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The Evolution of Fundamental Rights Charters and Case Law: A Comparison of the United Nations, Council of Europe and European Union Systems of Human Rights Protection
Liora Lazarus and et al.
This report examines the human rights protection systems of the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union. It explores the substantive rights, protection mechanisms, modes of engagement within, and the interactions between each system. The report also outlines the protection of minority rights, and the political processes through which human rights and institutions evolve and interact. A series of recommendations are made on how to advance the EU human rights system.
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Globalization and Local Adaptation in International Trade Law
Pitman B. Potter and Ljiljana Biuković
The trade principles of Western liberal democracies are at the core of international trade law regimes and standards. Are non-Western societies uniformly adopting international standards, or are they adapting them to local norms and cultural values?
This volume presents a new conceptual approach – the paradigm of selective adaptation – to explore and explain the reception of international trade law in the Pacific Rim. It brings together scholars from Australia, Canada, China, and Japan who reveal how the World Trade Organization’s standards are being interpreted – and in some cases disputed – in selected countries. Building on a conceptual discussion of the normative and institutional contexts for international trade law, the authors draw on examples from China,Japan, Thailand, and North America to show that formal acceptance of international trade standards through accession to the World Trade Organization and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade does not necessarily lead to uniform enforcement and acceptance at the local level.
Globalization and Local Adaptation in International Trade Law provides compelling evidence that non-uniform compliance will be a legitimate outcome of the globalization of international trade rules.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars who want a better understanding of the development and enforcement of international trade law and anyone interested in the comparative study of legal systems.
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Protecting Information Privacy
Charles D. Raab and Benjamin J. Goold
This report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (the Commission) examines the threats to information privacy that have emerged in recent years, focusing on the activities of the state. It argues that current privacy laws and regulation do not adequately uphold human rights, and that fundamental reform is required. It identifies two principal areas of concern: the state’s handling of personal data, and the use of surveillance by public bodies. The central finding of this report is that the existing approach to the protection of information privacy in the UK is fundamentally flawed, and that there is a pressing need for widespread legislative reform in order to ensure that the rights contained in Article 8 are respected. The report argues for the establishment of a number of key ‘privacy principles’ that can be used to guide future legal reforms and the development of sector-specific regulation. The right to privacy is at risk of being eroded by the growing demand for information by government and the private sector. Unless we start to reform the law and build a regulatory system capable of protecting information privacy, we may soon find that it is a thing of the past.
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Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting Pillage of Natural Resources
James G. Stewart
Pillage means theft during war. Although the prohibition against pillage dates to the Roman Empire, pillaging is a modern war crime that can be enforced before international and domestic criminal courts. Following World War II, several businessmen were convicted for commercial pillage of natural resources. And although pillage has been prosecuted in recent years, commercial actors are seldom held accountable for their role in fueling conflict.
Reviving corporate liability for pillaging natural resources is not simply about protecting property rights during conflict—it can also play a significant role in preventing atrocity. Since the end of the Cold War, the illegal exploitation of natural resources has become a prevalent means of financing conflict. In countries including Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Iraq, Liberia, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone, the illicit trade in natural resources has not only created incentives for violence, but has also furnished warring parties with the finances necessary to sustain some of the most brutal hostilities in recent history.
In Corporate War Crimes, available in its second edition, law professor James G. Stewart offers a roadmap of the law governing pillage as applied to the illegal exploitation of natural resources by corporations and their officers. The text traces the evolution of the prohibition against pillage from its earliest forms through the Nuremburg trials to today's national laws and international treaties. In doing so, Stewart provides a long-awaited blueprint for prosecuting corporate plunder during war.
[From Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting the Pillage of Natural Resources - Open Society Justice Initiative]
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A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance
Stephen Clarkson and Stepan Wood
As citizens of a middle power, Canadians know how it feels to be objects of global forces. But they are also agents of globalization who have helped build structures of transnational governance that have highly uneven impacts on prosperity, human security, and the environment, often for the worse. This timely book argues that these imbalances need to be recognized and corrected.
