Latest in human rights
A review of Joe Renouard, Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
A review of Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda, edited by Karen Engle, Zinaida Miller and D.M. Davis (Cambridge, 2016).
The Trump administration should use the post-human rights era as an opportunity to promote a different international law agenda: building a strong core of international law dedicated to protecting international peace and security.
A review of Mark Bradley's The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Samuel Moyn argues that we’ve moved toward a focus on ending war crimes and similar abuses, rather than a focus on preventing war’s outbreak in the first place.
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Bill, named for the Syrian military photographer who defected and smuggled photographs documenting Assad’s brutal crimes, embraces and amplifies the evolving and necessary role that the US and the international community must play in curbing impunity for war crimes.
Whatever economic problems China and Russia may be experiencing, the foreign policy of both countries of growing importance to global peace and security. Russia’s military intervention in Syria and Ukraine have changed the political and military calculus in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. China’s land reclamation in the South China Sea has made that region into a global hotspot of interstate conflict, one that is unlikely to be diffused by the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision in Philippines v. China.
There is a downturn in civil and political rights in many of the world’s largest and most geopolitically significant countries, especially Russia, China, and Turkey, but also other countries such as Venezuela. These developments have broad potential consequences for international law. In particular, they have implications for: the success of regional human rights treaties and courts; the “right to democracy”; the meaning of sovereignty; and the overall effectiveness of international law.
The refusal to follow through on threats of military action after Syria’s Assad used chemical weapons against civilians is not the only time the US has allowed red lines to be crossed without consequence.
Egypt's current repressive approach will only push the country into greater instability. Only enabling the country's opposition to function in an unconstrained environment will allow the country to contend with the practices that plague it.