Is An Obsession With Foreign Investment Eroding Democracy in Papua New Guinea?
Often described as “an island of gold floating on a sea of oil”, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of the top ten resource-dependent economies in the world. But robust...
Constitutions and Human Rights
Civil Society Wants its Voice Heard in Post-2015 Development
During the last week of August the UN headquarters in New York was effectively taken over by civil society. Over 4000 participants from non-governmental organisations around the world gathered for...
Charting the Future of Development: A Tale of Two Agendas
Editor’s note: this post is the winning entry for the OxHRH Summer Short Essay Competition 2014. For its sheer scale, poverty is the greatest systemic human rights violation of...
The Sustainable Development Goals: a new vision of development?
On 19 July, after eighteen months of fraught negotiation, a UN Open Working Group of seventy governments adopted a proposal for seventeen goals to ensure a sustainable future—economically, socially, and...
La reforma constitucional en materia de derechos humanos en México y la impunidad: las víctimas en el laberinto
La situación de derechos humanos en México ha sufrido un deterioro notorio en los últimos años debido a múltiples factores (como la debilidad del estado de derecho, el incremento del...
The Mexican Human Rights Constitutional Amendment and Impunity: Victims in a Labyrinth
The human rights situation in Mexico has suffered a notorious deterioration in the past few years due to multiple factors (such as the weakness of the rule of law, the...
Why Should Anyone Care About The UN? The UN Forum 2014
The UN Forum 2014, orchestrated by the United Nations Association-UK on 28 June, was the largest public event on the United Nations in recent decades. UN representatives explained to the...
Mind the values gap: do we really believe in the Constitution?
South Africans often proudly proclaim that our Constitution is one of the most progressive in the world. Yet if you ask most South Africans how they really feel about gay...
Against Happiness: Why ‘Happiness’ is not a Good Measure of Progress
‘Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.’ (Aristotle). Gross national income (GNI) per head is generally accepted as the dominant...
Third Conference of States Parties to the American Convention on Human Rights: Another Brick on the Wall (or is it another brick off?)
On January 21st and 22nd, the Third Conference of States Parties to the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) took place in Montevideo, Uruguay. Once again, Ecuador was working behind...
Lord Sumption on ‘The Limits of Law’
In the 27th Sultan Azlan Shah Lecture, given in Kuala Lumpur on 20th November, Lord Sumption, Justice of the UK Supreme Court, again stepped into the debate over the appropriate...
The Mandela I Knew by Professor Bob Hepple QC, FBA
I hesitated when asked to say something on the sad occasion of the death of Nelson Mandela, because so many carpetbagging celebrities who had only a slight connection with him...
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