The Viability of the United Nations Approach to Economic and SocialHuman Rights in a Globalized Economy

The United Nations approaches economic and social human rights through a framework of legal positivism. States are called on to respect, protect and fulfil their legal obligations contained in international human rights law. The state remains ultimately responsible for guaranteeing these economic and social human rights. This article explores the viability of this statist approach in this era of economic globalization. The less developed countries often face economic deprivation caused not by state action/inaction but by the global economic system itself. In many key respects states appear to be losing their capacity to regulate their economies and labour markets effectively. Yet despite the shrinking nature of our global community, the state is still central in the creation of the proper environment for the fulfilment of these rights. This article analyses the national strategies that governments can pursue to respect, protect and fulfil the economic and social rights of their citizens, and thus meet their international legal obligations.     

The abandonment of procurement-linked strategic activism in Australia: standing still with room to move

In this paper I examine the extent to which preferential trade agreements (PTAs) limit the Australian government's ability to use public procurement for local industry development ends. I do so not only by examining Australia's PTA obligations, but also by examining how other governments with similar obligations—such as Korea—are using public purchasing policies to promote local industrial advancement. I find that the PTA obligations of the Australian and Korean governments leave them both significant scope to use public purchasing strategically. Interestingly, however, Australian policymakers have been standing still in the room that remains, and even abandoning PTA-compliant procurement-linked development policies. South Korean policymakers on the other hand have been capitalising on every inch of space left open to them—and even experimenting with new forms of strategic public purchasing that nonetheless comply with their international obligations. I conclude by offering some suggestions as to how we might explain these countries’ radically different approaches to procurement policy, despite their very similar international obligations.     

Patents and medicines: the relationship between TRIPS and the human right to health

The question of access to drugs in developing countries is at present largely influenced by the TRIPS Agreement. TRIPS compliance in the field of health requires substantial changes to existing patent laws in some countries. These changes must be analysed in the context of the spread of epidemics like HIV/AIDS and in relation to other international obligations that states have, for instance, with regard to the human right to health.
Intellectual property rights treaties today have significant impacts on the realization of some human rights like the right to health. This article examines the extent to which TRIPS encompasses flexibility for developing countries to be able to foster better access to medicines. It also examines these issues from the point of view of human rights and considers, in particular, the ways in which the relationship between human rights and intellectual property can be improved in international law.     

Bounded political contestation: the domestic translation of international health and housing rights in Australia

Political contestation within liberal democratic states is an important, albeit limited, guide in defining how these states domestically implement their international human rights obligations. While often ritualistically endorsing human rights standards, political actors allow themselves a limited policy space with their domestic political contest circumscribed by more pervasive influences, often at odds with the state's international commitments. This article examines recent health and housing policy initiatives by Australia's two major political parties and assesses them against its international commitments. Applying a social constructivist approach, this article argues that the dominant neoliberal political discourse and the state's institutional structure set contextual boundaries to the parties’ policy contestation and reveal the limited influence of domestic political contestation in determining Australia's rights implementation.     

General Assembly pledges support for war against AIDS

At a special meeting held in October 1987, the World Health Organization called for a concerted, international response to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Announced was the creation of a WHO Global Commission on AIDS comprised of experts in health, social, economic, legal, ethical, and biomedical fields who will advise WHO officials of developments in various aspects of the disease. Member States were united in terms of the need for open communication and support of WHO efforts to combat AIDS. By December 1987, 129 countries had reported 73,747 AIDS cases to WHO and another 3 million new cases are likely to develop by 1982. The WHO strategy is based on several concepts: 1) even in the absence of a vaccine, AIDS is controllable through widespread education; 2) longterm commitment to eradication is necessary; 3) AIDS prevention and control must be integrated into national health systems; and 4) international cooperation, coordination, and leadership is vital. National AIDS committees have been established in over 100 countries.     

