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Keeping Europe safe after Brexit. ECFR Policy Brief. Findings of a reflection group
No full textThere is a strong rationale for close EU-UK cooperation on security and defence after Brexit. Each side should preserve the principle of cooperation in different arrangements for different areas, from policing to foreign policy.
The EU should embrace the UK’s proposal for a treaty on intra-EU security. Because no such treaty will be ready by March 2019, each side should aim for an interim agreement extending existing arrangements until one is in place.
On foreign policy and defence, the UK should not expect a seat at the table in European bodies, including in discussions around possible CSDP operations. Instead, both sides should establish new arrangements that keep them in touch with the other’s thinking. Regular working-level exchanges rather than a treaty are the aim here, such as monthly bilaterals between the British embassy in Brussels and the PSC chair, and UKREP and the EDA chief executive.
All this is achievable but needs clear principles if it is to succeed. These include: a broad understanding of the components of European security; agreement that unique arrangements are required for a unique situation; and a commitment not to treat security like just another element within the Brexit negotiations
Explaining Variation in the Intrusiveness of Regional Human Rights Remedies in Domestic Orders
No full textRegional human rights systems vary with respect to the intrusiveness of human rights remedies into the domestic orders of states from a spectrum of more intrusive remedies in the Americas to less intrusive remedies in Europe. This article identifies three potential explanations as to why the intrusiveness of human rights remedies varies across the three regional systems: (i) the legal design explanation, (ii) the case-history explanation, and (iii) the legal culture explanation. The article argues that of these competing explanations, the legal culture explanation fares better than the other contenders in accounting for variation in the intrusiveness of remedies over time. The other two explanations, however, are also of use. The legal design explanation accounts for why the courts in the Americas and Africa are more amenable to intrusive remedies. The case-history explanation is able to explain sudden bursts of intrusive remedies in all three regions
International Human Rights Law: One Purpose or Many? Reflections on Macklem’s The Sovereignty of Human Rights
No full textInternational human rights law (IHRL) puzzles international lawyers and moral philosophers alike. On the one hand, IHRL does not rest on logic familiar to international lawyers, such as reciprocal obligations between states. It is a body of law created by states, but what it regulates is relationships between states and individuals.1 On the other hand, IHRL has strong affinities with moral philosophy. It claims to protect the fundamental interests of individuals in the form of claim rights against states. Yet, IHRL contains a much longer list of rights than most moral philosophers are willing to justify. It further contains doctrines that are alien to moral philosophical accounts of rights, such as derogable rights and jurisdiction-based responsibility for duty holders.
That IHRL shares much in common both with international law and with moral philosophy yet, in some ways, remains distinct from both of them, has been subject to both philosophical and legal theoretical inquiry through the past decade.4 Significant questions have been raised concerning the normative justifiability of IHRL both from philosophical and legal perspectives. Should we interpret IHRL in the light of a moral philosophy of human rights? What explains the discrepancies between moral philosophical accounts of human rights and the practice of IHRL? What is IHRL for? Does the practice of IHRL allow us to make sense of the purpose of IHRL distinct from moral philosophical accounts of IHRL?
The Sovereignty of Human Rights5 is an important contribution to these questions, and in particular, to the purposive analysis of IHRL as a legal project distinct from the moral enquiries into human rights qua human rights. What is more, it offers a purposive analysis of a much wider range of IHRL than commonly found in the existing literature. It proposes that a legal account of the purpose of IHRL must go beyond the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of individuals and include minority rights, rights of indigenous peoples, the right to self-determination, the right to development and freedom from poverty. The Sovereignty of Human Rights brings together the latter under an integrated account of the purpose of IHRL by way of assigning a unified purpose to IHRL as a whole: monitoring and seeking to alleviate not only the exercise, but also the distributive effects of the allocation of sovereignty in the international legal order.
This article, part of the Symposium on Macklem’s The Sovereignty of Human Rights, has two aims. First, it seeks to reflect on the central argument of The Sovereignty of Human Rights that the legal purpose of IHRL is to monitor the exercise and distribution of sovereignty in the international legal order with a specific focus on the normative methodological underpinnings of this argument. Second, it turns to the implications of this central argument for understanding the purpose of legal minority rights as developed in Chapter 5, holding that minority rights foremost aim to monitor the distribution of the allocation of sovereignty in the international legal order
The March of Universality? Religion-based Reservations to the core UN Treaties and what they tell us about human rights and universality in the 21st century
No full textThe United Nations human rights treaties fulfil a central function in the global human rights promotion and protection system. By voluntarily acceding to those treaties, States bind themselves into a comprehensive framework of human rights obligations. Then, working in dialogue and cooperation with the Treaty Bodies set up to monitor and promote compliance with the treaties, States take steps over time to bring national laws, processes and practices into line with universal norms. However, when acceding to international human rights treaties,States often enter 'reservations' that limit, either generally or partially, the scope of application of the treaty in domestic law. So, for example, a State may make a general reservation to only accept obligations under a treaty insofar as those obligations are compatible with the tenets of a given religion; or may make a partial reservation to limit the application of a certain article
of a convention. These reservations have a significant negative impact on the on-the-ground enjoyment of human rights. If a State does not consider itself fully bound by a treaty to which it is Party, or does not consider itself bound by a certain article(s) of that treaty,then it is unlikely to take the necessary steps, at domestic level,to fully respect, protect or promote the right(s) in question. Between 2014-2016, the Universal Rights Group (URG) led a major international project to map all reservations to the core human rights conventions, and to better understand the extent and nature of these key checks on the universality of human rights. As part of the project, the URG was particularly interested in identifying and analysing reservations that are - or appear to be - motivated by doubts, on the part of the reserving State,as to the compatibility of the treaty in question with certain religious or belief systems. URG's analysis found that questions over compatibility of treaties or treaty provisions with religious belief, doctrine or dogma,are by far the most frequent reason, justification or basis for States' decisions to enter reservations to the UN human rights treaties. Indeed, religion-based or religion-influenced reservations account for over 40% of all reservations to the core international human rights treaties
The consequences of concluding codecision early: trilogues and intra-institutional bargaining success
No full textOne of the most important changes in the history of codecision has been the steep increase in early agreements since 1999. Early agreements have enhanced the efficiency of European Union legislation, but they have been criticized for giving a subset of actors disproportionate control over the legislative agenda and negotiation process. Yet, no study has systematically shown whether and how early agreements have indeed redistributed influence between actors within the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Our contribution fills this gap by comparing actors’ bargaining success across readings under codecision in a dataset of salient files. Contrary to our theoretical predictions, we do not find evidence of distributional consequences when controlling for inter-institutional conflict and file characteristics. Where codecision is concluded early, the final legislative outcomes are not located closer to the policy positions held by the party group of the Parliament's rapporteur or by the Council Presidency