A Perilous Imbalance situates Canada’s experience of globalization in the context of three interlinked trends: the emergence of a global supraconstitution, the transformation of the nation-state, and the growth of governance beyond the nation-state. The authors advocate a revitalization of the Canadian state as a vehicle for pursuing human security, ecological integrity, and social emancipation, and for creating spaces in which progressive, alternative forms of law and governance can unfold. This book shines an urgent light on the dangerous imbalances in contemporary forms of globalized governance that jeopardize not only Canadians but also citizens worldwide.
Written primarily with scholars and advanced students of law and politics in mind, this book will also appeal to policy-makers, activists, and general readers interested in the challenges Canada faces in a globalizing world.
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Murder, Medicine and Motherhood
Emma Cunliffe
Since the early 1990s, unexplained infant death has been reformulated as a criminal justice problem within many western societies. This shift has produced wrongful convictions in more than one jurisdiction. This book uses a detailed case study of the murder trial and appeals of Kathleen Folbigg to examine the pragmatics of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It explores how legal process, medical knowledge and expectations of motherhood work together when a mother is charged with killing infants who have died in mysterious circumstances. The author argues that Folbigg, who remains in prison, was wrongly convicted.
The book also employs Folbigg's trial and appeals to consider what lessons courts have learned from prior wrongful convictions, such as those of Sally Clark and Angela Cannings. The author's research demonstrates that the Folbigg court was misled about the state of medical knowledge regarding infant death, and that the case proceeded on the incorrect assumption that behavioural and scientific evidence provided independent proofs of guilt. Individual chapters critically assess the relationships between medical research and expert testimony; the operation of unexamined cultural assumptions about good mothering; and the manner in which contested cases are reported by the press as overwhelming.[From Murder, Medicine and Motherhood: : Emma Cunliffe: Hart Publishing]
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The Constitution of Japan: A Contextual Analysis
Shigenori Matsui
Japan boasts the second largest economy in the world and almost two thousand years of history. Yet, its first modern constitution, the Meiji Constitution, was not enacted until comparatively recently (1889). Since then, following World War II, Japan adopted its current Constitution, the Japanese Constitution of 1946. This book is designed to explain the outline of Japan's Constitution, together with a number of its unique characteristics and to offer an historical background and context which help explain its significance. Major topics covered include the constitutional history of Japan, fundamental principles of the Constitution, the people and the Emperor, the Diet and legislative power, Cabinet and executive power, and the Judiciary and judicial power. Also discussed is the protection of fundamental human rights, individual rights - including freedom of expression,economic freedoms, and social rights - pacifism and national defence, and the constitutional amendment and reform. Although the Japanese Constitution was enacted under the strong influence of the United States Constitution, many of its features are very different. For instance the existence of an Emperor, the long dominance of a conservative party over the Government, the relatively strong power of government bureaucrats, the absence of a leadership role in the Prime Minister, the small role the judiciary play in solving constitutional disputes and the struggle over national defence. Written in an accessible style and comprehensive in content, the reader will find this account of the constitutional law of Japan both unique and stimulating.
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Invisible Chains: Canada's Underground World of Human Trafficking
Benjamin Perrin
Just outside Toronto, a 14-year-old Canadian girl was auctioned on the internet for men to purchase by the hour. A young woman was taken by slave traders from an African war zone to Edmonton to earn greater profits by exploiting her in prostitution. A gang called Wolfpack recruited teenagers in Quebec and sold them for sex to high-profile men in the community.
The global problem of human trafficking is only beginning to be recognized in Canada, even though it has been hidden in plain sight. In Invisible Chains, Benjamin Perrin, an award-winning law professor and policy expert, exposes cases of human trafficking, recording in-depth interviews with people on the front lines—police officers, social workers, and the victims themselves—and bringing to light government records released under access-to-information laws.
