Law and development

Background: Worldwide, thousands of children are acting in different roles in armed groups. Whereas human rights activism and humanitarian imperatives tend to emphasize the image of child soldiers as incapable victims of adults' abusive compulsion, this image does not fully correspond with prevailing pedagogical and jurisprudential discourses, nor does it represent all child soldiers' own perceptions of their role. Moreover, contemporary warfare is often marked by fuzzy distinctions between perpetrators and victims. This article deepens on the question how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers, starting from three disciplines, children's rights law, psychosocial approaches and transitional justice, and then proceeding into an interdisciplinary approach. Discussion: We argue that the victim-perpetrator dichotomy in relation to child soldiers needs to be revisited, and that this can only be done successfully through a truly interdisciplinary approach. Key to this interdisciplinary dialogue is the growing awareness within all three disciplines, but admittedly only marginally within children's rights law, that only by moving beyond the binary distinction between victim-and perpetrator-hood, the complexity of childhood soldiering can be grasped. In transitional justice, the concept of role reversal has been instructive, and in psychosocial studies, emphasis has been put on the 'agency' of (former) child soldiers, whereby child soldiers sometimes account on how joining the armed force or group was (partially) out of their own free will. Hence, child soldiers' perpetrator-hood is not only part of the way child soldiers are perceived in the communities they return to, but equally of the way they see themselves. These findings plea for more contextualized approaches, including a greater participation of child soldiers, the elaboration of accountability mechanisms beyond criminal responsibility, and an intimate connection between individual, social and societal healing by paying more attention to reconciliation. Summary: This article deepens on the question how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers through an interdisciplinary dialogue between children's rights law, psychosocial approaches and transitional justice. With this interdisciplinary perspective, we intend to open up narrow disciplinary viewpoints, and contribute to more integrated approaches, beyond a binary distinction between victimhood and perpetrator-hood.

Background: Given that many low income countries are heavily reliant on external assistance to fund their health sectors the acceptance of obligations of international assistance and cooperation with regard to the right to health (global health obligations) is insufficiently understood and studied by international health and human rights scholars. Over the past decade Global Health Initiatives, like the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund) have adopted novel approaches to engaging with stakeholders in high and low income countries. This article explores how this experience impacted on acceptance of the international obligation to (help) fulfil the right to health beyond borders. Methods: The authors conducted an extensive review of international human rights law literature, transnational legal process literature, global public health literature and grey literature pertaining to Global Health Initiatives. To complement this desk work and deepen their understanding of how and why different legal norms evolve the authors conducted 19 in-depth key informant interviews with actors engaged with three stakeholders; the European Union, the United States and Belgium. The authors then analysed the interviews through a transnational legal process lens. Results: Through according value to the process of examining how and why different legal norms evolve transnational legal process offers us a tool for engaging with the dynamism of developments in global health suggesting that operationalising global health obligations could advance the right to health for all. Conclusions: In many low-income countries the health sector is heavily dependent on external assistance to fulfil the right to health of people thus it is vital that policies and tools for delivering reliable, long-term assistance are developed so that the right to health for all becomes more than a dream. Our research suggests that the Global Fund experience offers lessons to build on.

Obligations incumbent on other states than the domestic state party under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) are contested. By way of case study, the third state obligation to respect under the ICESCR is identified and clarified through a human rights assessment of the EU sugar regime. It is submitted that the European Union (EU) member states, all of which are states parties to the ICESCR, are in violation of their third state obligation to respect the right to an adequate standard of living of small sugar producers in the South by support for or condonation of the regime of sugar subsidies for surplus production and export dumping to the South.

Universidad de Jaén (España) Versión electrónica: rej.ujaen.es 4 Responsibility is used here in its plain language meaning, and not in the specific sense of the ILC Articles on State Responsibility. In the latter, responsibility is confined to a violations approach, i.e. responsibility is engaged as a result of attributable conduct that constitutes a breach of an international obligation. We use responsbility here to refer in a general way to the set of human rights obligations incumbent on a particular state. 5 S. JOSEPH, "An Overview of the Human Rights Accountability of Multinational Enterprises", in M.

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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 are the new and ambitious global development agenda for the 2015-2030 period. That global agenda can only be realized through a global effort. What does that mean for the division of labour? Traditionally, fostering development has been seen as the primary responsibility of the territorial State. This chapter reflects from a human rights perspective on the role to be played by external governmental and intergovernmental actors in bringing about sustainable development. It ponders strengths and weaknesses of the right to development and extraterritorial human rights obligations, and identifies five challenges for human rights law: the legal status of the obligations to cooperate internationally; the distributive allocation of extraterritorial obligations; the triggers of extraterritorial human rights obligations; the scope of the extraterritorial obligation to cooperate for development; and the ability of human rights law to engage with strong definitions of development, which take growth agnosticism as their starting point.

