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International human rights mechanisms’ efficiency is normally linked to the work of independent experts keen to push the boundaries of accountability, against recalcitrant states determined to defend their sovereignty. As a corollary, progress in this field is associated with the creation and maintenance of political free spaces. Another common presumption, rather than fact, is a belief in a differentiated “North” versus “South” approach to the promotion and protection of human rights, that finds solid ground within the prevalent human rights discourses repeated by governmental and non-governmental actors. Through the lenses of the UN Special Procedures, In Defense of Politicization of Human Rights: The UN Special Procedures challenges these and other presumptions informing doctrinal studies, policies, and strategies to advance international human rights. In seeking to debunk commonly held views about the role of politics in human rights at the international level, this book constitutes the first comprehensive study of the Special Procedures as a system covering their history, methods of work, institutional status, and relationship with other politically driven organs and processes affecting their development. The perspective chosen to analyze the human rights mechanisms most vulnerable to political decisions determining their creation, renewal, and operationalization casts a new light on the extent to which these remain the cornerstone of global accountability in protecting the inherent dignity and worth of individuals as well as groups.

“You can’t be convicted of a crime without a guilty act and a guilty mind.” A lawyer might express the same idea using Latin: “You can’t be convicted of a crime without actus reus and mens rea.” Guilty Acts, Guilty Minds proposes an interpretation of mens rea and actus reus as limits on the authority of a democratic state to ascribe guilt through positive law to those accused of crime. Actus reus and mens rea are portrayed as necessary conditions for the legitimacy of state punishment. The actus reus requirement disables a democratic state from using its authority to ascribe guilt to those who didn’t realize they were committing a crime, provided they lacked the capacity to realize they were committing a crime, or to those who realized they were committing a crime, but who lacked the capacity to conform their conduct to the requirements of law. The mens rea requirement disables a democratic state from using its authority to ascribe guilt to those who didn’t realize they were committing a crime, provided their ignorance manifested no lack of law-abiding concern for the law, or to those who realized they were committing a crime, but whose failure to conform to the law nonetheless manifested no lack of law-abiding concern for the law. Ascriptions of guilt are illegitimate, and not merely unjust, when a defendant’s choice fails to satisfy the requirements of actus reus and mens rea.

Should religious people who conscientiously object to facilitating same-sex weddings, and who therefore decline to provide cakes, photography, or other services, be exempted from antidiscrimination laws? This issue has taken on an importance far beyond the tiny number who have made such claims. Gay rights advocates fear that exempting even a few religious dissenters would unleash a devastating wave of discrimination. Conservative Christians fear that the law will treat them like racists and drive them to the margins of American society. Both sides are mistaken. This is not a matter of abstract principle, and none of the constitutional claims work. This is an appropriate occasion for legislative negotiation. This book is the only systematic accounting of the interests that must be balanced in any decent compromise, in terms that both sides can recognize and appreciate. Koppelman explains the basis of antidiscrimination law, including the complex idea of dignitary harm. He shows why even those who do not regard religion as important or valid nonetheless have good reasons to support religious liberty, and why those who regard religion as a value of overriding importance should nonetheless reject the extravagant power over nonbelievers that the Supreme Court has recently embraced. Koppelman also proposes a specific solution to the problem: that religious exemptions be granted only to the few businesses that are willing to announce their compunctions and bear the costs of doing so. His approach makes room for America’s enormous variety of deeply held beliefs and ways of life. It can help reduce the toxic polarization of American politics.

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people. Sophia Moreau argues that although all cases of wrongful discrimination involve a failure to treat some people as the equals of others, these failures are importantly different. The first four chapters of the book explore different ways of failing to treat people as equals: through unfairly subordinating some to others, through violating someone’s right to a particular deliberative freedom, and through denying some people access to a basic good. Chapter Five explains why these different wrongs can be seen as parts of a coherent theory of wrongful discrimination, and it presents some of the explanatory advantages of that this theory has over others. Chapter Six argues that the theory enables us to see indirect discrimination as wrongful for many of the same reasons as direct discrimination, and that both should be seen as forms of negligence. Finally Chapter Seven argues that the duty to treat others as equals is a duty held not just by the state, but also by each individual member of society.

