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Currently browsing entries tagged ‘human rights’
Toward a Right to Development? : Reflecting on the Endorois Decision
Last month, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“ACHPR”) handed down a decision on the Endorois peoples’ situation in Kenya. The decision not only marks the end of a nearly 40 year struggle by the Endorois people against the Kenyan government but it also heralds the increasing importance of the third generation human right to development.
The Endorois people are a sub-tribe from central Kenya that were evicted from their lands near Lake Bogoria in the 1970s. The government relocated them to an area that limited their access to a clean water source, central sites of worship and other daily requirements for their pastoral way of life. The Kenyan government failed to provide compensation for this eviction but still proceeded to develop a Game Reserve on the Endorois former lands.
After exhausting all domestic avenues for remedy, the Endorois – with the help of Minority Rights Group International – brought their case before the ACHPR. The ACHPR is a quasi-judicial regional body that renders non-binding decisions aimed at protecting human and collective rights in Africa as envisaged by the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (“African Charter”). Although non-binding, I believe that the decisions from the ACHPR can be viewed as a snapshot of general zeitgeist. Indeed, until the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights starts delivering decisions regularly, the Commission’s decisions will remain an important and indicative…
More Atrocities in the Congo
Drifting from my previous posts on international family law, I will focus today on the recent Human Rights Watch report on the Lord’s Resistance Army atrocities in the Congo. I have chosen to highlight this report for two reaons. First and foremost, I believe that the direct and indirect victims of the situation in the Congo deserve—at the very least—the world’s attention. Secondarily, I believe the report points out the nuanced and interdependent relationship between human rights and humanitarian law.
The 73-page report is heartbreaking. It contains information from 128 interviewees interviewed by three Human Rights Watch staffers. The accounts of murder, violence against children through child soldiers, rape, torture, abduction, and unimaginable brutality are not easy to read. I did, however, feel a duty to pay attention to these accounts.
Astonishingly (at least to this Western writer), the 312 murders and 250 abductions went relatively unnoticed for months. The area’s remoteness slowed communication, assistance, and investigation. This persistent isolation surely devastates the local population, who were unimaginably terrorized by these atrocities. Thanks to the courageous interviewees and interviewers, the world can take notice and seek some measure of justice.
The Human Rights Watch report calls for justice by addressing several stakeholders. It first demands that the LRA cease its attacks and release its prisoners.
The report then addresses the governments of the Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, and Southern Sudan, calling on these governments…
International Consequence to Prorogation
In discussing the principle of democracy in international law in my previous blog entry, I used the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall as a starting point. I wondered whether the blueprint for German reunification at the turn of the decade of the 80s could be used eventually for Korean reunification. As the 00s give way to the 10s, I find myself more compelled now than before to write about another “threat to democracy.” While such a phrase may conjure up a slew of George W. Bush speeches discussing his “crusades” to the Middle East, the threat of which I speak is not overseas, not even in a different continent, but here in North America. It is in Canada. While saying that Prime Minister Harper’s move to prorogue parliament on December 30th, 2009 is a threat to democracy and an affront to international law may seem like a slight exaggeration, the background of the prorogation makes it internationally relevant.
Authoritarian Leadership
This blog is certainly not the forum to engage in an ideological debate. Moreover, prorogation of Parliament is not unusual. Since Canadian Confederation, the Parliament has been put on hold 105 times. However, it is the timing and circumstances of this prorogation which has drawn nationwide criticism. While this is not a problem under Canadian domestic law, it is arguably contrary to “soft” international law. In my previous entry I…
A Trend Toward the ‘Humanization’ of Conflict Law?
Israeli Targeted Killing and the relationship between international humanitarian law and human rights
The modern laws of warfare were born in the nineteenth century from Europe’s fears “about the escalating severity of war”[1]. As the decades passed, war’s means, methods, aims and tactics have changed. Suicide bombers that melt into the civilian population have replaced ordered battalions of uniformed soldiers. Strikes from unmanned Predator drones have supplanted direct confrontations on the battlefield. Wars are fought not only against states, but also against colonial domination, racist regimes and abstract social phenomena, most notably the “war on terror”.
Islamic Hardliners Rattle Their Sabres in Aceh, Indonesia and the West Listens Attentively
Recent reports of the legislative passing of hardline Islamic laws in the Aceh province of Indonesia, including the punishment of stoning for adultery, have unnerved Western observers who believe that basic human rights will be ignored under such a system. While the laws are severely flawed, a closer look at Acehnese and Indonesian political and legal structures reveals that such strict punishments under the system are legally impossible to achieve.
Indonesia is a country of over 230 million people, spread out amongst 17,000 islands and islets along an archipelago that stretches for more than 5,000 kilometres. The province of Aceh, lying at the archipelago’s most westward tip, is itself a diverse region, where some fifteen languages are spoken, and where, for the better part of 150 years, conflict and outright war have been the norm.
Islam came to Aceh in the 9th century. It has long been a unifying force throughout the country, but the Acehnese people in particular focus on Islam as a defining characteristic of their identity. As such, the creation of a system of Islamic law (Syariah in Bahasa-Indonesia) was a central factor of the peace plan agreed to by the Acehnese liberation group Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM). However, it must be noted here that GAM was a purely secular movement, and that the achievement of Syariah was just one of many negotiation goals – and one that was proposed by the Indonesian…
