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Since World War II, there has been a proliferation of international norms and institutions around accountability for gross human rights violations, in the universal aspiration that societies should never again endure the atrocities of war and mass violence. This has manifest most notably in the landmark creation of a permanent International Criminal Court. Yet despite the rapid ascendance of this global justice norm, the incidents and scale of conflicts and atrocities around the world have continued unabated. What is lacking is a coherent articulation of states' duty to prevent conflict's recurrence by tackling the structural roots of conflict and dismantling the underlying infrastructure for violence. International human rights law frames such measures as a state's duty to undertake guarantees of non-recurrence. Yet transitional justice remains largely focused on backward-looking responsibility for past harms; the scope of this forward-looking principle of future prevention is glaringly under-explored. This conceptual gap is particularly acute in South Asia, where countries continue to backslide towards conflict and autocracy. Yet, the experiences of this populous region have received decidedly less attention within transitional justice scholarship. This has left a critical gap in the development of a more contextualised, holistic and effective approach to preventing recurrence of conflict. With Sri Lanka as a case study, the thesis contributes to filling this critical gap by examining the scope and application of the international obligation to provide guarantees of non-recurrence as a core, but under-scrutinized, pillar of transitional justice. Drawing on lessons from Sri Lanka, the thesis argues for a reimagining of how guarantees of non-recurrence may be conceptualised and applied to advance a more contextually-appropriate, politically-sensitive, sustainable peace and comprehensive justice. Significantly, the thesis posits a new theoretical framework based on applied political economy as an analytical tool to realise this ambition of more transformative guarantees of non-recurrence.

This thesis investigates the way in which the European Court of Human Rights conducts its reasoning process under the qualified rights in the context of imprisonment. The structure of the qualified rights, in that they can be justifiably interfered with by reference to competing legitimate aims and what is 'necessary in a democratic society', poses issues relating to the interpretation of rights and the role of balancing in the adjudication of rights claims. The status of prisoners as rights-bearers whose access to those rights is legitimately curtailed adds further complexity to the interplay between qualified rights and competing aims. The Convention was designed with the rights of free persons in mind. The application, therefore, of the Convention rights to the specific context of imprisonment requires that those rights are interpreted in such a way as to have practical effect while recognising that, necessarily, imprisonment imposes some restrictions on the enjoyment of Convention rights. Further, that the restrictions placed on rights in this context are imposed, to some extent, for reasons of punishment. This complex framework of rights protections and principles of punishment leaves a grey area in which the Court must decide whether Convention rights or competing aims, considered in light of the context of punishment, will take priority in a given case. This thesis proposes a modified framework for the interpretation of the qualified rights which takes account of the meaning of 'effective protection' and priority to rights in the specific context of imprisonment. It analyses the caselaw of the European Court against this framework, and suggests that a more clearly structured approach to each stage of the Court's reasoning process would provide prisoners with greater protection of their Convention rights. Further, it argues that the Court should more fully embrace rehabilitation as an aim of punishment within its caselaw.

The research aims to analyze and explain the impacts of international legal regimes on Brazilian democracy. The thesis proposes that international norms, supranational organizations policies, and transnational agencies agenda can produce paradoxical effects on democracy. We propose a functionalist and pluralist approach that understands democracy as a continuous process of increasing participation and enfranchisement, access to rights, inclusion, and citizenship. Our qualitative research was based on the textual analysis of international conventions, additional protocols, review mechanisms report, multinational organizations publications, transnational agencies toolkits, guidelines, and international courts/commissions decisions. It also involved documental research of domestic legal/institutional unfolding of those international initiatives, such as draft bills, pieces of legislation, case-law, policies data as well as primary data found in Brazilian official datasets. The research consists of a longitudinal study that considers international human rights and anti-corruption legal regimes outcomes in political participation and inclusion. We found that international human rights have been present from the constituent moment onwards in a diverse process of expanding inclusiveness and citizenship enhancement, leading to significant social changes in post-1988 constitutional history. Conversely, international anti-corruption standards strategical absorption contributed to a disruption in Brazilian recent democratic history. The penetration of international anti-corruption discourses and practices into Brazilian reality did not cause the consolidation of democracy advocated by specialized literature, decisively impacting core democratic institutions and procedures. Moreover, anti-corruption packages colonized the public sphere and affected human rights and democratic achievements observed in the rights to food, health, ethnic equality, and indigenous populations protection. The research shows that international regimes that constitute the cosmopolitan/universalist element out of which modern democracy was constituted and spread worldwide can interact with the local, participatory element of democracy in contingent forms. The socio-political background and the institutional framework in which international regimes infiltrate play a decisive role in the way their influences are absorbed and produce effects. We conclude that international anti-corruption norms, regimes and discourses can generate anti-democratic pressures, exclusion, and democracy decay.

The UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) was created by UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 690 in 1991. This resolution provided for the appointment of a Special Representative, the declaration of a cease-fire and the organisation of a self-determination referendum on the status of the territory, i.e. independence or integration with Morocco, which had invaded it in 1975. Since then, the UNSC has extended MINURSO's mandate 59 times without incorporating any human rights monitoring and/or reporting components nor any support from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). As such, MINURSO stands out as the only post-Cold War multidimensional UN peacekeeping operation (PKO) deprived of a human rights dimension. To date, no referendum has been organised and the mission is still in place. This research project examines the impacts of human rights components in UN peacekeeping, or the absence thereof, and conflict (ir)resolution with a focus on the case of a self-determination conflict such as Western Sahara. Besides shedding more light on the conflict in Western Sahara, the thesis aims to empirically explore the human rights protection-peacekeeping-conflict resolution nexus in this deviant single case study. It further investigates a possible remedy using the relevant legal methodology tools through the existence of a norm of customary international law, requiring systematic inclusion of human rights monitoring components into PKOs.

In recent years, global institutions like the UN and UNESCO have increasingly treated obligations to preserve cultural heritage as obligations to uphold human rights. Owing to the relative novelty of this approach, little work has been done to see what exactly such rights would be and how this treatment of cultural heritage could be justified. Not only is it unclear what the foundations of a human right to cultural heritage are or what precisely such a right ought to entail, but it is equally uncertain what is meant by cultural heritage in the first place. Considering this, the aims of the thesis are the following: (i) provide a philosophically robust definition of cultural heritage and its social value that could serve as a foundation of the human rights approach to cultural heritage; (ii) building on this understanding of cultural heritage, provide a systematic conceptual analysis of obligations to preserve cultural heritage understood in the language of human rights. The thesis defends a constructionist-inspired account of cultural heritage, according to which cultural heritage is not primarily about historical objects and practices, but rather about how we employ such objects and practices to make sense of our internal and external worlds, both as individuals and as communities. Equipped with this understanding of cultural heritage the thesis provides a justification of a human right to cultural heritage by appealing to the centrality of cultural heritage to our individual normative agency. This is followed by a discussion of the limits of a human right to cultural heritage, where such limits are determined by its harmful uses. Lastly, the thesis provides a discussion of legal duties that a human right to cultural heritage will generate and briefly considers whose responsibility such duties are.

This dissertation examines transnational reform networks in the Atlantic World-specifically between the United States and Great Britain-between the War of 1812 and the passage of the Second Reform Act in Britain in 1867. This period saw the rise of a transnational humanitarian tradition built atop the successful campaign to end the British slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century. A new transatlantic reform system, constructed around feedback loops of persons and print, was coming into being. In the six decades leading to the American Civil War, Britons and Americans constructed a multifaceted transatlantic network of reform communication that exerted a novel transnational pressure politics. A multitude of reform movements-including abolitionism, women's rights, temperance, and Universal Peace-interwove in this Anglo-American reform pathway. This dialogue was rooted in and sustained by a spectrum of natural rights beliefs filtered through a prism of reformist Christian convictions. Four principles were paramount: the equality of all people, the inherent worth of the individual as a divinely-created being, the necessary freedom to develop and further oneself, and the unity of the human race. Espousals of these truths were the transatlantic fuel of this reformist revolution. Binding these various humanitarian beliefs together was a foundational commitment to the transcendent value of the human being, a value that had to be defended from the harmful tendencies of earthly governments and societies. This was the birth of a Natural Rights Atlantic, a geo-moral space defined by transnational appeals to human connection and individual liberation in which the ideas and activities of humanitarian reformers from different movements intermingled.

