Month: April 2021

Signing, Negotiating, Opting Out, and Starting Over: A New Approach to Approval of Human Rights Treaties, by Lisa Baldez

A COMMENTARY ON A. L. COMSTOCK (2021), Committed to Rights: UN Human Rights Treaties and Legal Paths for Commitment and Compliance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Abstract:

While much of the research on human rights treaties focuses on ratification, countries can also commit to treaties through signature, accession, and succession. Audrey L. Comstock identifies these four types of approval as distinct “legal commitment paths.” In her forthcoming book, Committed to Rights, Comstock derives thoughtful hypotheses about the ways that each of these options shapes a country’s performance on human rights and subjects them to qualitative and quantitative tests. In this essay, I review each of these paths in turn, evaluating the claims that Comstock makes and illustrating her logic in light of an analogy between approval of human rights treaties and the process of drafting diversity statements in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Lisa Baldez is Professor of Government and Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College and the author of Defying Convention: US Resistance to the UN Treaty on Women’s Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Who Should Pay to Tackle Pollution, by Thom Brooks

A COMMENTARY ON A. Zahar (2018), “The Contested Core of Climate Law,” Climate Law 8(3–4): 244–60. https://doi.org/10.1163/18786561-00803009

Abstract:

In the efforts to combat climate change, there are a growing number of scholars who claim that the pollution costs should be paid by the polluters in what has become known as “the polluter pays principle.” Zahar defends this principle as the best way to tackle the associated harms that polluting creates. This comment raises questions about how this principle might work, and compares it with the alternative approaches of the beneficiary pays principle and the principle we should pay polluters to cease polluting. It is argued that none solve the problem even if some can be part of a future solution that pushes us to rethink how we can best achieve global justice.

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Thom Brooks is Dean and Professor of Law and Government at Durham University’s Law School and an advisor to the UK Labour Party

Negotiating the Paradoxes of Migrants’ Human Rights, by Meghana V. Nayak

A COMMENTARY ON S. Abji (2018), “Postnational Acts of Citizenship: How an Anti-Border Politics Is Shaping Feminist Spaces of Service Provision in Toronto, Canada,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20(4): 501–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1480901

Abstract: Salina Abji’s work examines feminist service providers who work with non- status migrant survivors of gender violence. While these advocates assist their clients in accessing state rights, they also challenge the state’s right to decide who belongs. I offer a critical reading that suggests two key contributions of her essay. First, she illustrates the intersection of multiple paradoxes of human rights that are too often analyzed separately, and second, she shows how activists negotiate the tensions produced by the contradictions of human rights. I also draw on her scholarship to think about advocate-migrant relationships and the role of indigenous feminist politics.

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Meghana Nayak, PhD is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University, focuses on the gender violence, migration politics, and feminist international relations theory, and is author of Who is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and US Immigration Politics (Oxford University Press).