Laying the Foundations for the Wheat Scandal: UN Sanctions,Private Actors and the Cole Inquiry

Throughout 2006, Commissioner Terence Cole QC conducted an inquiry into the involvement of Australian companies in the United Nations' Oil-for-Food Programme in Iraq. The inquiry generated headlines about sanctions-busting behaviour on the part of AWB Limited and whether or not government ministers knew or should have known what was happening during the life of the Programme from 1996 to 2003. An element of the scandal that has received little attention is whether AWB Limited's behaviour was actually that extraordinary, given its status as a private company whose obligation to its shareholders was to maximise profits and which, had it not complied with the Iraqi government's demands to bypass the sanctions regime, could have cost the company a very important market. Drawing on the sanctions literature, this paper examines an essential problem at the heart of sanctions implementation; namely, that while states sign on to these international obligations, it is private companies and individuals that generally bear their cost. The paper considers legislative changes prompted by Commissioner Cole's Report but emphasises their limitations. A key and persistent difficulty for Australia and other states is that enforcing their international obligations depends on the goodwill and integrity of private actors.     

Transnational environmental obligations: locating new spaces of accountability in a post-Westphalian global order

The growth of transnational environmental harm is not only leading to new obligations between states, it is also recasting democratic accountability for the crossboundary environmental performance of public and private actors. Informed by pragmatist ideas on public discourse, I propose a conceptual schema for understanding the moral geography of these new transnational environmental obligations: they mark out non-territorial spaces of public communication delimited according to moral precepts of harm prevention, inclusiveness and impartiality. I outline how the recognition of transnational affected publics is reconstituting and rescaling environmental accountability within international regimes of harm prevention and liability. The critical geopolitical challenge in institutionalizing non-territorial domains of environmental accountability will be the mapping and empowerment of transnational affected publics.     

Growth in the International Reserves of Russia,China, and India: A Comparison of Underlying Mechanisms

A noted international specialist on the Russian economy compares the different mechanisms by which the emerging powerful economies of Russia, China, and India accumulated substantial foreign reserves during the 2000s in the lead-up to the global financial crisis. He also investigates the costs incurred by these countries of intervention into exchange markets to maintain exchange rate regimes supporting such accumulation, as well as measures undertaken after the crisis to address sudden and massive outflows of foreign private capital and considerable decreases in demand for imports in developed countries. The author argues that each of the three countries can be viewed as a prototype for a particular means of reserve accumulation among emerging market countries that has led to the revival of the Bretton Woods international monetary system.     

Tuberculosis: an airborne disease

This article focused on the complications for medical management of airborne diseases, such as tuberculosis. The bacilli that cause tuberculosis were first isolated in 1882, by Robert Koch. It took until 1944 for breakthrough treatment of tuberculosis. In 1998, the World Health Organization (WHO) is waging a new war against the spread of tuberculosis, which has made a comeback after years of quiescence. WHO predicts that 30 million people will die of tuberculosis and 300 million will be infected by 2008. Tuberculosis is transmitted by air in coughing, sneezing, talking, or spitting. A tuberculosis infected person can easily infect an additional 10-20 people in the same year with the same strain. The re-emergence of tuberculosis infections is due to increased migration, international travel and tourism, AIDS, multi-drug resistance, and the weakening of public health care systems in both developed and developing countries. Multi-drug resistance occurs due to people's failure to take prescribed medications for the allotted time period. Treatment takes 6-8 months, but symptoms disappear after 2-3 months. People forget to take their drug regimens over such a long period. Some find costs too high for drugs or doctor visits. Tuberculosis bacilli can mutate and become resistant to new drugs if strains are not eradicated. WHO new management strategies offer a short course of treatment that must be followed up with support from medical staff. The Directly Observed Treatment Strategy (DOTS) eliminates the bacteria from the body and reduces the potential for contagion. DOTS has demonstrated high cure rates and low cost ($11-40/person).     

