United Nations

CEDAW: The Every Woman Treaty that Already Exists

CEDAW: The Every Woman Treaty that Already Exists

There is an initiative for a new treaty focused on violence against women that calls itself the “Every Woman Treaty”. It is proposed as a stand-alone United Nations (UN) treaty...
Crimea Conscripts: Russia continues to flout the Geneva Conventions

Crimea Conscripts: Russia continues to flout the Geneva Conventions

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in its most recent Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine has confirmed that some 18,000 Ukrainian citizens living...
A Global Mandate to End Violence and Harassment in the World of Work: ILO Convention No. 190

A Global Mandate to End Violence and Harassment in the World of Work: ILO Convention No. 190

“For me, as for most women workers I know, this Convention and this Recommendation are personal… This Convention, and its recognition of violence and harassment as a range of behaviours...
The CERD Committee on Discrimination Against Non-Citizens

The CERD Committee on Discrimination Against Non-Citizens

In a previous blog post I explained the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’s (CERD) first three inter-State communications submitted under Article 11 CERD, specifically that...
UN Political Bodies and Voluntary Abortion: Back to 1994

UN Political Bodies and Voluntary Abortion: Back to 1994

Calls for the protection of reproductive and sexual health are included in an increasing number of resolutions of the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council concerned with women’s rights,...
The Non-effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council’s role in the Syrian Conflict

The Non-effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council’s role in the Syrian Conflict

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the principal organ of the United Nations (UN) charged with maintaining and restoring of international peace and security. Its actions or failures to...
The ILO adopts Convention concerning violence and harassment at work

The ILO adopts Convention concerning violence and harassment at work

Sexual harassment, an expression of violence against women (VAW), received remarkable media attention with the #MeToo Movement. It was a reminder of the law’s poor track record in curbing workplace...
Mobilising International Human Rights Law to Promote Tax Justice

Mobilising International Human Rights Law to Promote Tax Justice

Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue are lost to governments – and particularly those of developing countries – annually as a result of deficiencies in the global taxation system,...
The 2019 Guiding Principles on the Right to Education: The Drafters’ Perspective

The 2019 Guiding Principles on the Right to Education: The Drafters’ Perspective

The Oxford Human Rights Hub in partnership with the Masters in International Human Rights Law at the Department of Continuning Education, University of Oxford will be hosting a panel discussion...
Cuts to the UN Human Rights Bodies? We Know What This Leads To

Cuts to the UN Human Rights Bodies? We Know What This Leads To

The global populist backlash against multilateralism and rights is reaching the UN treaty bodies. These reactionary politics are manifesting in States’ refusal to pay their dues to the UN (the...
Still the second sex: Some feminist reflections on the new General Comment of the UN Human Rights Committee on the right to life

Still the second sex: Some feminist reflections on the new General Comment of the UN Human Rights Committee on the right to life

In October 2018 the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee (HRC) adopted general comment (GC) 36 on the right to life, replacing GC 6 and GC 14. Latter documents date...
Expectations of the Victims of Radovan Karadžić

Expectations of the Victims of Radovan Karadžić

The Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT) recently delivered the long-awaited judgement in the appeal of Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić. A trial chamber of the...

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