This chapter provides information about the selection of cases, the response rate, and the survey population. Quantitative data, gathered between December 2016 and May 2017, were surveyed online among parents who have been in an international child abduction situation. 2.1. Survey participant selection procedure Administrative data of parental abduction cases were collected by Child Focus (Belgium), Centre Français de Protection de l'Enfance-Enfants Disparus (CFPE-Enfant Disparus, France) and the French Central Authority, and Centrum Internationale Kinderontvoering (Centrum IKO, the Netherlands). The Child's well-being emotional problems conduct problems hyperactivity peer problems Circumstances before the abduction Circumstances during the abduction Court procedure and mediation End of abduction (return/non-return) Circumstances after the abduction case is closed 2.2. Overview of the survey population This section describes the socio-demographic background of the respondent and the child; the relationship between the respondent and the child; the role of the parent in the abduction; the relationship between both parents; the residence of the child, and whether the child was returned not. In response to the questions, the parents provided information about their socio-demographic situation, the circumstances of the abduction, finding a solution, and the wellbeing of the child. Different phrasing was provided depending on whether it was the taking parent or the left-behind parent who completed the questionnaire. For this research, only one child was considered per survey. Therefore, when several children in one family were abducted together, the program selected one child for which the parent was requested to fill in the questionnaire (the 'target child'). Parents with whom the children did not reside at the time of the survey were not questioned about the wellbeing of their children. Detailed results of the survey can be found in Appendix 1. Socio-demographic information Of the respondents, 61,3% (n = 217) were males and 38,7% were females (n = 137). Respondents were between 28 and 70 years old (Mmales = 47.6; Mfemales = 43.1). In terms of nationality, 26.6% of the respondents were French, 13.6% Belgian, and 41.5% Dutch. An additional 18.4% of the respondents held another nationality. The children, for whom the surveys were completed, were on average 11 years and eight months old, with 51,1% boys (n = 181) and 48.9% girls (n = 173). The break between the start of the abduction and the time of filling in the questionnaire was on average 6.3 years. Relationship between respondent and child Any person with parental authority over the abducted child could fill in the questionnaire. A minority of the respondents were grandparents (3.4%), a stepparent or a foster parent (1.9%). Another 2.8% of the respondents had 'another relationship' with the child but were asked to consider themselves as the parent of the child when filling in the questionnaire. The term 'Parents' refers to any of the survey respondents. Abduction of child abroad n = 45 Refusing other parental contact with child abroad n = 5

International human rights law (IHRL) offers potential responses to the consequences of climate change. However, the focus of IHRL on territorial jurisdiction and the causation-based allocation of obligations does not match the global nature of climate change impacts and their indirect causation. The primary aim of this article is to respond to the jurisdictional challenge of IHRL in the context of climate change, including its indirect, slow-onset consequences such as climate change migration. It does so by suggesting a departure from (extra)territoriality and an embrace of global international cooperation obligations in IHRL. The notion of common concern of humankind (CCH) in international environmental law offers conceptual inspiration for the manner in which burden sharing between states may facilitate international cooperation in response to global problems. Such a reconfiguration of the jurisdictional tenets of IHRL is central to enabling a meaningful human rights response to ...

This policy brief focuses on the European Union (EU), that is the Union as such, as well as the member states, as the largest donor of aid. The EU and its member states provide more than half of all development assistance, around 55 per cent. Initially, our research idea was to examine how the EU contributes, or may contribute, to the operationalisation of UN human rights approaches to development on the ground. Very early on, it became clear that given the recent major reforms of and within the EU,the EU is and will continue to be mostly inward looking in the years to come. We will therefore mainly focus on the EU’s approach to human rights approaches to development, and later suggest some opportunities for inter-­organisational learning between the EU and the UN

AHRI members of COST Action IS0702 on the role of the EU in UN Human Rights reform have established since 2009 a specific Working Group II of researchers focused on the sub-topic of human rights and development tools, including a particular focus on EU and UN institutions

toe is aan een belangrijke herijking. Die herijking moet het toelaten om extreme sociaaleconomische ongelijkheid te vatten, met name door aandacht te besteden aan structurele machtsverhoudingen. Of dergelijke herijking binnen het bereik van het recht ligt, zal moeten blijken.