[From Invisible Chains by Benjamin Perrin | Penguin Random House Canada]
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The Backlash against Investment Arbitration
Michael Waibel, Asha Kaushal, Kyo-Hwa Chung, and Claire Balchin
One may debate whether the tremors of a systemic crisis in investment arbitration are real, and, if so, of a great enough magnitude to shake its foundations, but it is no longer possible to deny that the current system is coming under intensive scrutiny. International lawyers, who recognize the indispensability of a well-functioning system for settling investment disputes, should be concerned about enhancing the legitimacy and functionality of investment arbitration. A well-calibrated response to the challenges facing investment arbitration is essential to ensuring its long-term future. Critics must be answered; enquiries made; reassessments undertaken. If crucial questions continue to be ignored, or simply glossed over, the strength of, and consequences flowing from, the backlash are likely to be greater in scale.
This book, which grew out of a conference held at Harvard Law School in April 2008, aims to uncover the concerns driving the backlash against the present international investment regime. Thirty-one contributors – academics, practitioners, government officials and representatives of civil society – analyze both the current state and future direction of the international investment regime, and offer valuable insights into possible ways of improving the system.
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Surveillance
Benjamin J. Goold
Over the past fifty years, the apparatus of surveillance in modern societies has expanded to such an extent that almost every aspect of our public and private lives is now open to scrutiny and analysis. Each time we walk down a city street or pass through a shopping centre, CCTV cameras record our every move. Credit card and online purchases are logged and used to construct ever more detailed profiles of our consumption patterns and preferences. Personal information held by a bewildering array of state and private organizations is becoming increasingly centralized and searchable. As a result, modern life and citizenship is now intimately bound up with surveillance and the construction of data profiles, profiles that are largely beyond our power to alter or amend, and which may bear little resemblance to how we see ourselves (or want to be seen). Combining fear of crime and a desire for social control, surveillance is an inescapable fact of modern life.
Research on surveillance—conducted by governments, academics, and the private sector—has exploded in recent years and this new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in Criminology, addresses the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary scholarly literature. Edited by Benjamin Goold of Oxford University’s Centre for Criminology and organized into three principal parts, Surveillance is a four-volume collection of the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship.
Surveillance is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. An essential reference collection, it is destined to be valued by scholars and students of criminology—as well as those working in the allied fields of sociology, politics, and urban studies—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
[From https://www.routledge.com/Surveillance/Goold/p/book/9780415458191]
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New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy
Benjamin J. Goold and Daniel Neyland
The field of surveillance studies is growing at a rapid rate, fuelled by a growing interest in the questions that lie at its heart and a deep unease about the future of individual privacy. What information is held about us, to what extent that information is secure, how new technologies ought to be regulated, and how developments in surveillance will affect our ordinary and everyday lives?
Deliberately multi-disciplinary in character, this book examines these questions from the perspective of a broad range of fields, including sociology, management research, law, literary analysis and internet studies. As privacy comes under increasing threat and surveillance activities grow in quantity and diversity, so too the academic field needs to develop in new directions, form new perspectives, and gain new insights. In keeping with this aim, the chapters of this book consider how individuals, organisations, and states are engaged in the compilation, mobilization, scrutiny and use of ever increasing amounts of information.
Divided into three sections focusing in turn on legal regulation, technologies of surveillance, and the future of privacy and surveillance, this collection provides a unique and eclectic insight into the question of how the spread of surveillance is changing our lives and the societies in which we live.
[From https://www.routledge.com/New-Directions-in-Surveillance-and-Privacy/Goold-Neyland/p/book/9781843923633]
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Climate Law and Developing Countries: Legal and Policy Challenges for the World Economy
Benjamin J Richardson, Yves Le Bouthillier, Heathe McLeod-Kilmurray, and Stepan Wood
This timely book examines the legal and policy challenges in international, regional and national settings, faced by developing countries in mitigating and adapting to climate change.
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