Search Results (4)

This article examines the persistent legal invisibility of the Kashmiri Pandits within international frameworks on indigenous rights and internal displacement. Despite meeting definitional criteria under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the community remains unrecognised as either indigenous or internally displaced. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), constructivist norm diffusion and decolonial intersectional critique, this article argues that this exclusion arises not from normative ambiguity but from geopolitical selectivity and epistemic suppression. Through doctrinal analysis of India’s treaty commitments, including its accession to the Genocide Convention (1959) and its interpretative reservation to Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) (1979), this study reveals how recognition is constrained by state narratives of sovereignty and secularism. Supported by evidence from the NHRC inquiry, IDMC displacement data, and comparative experiences such as Native American recognition this paper demonstrates that categories of protection in international law are applied unevenly, depending on political compatibility rather than legal principle. It calls for renewed engagement with epistemic justice and narrative accountability in rethinking indigeneity and displacement in postcolonial contexts. Full article

Ethnicity-based public health inequities continue worldwide, reflecting established failures in law, governance, and social justice. International legal instruments, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), obligate states to provide equitable access to healthcare and address structural components of inequality. This article critically evaluates the effectiveness of these frameworks in advancing health equity, adopting a black-letter legal approach integrated with the social determinants of health models to assess whether ratified commitments have translated into quantifiable changes for marginalized ethnic populations. Case studies from Canada, Australia, and the United States—high-capacity health systems with entrenched inequities—portray the gap between normative commitments and practical implementation. Findings demonstrate that while international law has shaped discourse, promoted civil society advocacy, and influenced select policy reforms, weak enforcement, reliance on voluntary compliance, and insufficient accountability mechanisms curb its capability to generate consistent outcome-based change. Recommendations include establishing a framework convention on global health equity, strengthening the WHO’s mandate on racial justice, improving ethnic-disaggregated data reporting, and ingraining affected communities in policymaking. Normative strength is apparent, but operational impact remains dependent on an enforceable framework and sustained political will. Full article

This article examines the extent to which the inclusion of the European Union (EU) Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Treaty of Lisbon, which gives legal force to socio-economic rights as well as civil and political rights, will succeed in helping EU member states meet international treaty obligations to implement socio-economic rights. Will the EU’s renewed commitment to developing the social sphere, post-Brexit, be more successful and will British citizens lose out on so-cio-economic rights in the long term if the EU succeeds in creating a better social or public dimension? Member states of the EU that have ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) have obligations to progressively realise economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights. Progress on this has been slow and potentially made more difficult by the economic direction adopted by the EU since the 1980s. Although the EU, from the beginning, saw itself as a “social market” it struggled to embed the “social” to the same extent that it embedded the “market”. Critics argue that the economic policies of the EU and key judgements of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) successfully dis-embedded the market from its social context. Additionally, the regulatory regime of the EU developed in a direction that limited the capacity of nation states to ameliorate the consequences of market-led policies for the least advantaged. However, the Charter of Rights, which places socio-economic rights on an equal footing with civil and political rights, is a novel and bold initiative. It has stimulated debate on whether the Charter could rebalance the EU’s economic agenda by paying attention to the social consequences of predominantly market-led policies. This paper examines the potential impact of the EU Charter, in the context of member states international human rights obligations, to create an environment where member states of the EU have fewer obstacles to the “progressive realization” of ESC rights. Full article

In light of the recent adoption of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (OP-ICESCR) and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (OP-CRPD), there is a necessity for harmonisation among the treaty bodies, particularly in the area of socio-economic rights. The equality norm in the CRPD, including the duty to reasonably accommodate, is an important facilitator of socio-economic rights. This article sets forth the opportunities for cross-fertilisation of socio-economic rights, and disability rights in particular, at the level of international human rights law and beyond, as well as the potential that exists for social change at the domestic level. The CRPD Committee and the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR) will undertake the task of assessing measures adopted by States related to alleged violations under the optional protocols and will determine compliance with treaty obligations under the State reporting procedure. In that regard, a framework of “reasonableness review” is proposed, which could provide the opportunity to merge individual rights’ violations with broader issues of socio-economic inequalities and could also lead to coherent implementation of the normative content of socio-economic rights at the domestic level. Full article