has at first sight little to say about law, let alone cosmopolitan law. Yet the sign outside its gate adds a cosmopolitan touch to the history of the building.  It points out that the Little White House is ‘held in trust by the state for the citizens of the world’.

In hinting to something that the state, the state of Florida in this case, does for the citizens of the world, the sign evokes an unsolved conundrum of international law and legal theory: does the sovereign state owe any legal duties, beyond its citizens and its jurisdiction, to humanity at large? And if so, why?

These questions about the cosmopolitan role of the sovereign state have grown more pressing as the first quarter of the 21st century slides towards its end. The sovereign state remains the main actor in the international arena. Yet the challenges it faces are increasingly of a type that affects the entire human race: climate change; energy provision; security of data and identities in a borderless cyberspace; as well as the global movement of people. In the face of such challenges, a vision of the sovereign state as the mere guardian of its territory and people is increasingly inadequate.

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Beyond the Virus – Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives on Inequalities Raised by COVID-19

 

Dr Adrienne Yong & Dr Sabrina Germain, City Law School

Beyond the Virus book cover

Originally published on the Social & Legal Studies blog

In late 2020, after the world had endured several lockdowns due to the unprecedented spread of a novel deadly virus, COVID-19 was front and centre in the minds of many academics. Importantly, this was not limited to just those in the medical profession, nor just those interested in biomedical sciences. The pandemic and its effects were of academic interest to most disciplines, including law, politics and other social sciences. As sociolegal scholars with an interest in justice in healthcare (Germain) and immigration and intersectionality (Yong), the pandemic piqued our curiosity because of its impact on widening existing inequalities for some of the most vulnerable in society in range of different areas. With a burning desire to publish an edited collection that would be an important contribution to a burgeoning area of literature, we set off to harness the expertise of a wider group of authors, doing cutting edge work in areas that were not just about the medical effects of the virus itself.

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Facebook/Meta Oversight Board: International and Regional Law Applications

Giulia Alves Maia

The Facebook / Meta Oversight Board (OB) is one of the most novel developments in law and governance in recent years. The Oversight Board has ignited a major debate about its character, form, operation, and effects. It has been modelled as a “Facebook Supreme Court”, and its structure and style of its reasoning, as well as its use of precedent, give the appearance that the OB operates in a similar way to a court. On 26 April 2023, City Law School hosted a hybrid event entitled The Facebook/Meta Oversight Board: International and Regional Law Applications to discussion these and other issues.

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The UNGA request for an ICJ Advisory Opinion on Palestine: The role of demographic alterations in the process of de facto annexation and legal consequences under international law

Andrea Maria Pelliconi

On 30 December 2022 – one day after the establishment of the new Israeli government – the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution A/RES/77/247 in which, referring to Article 65 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it requested the Court to give an advisory opinion (AO) clarifying the legal status and consequences of the Israeli occupation of Palestine’s territories. More specifically, the AO request asks the following questions:

“considering the rules and principles of international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, international humanitarian law, international human rights law, relevant resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, and the advisory opinion of the Court of 9 July 2004:

(a) What are the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures?

(b) How do the policies and practices of Israel referred to in paragraph 18(a) above affect the legal status of the occupation, and what are the legal consequences that arise for all States and the United Nations from this status?”

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‘If I Would Stay Alive, I Would Be Their Voice’: On the Legitimacy of International People’s Tribunals

Dr Aldo Zammit Borda

This article considers that, in the current state of international justice, informal People’s Tribunals (PTs) constitute indispensable, quasi-judicial institutions that bridge gaps in access to justice, challenge official narratives (or silences) about atrocities and, potentially, open up new avenues towards justice and recognition.

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Russian invasion of Ukraine – Legal Developments and Sources

Jed Odermatt 

An overview of the latest legal developments and sources related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

General Information

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Ethnic minority and migrant women’ struggles in accessing healthcare during COVID-19: an intersectional analysis

Sabrina Germain & Adrienne Yong

In their recent published article in the interdisciplinary Journal for Cultural Research, Dr Sabrina Germain & Dr Adrienne Yong (Senior Lecturers at The City Law School) shine a spotlight on an area of the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has arguably been overshadowed throughout this public health crisis – the effect the pandemic has had on access to healthcare for women at the intersection of their ethnic minority status and gender, and their migration status and gender. Focusing on two distinct groups of women – ethnic minority women, and migrant women – Germain and Yong apply the theory of intersectionality coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to investigate barriers to accessing healthcare in the United Kingdom as they have been particularly exacerbated by the pandemic.

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