This thesis argues that the democratic dialogue model, a domestic constitutional model of rights protection, can, and does, provide both an explanatory and a normative framework for the relationship between domestic legislatures and international courts. The thesis hypothesises that, at a descriptive level, domestic legislatures and international courts engage in democratic dialogue because each time an international court decides on a rights issue, domestic legislatures can respond in such a way as to respect the international court's decision, while nonetheless achieving their own legislative and policy goals. From a normative perspective, the thesis also hypothesises that dialogic interaction between domestic legislatures and international courts should: (i) produce a better protection of rights, that is, 'better' in the sense of providing a protection of rights which draws on arguments for both political and legal constitutionalism; (ii) facilitate a more diverse deliberation about rights; and (iii) produce a system of checks and balances between the institutions. With a focus on the interactions between the Parliament of the United Kingdom and, respectively, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union and using the (contestable) right of non-nationals to enter and remain in a country as its key case study, the thesis ultimately demonstrates these hypotheses to be correct. This finding, it is argued, is particularly useful to build the legitimacy, and perceived legitimacy, of the international human rights law system, because it goes some way to addressing an ongoing objection, based on an alleged 'democratic deficit', to the adjudication of rights by international courts.

When unaccompanied young people arrive in the UK alone and seek asylum, local authority Children's Services are responsible for their care and support, and they have the same rights and entitlements as any other child in the care of the local authority. It is as these children approach adulthood that for those whose immigration status is precarious, their imagined futures can be obscured, the pathway to resettlement can begin to unravel and their wellbeing is compromised. Precarious immigration status can seriously restrict access to opportunities and services, including potentially ending leaving care support, setting them apart from other care leavers who can now access social care support until age 25. Contextualised within policies of the 'hostile environment' and austerity, it is at this interface of applying Children's and Immigration legislation that social workers have been accused of implementing racist and exclusionary policies in being de-facto border guards. As a profession based on a strong commitment to human rights and social justice, seeking to promote and enhance wellbeing, considerable tensions can arise. Through undertaking a combination of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with young people, voluntary sector representatives, and social care practitioners, this qualitative study uses Harding's (1986) Standpoint Theory to understand and foreground how the most marginalised within the system, the young people, experience and make sense of their transition to adulthood particularly when their immigration status is compromised. It then considers how those in more powerful social positions, the different social care professionals involved: social work managers, social workers and personal advisors identify and navigate the issues and tensions which arise, practically and ethically. The findings of thesis offer critical insights into how practitioners, primarily responsible for the young people's welfare, engage with their asylum narratives and issues of credibility. It identifies how practitioners navigate the uncertainty both in relation to the precarity linked to the young people's immigration status, but also the ethical stress that invokes and how this is experienced by them. It then identifies how practising within the context of both the 'hostile environment' and austerity has framed the way in which young people are viewed by practitioners within the local authority system. The thesis then offers an original practice tool derived from the young people's standpoint, The OPTIONS model, which captures the attributes local authority practitioners need to demonstrate to work most effectively with unaccompanied young people at this transition stage of their lives. Familiarity with the attributes and use of the model within practice, could change the way that they experience these structures and systems. There is not a stark binary between implementing border control contrary to social work values or resisting them in line with social work values, rather the situation is much more nuanced.