The dark side of human rights1

Edmund Burke argued that abstract or universal rights to food and medicine were less valuable than the aid of ‘the farmer and the physician’. His point remains unanswered. Human rights receive universal lip service, but their status and justification remain murky. From one view they are universal requirements matched by counterpart universal obligations: but if so they cannot be defined or created by international Covenants. From another view they are defined by convention and have force only when states ratify international Covenants: but if so, they are not universal. This matters particularly for rights to goods and services, such as rights to food and health care. These rights require the active collaboration of those who are to deliver needed goods and services: yet this active engagement is endangered by imposing overly complex requirements in the name of compliance with human rights. Excessive demands for compliance, and excessive emphasis on complaint, compensation and blame as remedies for non‐compliance, endanger the effective contribution of the farmer and the physician, and of others on whom the provision of needed goods and services most depends.     

Implications of hydro-political dependency for international water cooperation and conflict: Insights from new data

Hydro-political dependencies between countries are widely regarded as having important implications for international water cooperation and conflict. Quantitative ex-post empirical research on the subject so far uses very simple characterizations of international river geography to proxy for such dependencies, though. The authors developed a new geo-spatial dataset for water catchments worldwide. This dataset combines elevation models, flow accumulation approaches, hydrological data, and data on international boundaries to generate more precise and nuanced measures of hydro-political dependencies among riparian countries. The paper discusses these measurement concepts, illustrates how dependencies are distributed worldwide, and revisits three prominent quantitative studies on the issue to show how using improved data affects empirical findings. In contrast to a very popular presumption, upstream–downstream dependencies turn out to have a very small to insignificant effect on international water cooperation or conflict.     

The role of negotiated developer obligations in financing large public infrastructure after the economic crisis in the Netherlands

The economic crisis that started in 2009 has negatively impacted in the Netherlands the available financial resources for urban development. Dutch municipalities struggle since then with falling local financial sources, especially since active public land policy, traditionally an important additional financial source, became not so profitable anymore. One supposed effect is the limited degree to which municipalities can nowadays finance public infrastructure that serves wider areas, thus more than one specific development site (i.e. ‘large’ public infrastructure). Until now, however, there are no data available that support this claim. In this paper, we explore this and the role that developer obligations can play as an alternative, compensating financial source. Developer obligations are in many countries a growing popular public value capturing instrument, but in the Netherlands, a relative new phenomenon. On the basis of surveys, interviews and policy analysis, we conclude that at least a quarter of Dutch municipalities use developer obligations to obtain financial sources for large infrastructure. This seems, however, so far not to compensate for the diminishing of other municipal financial sources. The paper ends with some speculation about the future evolvement of developer obligations in the Netherlands.     

A new process for negotiating multilateral environmental agreements? The Asia–Pacific climate partnership beyond Kyoto

The Kyoto Protocol is widely regarded as representing a failed approach to the problem of climate change, especially since the US and Australia have declined to ratify, and developing countries such as India and China—sources of much future emissions growth—have signalled an unwillingness to take on obligations for binding reductions within the framework of an extended Kyoto-like instrument. A new Asia–Pacific Partnership to deal with the problems has emerged and held its first meeting in Sydney in January 2006. Involving Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea and the US, this new partnership provides not only an approach better suited to the interests and resource endowments of the region, but a new model for negotiating multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). In the past, MEAs have been beset by a dilemma, in that the slow pace of their negotiation was overcome by devices (such as lowest common denominator measures, creative ambiguity, iterative functionalism, and double standards provisions) that limited their effectiveness. This article argues that by involving only six parties which account for half of existing emissions, the new Partnership provides the opportunity for better policy to be developed among a smaller number of parties, with the potential to overcome the pitfalls of past MEAs.     