This book develops a theory of extraterritorial human rights obligations in international law. It links debates on human rights theory with those relating to extraterritoriality and merges accounts of economic social and cultural rights with those of civil and political rights. It advances four main arguments aimed at changing the way we think about extraterritoriality of human rights. First, it is argued that the questions regarding extraterritoriality are really about justifying the allocation of human rights obligations to specific states. Second, the book shows that human rights as found in international human rights treaties are underpinned by the values of integrity and equality. Third, it is argued that these same values justify the allocation of human rights obligations towards specific individuals to public institutions—including states—that hold political power over said individuals. And fourth, the book argues that title to territory is best captured by the value of stability, as opposed to integrity and equality. If these arguments are successful, their consequence is a major shift in how we view extraterritorial human rights obligations. Namely, the upshot is that all standards in international human rights treaties that count as human rights require that a threshold of jurisdiction, understood as political power, is met. However, on the present account, this threshold is not just a conceptual necessity but a normative one as well. It is needed because it not only describes, but also justifies the allocation of obligations.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has left a rich legal, institutional, and non-judicial legacy. Many of the classical juridical footprints of the work of the ICTY are covered in legal treatises or reflective volumes. This book sheds a broader light on some of the working practices, challenges, and critiques of the ICTY. It starts from the assumption that the notion of legacy deserves consideration from multiple disciplinary standpoints, and that there is not one, but at best multiple legacies. It explores (i) historic legacy, that is, the contribution of the ICTY to the framing of facts and events, including the value of the records in combating denial of crimes; (ii) investigative and experiential legacy, including approaches towards identifying evidence, experiences related to the delivery of testimony, and access to justice; (iii) procedural legacies, including lessons learned from the management of proceedings, the treatment of parties, and outreach; (iv) retribution and punishment; (v) normative legacies, that is, the impact of the work of the Tribunal on domestic legal systems; and (vi) ongoing debates over impact and societal reception. The book draws on insights from multiple disciplines and combines voices from inside the Tribunal with external perspectives.

This book investigates the phenomenon of deference to Member State authorities in EU free movement law. It enquires into the decision-making latitude which the European Court of Justice grants national institutions by means of two deference doctrines: the margin of appreciation and decentralized judicial review. At the same time, it sheds light on a number of broader developments in European law. These include changes in the intensity of judicial review, the relationship between centre and periphery, the interaction between political and adjudicative processes, and the division of powers between EU and Member State courts. Drawing on an original data set of free movement cases from 1974 to 2013, the book examines how and which decisions the Court defers to national institutions. It tests the impact of twelve variables on the practice of judicial deference. The results reveal that free movement law and the internal market have substantially changed over the past four decades. The Court has scaled down its involvement in and reduced its control over Member State affairs. The book argues that these new-found ‘passive virtues’ are linked to the legal, political, and institutional changes that have taken place in the EU.

International criminal justice is a form of social performance. It relies on messages, speech acts, and performatives practices in order to convey social meaning. Major criminal proceedings, such as Nuremberg or Tokyo and other post-Second World War trials have been branded as ‘spectacles of didactic legality’. However, the expressive and the communicative functions of law have been sidelined in institutional discourse and legal practice. The concept of expressivism is referred to in justifications of punishment or sentencing rationales. It appears as reference in scholarly treatises, but it has remained crucially underdeveloped. This book is an attempt to remedy this gap. It shows that expression and communication are not only an inherent part of the punitive functions of international criminal justice but represented in a whole spectrum of practices: norm expression and diffusion, institutional actions, performative aspects of criminal procedures, and repair of harm. It argues that expressivism is not a classical justification of justice or punishment on its own but rather a means to understand its aspirations and limitations, to explain how justice is produced, and to ground punishment rationales.

Neighbourhood Policing is one of the most significant and high-profile innovations in UK policing of recent times. It has also been one of the most successful, garnering widespread political and public support. This book brings together insights and evidence from a ten-year programme of research into the concept and implementation of Neighbourhood Policing, telling its story from initial policy development, through periods where it started to feature less significantly in the everyday practice of the police, and beyond. Drawing upon extensive empirical data, blended with unique insights from the authors’ involvement in designing some of the original processes and systems underpinning the delivery of Neighbourhood Policing, the book attends to issues of criminological and sociological interest, seeking to distil key findings about this particular inflection of community policing. Locating these themes and issues within the overall trajectory of development of UK policing, the book provides a rigorously evidenced assessment of Neighbourhood Policing’s achievements and weaknesses, and a unique and compelling insight into the significant place it has achieved within the contemporary policing landscape.

This book presents a historical study of the international law of the private business corporation. The literature on corporations and international law typically concentrates on the failure to regulate corporations. This book challenges this ‘failure’ narrative and presents an alternative historical reading: a history of its facilitative role in constituting an economic order. This study draws inspiration from scholarship on the history of international trade law, international investment law, the history of global governance, and political economic analysis of international law, and connects these specialized fields in a single lens: the corporate form. The point of departure for this history is the simultaneous emergence of international law as a modern legal discipline and the turn to free incorporation in corporate law during the last third of the nineteenth century. The book demonstrates how the sovereign veil of the state and the corporate veil of the company were applied in tandem to insulate corporations from responsibility. Nevertheless, less powerful states invoked the same prevailing conceptions of the corporation, the sovereign state, and the relation between them, to curtail corporate power in struggles associated with decolonization. Reacting to these early victories, capital exporting countries shifted to a vocabulary of human rights and protected companies under a new regime of international investment law, which entrenched the separation between market and politics.