Legal Capacity, Disability and Human Rights: Changes and Challenges
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes in Article 12 the equal right to exercise legal capacity without discrimination and imposes on States parties a duty...
Request for UN Inquiry into Italy’s role in the Torture of Migrants and Refugees Pulled-Back to Libya
Human rights violations of migrants and refugees intercepted in the Central Mediterranean, and detained in Libya, are well-documented. Reports on Italy’s active involvement in this pull-back practice are growing. Is...
Protecting Indigenous Communities in Cases of Climate-forced migration
On Indigenous People’s Day in 2018, the United Nations pushed for the protection of indigenous populations’ human rights in cases of social, political, economic, and climate-forced migration. It fell short...
Women’s Right to Sexual and Reproductive Decision-Making: The UN Population Fund Report 2020
One of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is to ‘Achieve Gender Equality and Empower all women and girls’ (Goal 5) and to...
20 Years After Palermo Protocol: Towards a stronger East African regional anti-trafficking framework
The year 2020 marks 20 years since the adoption of the year 2000 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations...
Sexual Violence and Genocide: The International Court of Justice’s ruling on Rohingya
Since August 2017, at least 10,000 Rohingya – a Muslim minority group in Myanmar’s Rakhine state – have been killed and 700,000 have fled to neighboring Bangladesh amidst a brutal...
The Gambia v Myanmar: ICJ upholds the rights of Rohingyas
On January 23, the International Court of Justice announced the imposition of provisional measures against Myanmar. Myanmar is required to immediately cease all atrocities and human rights violations against Rohingyas,...
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
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
“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
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
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,...
