A New Opportunity for the UN to Move Forward the Global Abolition of Death Penalty
On the 2014 world day against the death penalty, Ban Ki Moon made a strong statement calling for global abolition. This declaration reflects a growing trend toward abolition, and yet...
The Uncomfortable Place of Inter-Country Adoption in the Human Rights Arena
While November marks the anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the United States (one of the two countries still to ratify the UNCRC) celebrates...
Addressing the Critical Funding Gap at the UN Human Rights Office
High Commissioner Zeid Al Hussein is right to point to the shockingly low proportion of the UN budget which is allocated to his office. But he also needs to implement...
Transnational Human Rights Advocacy as the Contemporary Anti-Hegemon: Human Rights Implications for the BDS Movement
Critics have characterised the status of close to four million Palestinian refugees as “nothing short of heinous”, and this contention has been substantiated by the detailed findings of Professor Richard...
National Pro Bono Week – Interning for Gender Equality: UN Women
The 13th annual National Pro Bono Week (NPBW), sponsored by the Law Society, the Bar Council and the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx), will take place between 3 –...
“Classic Human Rights Law Territory”: Why the HRC need to talk about drones
A US drone strike killed two suspected militants in northwest Pakistan last Saturday, in an attack which marks the seventh this past week, and the sixteenth this year. These latest...
Recognising Maternity Leave as a Human Rights Obligation
Paid maternity leave is routinely argued as necessary to achieve gender equality in the workplace. Article 11(2)(b) of CEDAW requires States “to introduce maternity leave with pay or comparable social...
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...
Histórica Decisión de CEDAW en un Caso de Violencia de Género
En su reciente decisión sobre el caso de Ángela González, una mujer española superviviente de la violencia de género, quien durante años luchó por protegerse a sí misma y a...
CEDAW Issues a Historic Ruling in a Gender Violence Case
In its recent ruling on the case of Ángela González, a Spanish gender violence survivor who fought for years to protect herself and her daughter Andrea, the CEDAW Committee found...
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...