新西兰中国大陆新移民初探

论文基于统计数字,分析了新西兰移民政策对中国大陆移民的影响、中国大陆移民在新西兰的定居状况以及近期新移民的政治诉求。得出结论,新西兰中国大陆新移民群体的形成始于新西兰在1987年所颁布的新移民法案,此后分别于20世纪90年代中期和2000年以后共两次大批的中国大陆人士移民新西兰;近年的新移民包括数以万计的留学生转化的移民以及数额可观的商业移民,尤其是投资移民;如此数万之众的留学生和新移民的到来,对新西兰华人社会经济产生了巨大影响;很多中国大陆新移民对参与新西兰政治表现出了浓厚的兴趣;未来的研究应做多角度和深度研究,如探讨新西兰中国大陆移民的身份认同问题,他们与其他华裔移民及土生华裔的关系以及这个群体中的＂空中飞人＂和海归现象等。     

相对成熟的西方边疆理论简论(1871-1945)

1945年前的80多年间,西方国家涉及边疆(含边界)问题的理论进入相对成熟的时期,主要是国际法和地缘政治学的相关理论发展迅速,美国、俄国、英国、日本等国的相关理论都得到较为全面的发展。这些理论内容广泛,又具有鲜明的时代性,大多数带有“强权即公理”的特点,或者为帝国主义瓜分世界的种种现象进行解释,或者公然地为大国主宰世界、扩张疆土服务。     

Britannia rules the waves? (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

An international arbitration tribunal recently found the United Kingdom to have breached its obligations under international law in declaring a Marine Protected Area in the Chagos Islands (British Indian Ocean Territory). The ruling has potential implications for the indigenous people of the islands, the Chagossians, who continue to wage a political campaign for the restoration of their right of abode in Chagos. In this comment, I update readers on the tribunal's ruling and other related current events.     

The Greek University Stranded in the Policy of Establishing Regional Universities

The paper examines the policy implemented when it comes to establishing regional universities in a developed, yet semi-peripheral, EU country (i.e. Greece) and focuses on two central issues: whether regional universities contribute to local development and whether their location in the periphery harnessed their academic performance. The establishment of regional universities has become a widely used practice for facilitating regional development throughout the developed world, and the university's third role is quite widely accepted. The paper does not intend to question the policy of establishing regional universities itself, but rather the way these universities were established in Greece (as a case of a semi-peripheral regime) and possibly in other countries that are not in the forefront of international research. Regional universities in Greece were often established for clientelistic reasons; however, they do contribute in advancing local economic growth. These positive effects on the locality are often accompanied by a high cost for the Greek university and society itself, in the sense that regional universities have often been forced to operate under difficult conditions, thus undermining their fundamental mission (educational but primarily research).     

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.     

Enforcing the Human Rights of Citizens and Non-Citizens in the Era of Maastricht: Some Reflections on the Importance of States

This article explores the impact of globalization in the context of human rights enforcement within the European Union. It argues that despite the growing impact of transnational forces and supranational institutions, national mechanisms are still crucial in enforcing international obligations, so that states remain critical players rather than diminishing entities. The article considers the development of human rights as a fundamental norm within the European Union, and explores the relevance of this norm for third country (i.e. non-European) nationals. It argues that restrictionist policies designed to curtail immigration and exclude asylum seekers override international human rights obligations voluntarily entered into by the European member states. Even the concept of European Union citizenship, designed in part to address the rights deficit within Europe, has not so far created a base of fundamental rights capable of trumping state interests, but rather functions primarily as an exclusionary concept directed against non-Europeans.     

War Dead and the Restoration of Military Cemeteries in Eastern Europe

This article examines the rebuilding of World War II cemeteries and mass graves. It compares the cult of the war dead in Germany, Romania and Russia and analyses examples of restorations of war cemeteries by these countries in Moldova. This reveals how the former war allies and adversaries now collaborate, as well as their attempts to overcome the political and ideological divides of recent decades through the reburial and remembrance of the war dead. The search for the war dead occurred at a time when each of these countries was “coming to terms” with its recent totalitarian past and, at the same time, was looking for recognition in a new international context. The convergence of the private and the political in the remembrance of the dead led at times to reconciliatory discourses and at others to a restatement of the “sacredness” of the past or of exclusivist national ideals.