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The Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPSA) is an international framework addressing the disproportionate impact of armed conflict on women and girls and promoting their meaningful participation in peacebuilding efforts. The Security Council called on Member States to develop National Action Plans (NAPs) to operationalize the four pillars of the Agenda. This study looks at the relevant steps undertaken by both Germany and the European Union. The author calls for improvements on either level and makes four recommendations.
Thus far, research into reservations to treaties has often overlooked reservations formulated to both European Social Charters (and its Protocols) and the relevant European Committee of Social Rights practices. There are several pressing reasons to further explore this gap in existing literature. First, an analysis of practices within the European Social Charters (and Protocols) will provide a fuller picture of the reservations and responses of treaty bodies. Second, in the context of previous landmark events it is worth noting the practices of another human rights treaty monitoring body that is often omitted from analyses. Third, the very fact that the formulation of reservations to treaties gives parties such far-reaching flexibility to shape their contractual obligations (à la carte) is surprising. An important outcome of the research is the finding that, despite the far-reaching flexibility present in the treaties analysed, both the States Parties and the European Committee of Social Rights generally treat them as conventional treaties to which the general rules on reservations apply. Consequently, there is no basis for assuming that the mere fact of adopting the à la carte system in a treaty with no reservation clause implies a formal prohibition of reservations or otherwise discourages their formulation.
In the past decades, scholars and courts have paid considerable attention to the extraterritorial applicability of human rights treaties. By contrast, the extraterritorial application of constitutional rights has received comparable scholarly attention only in the United States. Specifically, there is a paucity of comparative research in this area, which contributes to the prevailing view that human rights law provides the proper framework under which domestic courts should examine extraterritoriality questions under constitutional law.
This article argues that domestic constitutional regimes and their judicial enforcers can and should provide an important counterweight to the deadlocked extraterritoriality debate at the international level. Using two case studies from Germany and the United States, it shows that domestic constitutional courts are sometimes better suited than treaty bodies to guard the normative values of human dignity and universality in an extraterritoriality context. This is most apparent in the case of Germany, which has a long tradition of integration into international multi-level governance systems and "bottom-up" resistance based on fundamental rights within such systems. Recent cases from the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) about the extraterritorial application of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) to foreign intelligence gathering and climate change support this theory. However, an independent constitutional approach can also achieve some normative effects in domestic systems that are more isolated from the international human rights system. Thus, the US Supreme Court likewise used domestic constitutional doctrine to sidestep the American government's strictly territorial interpretation of the ICCPR and employ a functional approach to the extraterritorial applicability of fundamental rights in the case of detention of suspected terrorists in the Guantánamo Bay naval base.
The study of these two examples does not purport to be comprehensive or even representative of the world’s diverse array of constitutions and their relationships with international human rights law. However, the independent power of constitutional frameworks in these two disparate cases should all the more provide an impetus for increased comparative research into constitutional extraterritoriality regimes and their value for the project of human rights.
The last years have been affected by Covid-19 and the international emergency mecha-nism to deal with health-related threats. The effects of this period manifested differ-ently worldwide, depending on matters such as international relations, national policies, power dynamics etc. Additionally, the impact of this time will likely have long-term effects which are yet to be known. This paper gives a critical overview of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) mechanism in the context of Covid-19. It does so by explaining the legal framework for states of emergency, specifically in the context of a PHEIC, while considering its restrictions and limitations on human rights. It further outlines issues in the manifestation of global protections and limitations on human rights during Covid-19. Lastly, considering the likelihood of future PHEICs and the known systemic obstructions, this paper offers ways to im-prove this mechanism from a holistic, non-zero-sum perspective.
The question of whether the monitoring bodies have competence concerning reservations is at the centre of the discussion of reservations to human rights treaties that has occupied many international legal scholars over the last few decades. The Istanbul Convention’s treaty monitoring body, GREVIO, is the only human rights treaty monitoring body with a direct competence concerning reservations. However, as practice to date shows, it does not make much use of this power. This is a big disappointment considering all the efforts of other bodies in the past and the doctrinal positions of various scholars. The main aims of this article are threefold to: present GREVIO’s practice to date concerning reservations, provide a brief historical overview of how other human rights treaty bodies have approached their role concerning reservations, and finally, attempt to explain why GREVIO has abandoned a more proactive position on reservations.
Back in 1949, and thus only one year after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted, providing a strong signal for a new world order created after 1945 with the United Nations at their centre and combining as their goals both the maintenance of peace and security and the protection of human rights, but also recognising, realistically, that succeeding generations had so far not yet been saved from the scourge of war. Hence, the continued need for rules governing, and limiting, the means and methods of warfare once an armed conflict has erupted. At the same time, the international community has unfortunately not been able so far to fully safeguard individual human rights, its efforts to that effect and the continuous development of international human rights law over the years notwithstanding.
This chapter consists of three parts. In the first part, I will give a short overview about the integration of the protection of the environment into German constitutional law. This section will start with the presentation of the relevant provision, Art. 20a BL. Then, I will elaborate on its legal character. In the second part, I will make some brief remarks on the practical implications of Art. 20a BL. Finally, I will present some preliminary conclusions.
Dispersing the fog
(2020)
Countries in the Middle East generally fare poorly in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. One of the biggest challenges for the anti-corruption-regime in the Middle East are the many forms of corruption that are not being recognised as such on the local level, if assessed against a culturally relativistic benchmark. Our paper seeks to establish a unifying ground by providing a functional analysis of corruption which is both, normatively guiding and culturally sensitive. We demarcate our work as follows: (1) our reference point will be the phenomenon of institutional corruption, whereas (2) our working definition of corruption will conceive of corruption as a violation of role-specific norms that is motivated by the role-occupier’s private motives. In an attempt to offer a comprehensive approach, corruption will be viewed on two differing levels. On the external level, we will begin with an investigation of features within a norm-order that typically instantiate corruption. We will argue that corruption is externally conditioned by an authority’s inability to enforce and (re)establish the norms of conduct that ought to be action-guiding in office. This changes the expectation-structure within a norm-order and erodes public trust in the authorities, giving rise to willing perpetrators. Complementing this, the internal level of our framework will emphasize the motivational deficits of corrupt acts. It will be argued that this deficit can typically be found in societies that lack civic virtues. This, we suspect, is the functional reason why corrupt societies have such a hard time to overcome the problem: they lack both features and are, as a consequence, caught in a vicious circle as they struggle to strengthen civil society and consolidate institutional structures – whereas corruption increasingly disappears from the radar as it becomes accepted reality.