This thesis examines the worldmaking powers of the law and of performances, two crucial sites/strategies of historical importance for LGBT and queer activists and artists. My focus is a particular rhetoric of LGBT rights circulating in the mainstream of international human rights law and politics that posits gender and sexuality as inherent, natural properties of self-bounded, sovereign individuals. I begin by offering a genealogical account that asks how this rhetoric went rather rapidly from global obscurity to omnipresence in, even preclusion and colonisation of, our political repertoire. Next, drawing on insights from feminist, queer, and critical race scholars and activists, my critique centres on some of this rhetoric's ontological and political limitations: its narrowing down of fundamental political vocabulary and concealment of historical injustice and structural inequality; its reductionist misconception of the operations of power and displacement of alternative, extralegal sites and knowledges; and its disavowal of social relationality through the myth of the self-sufficient, possessive subject. My overarching purpose is to scrutinise this rhetoric's potentials and pitfalls for queer politics, a task I pursue with the purpose of not rejecting but decentring it from, even decolonising, our political imaginaries and subjectivities. To do so and foreground the potential of extralegal modes and knowledges of queer politics, I turn to a case study and foil against which the ontopolitical limitations of neoliberal LGBT (human) rights may be exposed and challenged. Namely, to the social contagion and social movement in/as the aftermath of the performances of the Dzi Croquettes, a 1970s Brazilian theatre and dance group/family whose style, language, and 'philosophy of life' leaked out of the stage and increasingly onto the streets, igniting incipient discussions about gender and sexuality. In order to illustrate how queer performances may help expose and challenge the ontopolitical limitations of the neoliberal LGBT rights rhetoric, I turn to this 'pre-rights' era under the Brazilian dictatorship in early 1970s to examine the Dzi Croquettes both qua performance group/family and social movement. At a time when Brazil was ruled by a patriarchal, fascist dictatorship, I argue that the Dzi performed and ventilated alternative ontologies against the notion of the impenetrable male body and disidentified with structuring binaries such as male and female, public and private, even oneself and other. Based on a survey of the literature, on data generated through archival research and oral history interviews as well as on ephemera gathered on- and offline, I dwell on the group's trajectory and oeuvre before presenting and analysing my participants' accounts on the Dzi performances' magnetic and disorienting powers. I proceed by bringing both the legal and performative realms in conversation with each other. I demonstrate that the Dzi/queer performances more broadly 'target' affective and disciplinary modes of powers in ways the mainstream LGBT rights rhetoric comes short of. Further, unlike the atomised subject to whom others appear primarily as dangerous or intrusive, the Dzi posited and valued alterity as fundamental to the knowledge and constitution of both oneself and the social world. The analysis of my participants' narratives brings the Dzi performances under relief as catalysts for collective, multidirectional identification and resistance as well as of (re)formulation of political needs and vocabularies against/beyond those of neoliberal legalism. I conclude by examining what might be at stake in decentring the law and meditating on how it may fit and nurture a kaleidoscopic political arsenal as plural and diverse as the workings of power. This thesis contributes to critical enquiries on what happens, on what we may lose and/or gain, in/through the translation between queer politics and the law. It also advances the concept of legal decentring, which first appeared three decades ago but whose meanings and implications remain little theorised. In an effort to extend and develop the concept, I gesture towards what it may open up and/or close down, both its potentials and limits. Lastly, it contributes to debates of 1970s queer utopia and communes in/from the Global South and to the literature on the political and affective potentials of performances as realms where we may collectively imagine and enact radical ways of being and doing queer(ness).

The thesis investigates to what extent the international right to health can generate standards for Health Technology Assessment (HTA) implementation and policies. HTA has been used as a multidisciplinary process to determine the broad impact and cost-effectiveness of new healthcare technologies and interventions in health systems under multiple levels of resource constraints. By exploring the relation of this process with State measures to promote access to health, this thesis proposes a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to HTA focused on controlling economic relations and ensuring favourable conditions for access to healthcare. The central point of analysis is how the premise of scarcity, which inspired procedural approaches in bioethics and right to health litigation studies, is not rigid and can be mitigated by State continuous efforts during HTA. The normative focus is on Article 2.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, concerning fundamental principles of progressive realisation and maximum available resources. In this doctrinal analysis, the notion of resources is expanded so as to include State regulatory power at large to contain scarcity through laws alongside HTA decisions. Resources, in this interpretation, involve enabling affordable healthcare, obligations of international cooperation and State support to evidence-making and knowledge production that enhance HTA criteria. A case study in Brazil indicates how the procedural justice model is insufficient to guide State responses to scarcity. A documentary analysis suggests that policies and law can be in practice applied as prescribed by the international economic and social rights principles concerning resource mobilisation, which cannot be divorced from resource allocation in political deliberations. Therefore, an HRBA to HTA should not be read as merely procedural justice but should also impose obligations to address the causes of scarcity where possible before overdependence on rationing deliberations.

First Nations women in Australia experience domestic violence disproportionately compared to Australia's 'settler' population. Prior research suggests that domestic violence responses developed with the 'settler' population in mind may be problematic for First Nations women, but to date no studies have examined First Nations women's domestic violence service interactions prior to fatal violence. I accordingly review a whole-of-population sample of domestic violence-related homicide cases from several Australian jurisdictions, alongside findings from yarning and interviews with First Nations Elders, specialist domestic violence workers and survivors, to examine and analyse First Nations women's service contact histories preceding fatal violence. Viewing findings from a postcolonial, intersectional perspective attuned to Australia's history of invasion/colonisation and the ongoing violence of 'settler' occupation, I argue the domestic violence response system-comprising criminal justice and specialist service responses-is an expression of colonising state power. I then ask how responses to domestic violence against First Nations women can be improved. While Australia's domestic violence response system reflects current international standards, my findings suggest that these standards may be problematic for First Nations women in the Australian 'settler' context. I review United Nations ('UN') guidance to ascertain how, and to what extent, First Nations women's right to self-determination has been considered relevant to First Nations women's rights to be safe and free from violence. I conclude that, to date, UN standards and state monitoring of Australia has been insufficiently attentive to the interaction of these rights. I propose enhanced rights-integration (normative integration) as a way to support improved state responses to domestic violence against First Nations women, however I remain cautious about the UN's ability to transcend its state-centric focus and support meaningful self-determination in its most fulsome sense.

This research study evaluates the strategies of Plan Colombia and the impacts on social exclusion as a human rights dimension. Special consideration is given towards the influence of the United States on human rights in Colombia, especially their collaboration during Plan Colombia in the years 2000-2015. As is related in the early chapters (including the literature review), armed conflict has marked Colombia since its inception as a republic. The deep historical roots of these conflicts have contributed greatly to the rise of polarized movements on both extremes of the political spectrum in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both right-wing paramilitary groups and the country's various leftist guerilla movements. After briefly discussing the origins of the recent armed conflict, the study the impact of counter-narcotics interventions on the activities of non-state armed actors and the implications of these activities for social exclusion and justice. This study offers an answer to the research question: In what ways did the US' intervention via the policies of Plan Colombia alleviate or exacerbate social exclusion in Colombia? To fully investigate the topic, the researcher also explores three sub-research questions: How prominent was the teaching of human rights dimensions to Colombian officers under Plan Colombia? How did US military training programs respond to criticisms about human rights abuses? How can the armed conflict in Colombia inform the international community about the human rights abuses associated with counter-narcotics interventions? These research questions intend to account for three levels of influence on the armed conflict in Colombia: the international community writ large, the US, and Colombia's domestic context. There is overlap between these three geographic scales, since they are constantly interacting; this analysis is simultaneously informed by all three. This study employs a case study methodology based on two data sources: semi-structured interviews with practitioners with on-the-ground experience in Colombia during Plan Colombia and archival research conducted at Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Cooperation (WHINSEC) in Fort Benning, Georgia, and the Organization of American States' Colombia Library in Washington, DC. The researcher draws on Nancy Fraser's (2010) three dimensions of justice in order to provide a conceptual framework to analyze the data collected. The researcher was successful in addressing all research questions with the employment of two sets of data sources. The integration of the interviews along with the data archives was complementary as the weaknesses of one another were covered upon data analyses. Hence, the researcher could report that the US' intervention via the policies of Plan Colombia impacted Colombia both in positive and negative ways. There were sources that reported the improvement of Colombia's democracy and security under Plan Colombia. However, there were also data sources that noted and even highlighted the presence of social exclusion across the country. From the analyzed data archives, different groups and key actors continuously called for the U.S. government to answer and take action on countless and serious human rights abuses reported wherein U.S. military graduates and officials were involved.

The question of States working collectively to respond and share responsibility for the world's refugee population has long been a core concern for the international community. The prominent narrative by States, politicians and general society is that refugees are a cost economically, socially and also politically. A 'burden' to be shifted or avoided, yet rarely ever shared. How States allocate responsibility for protection is a contentious and complex issue, no more so than within the EU's regional legislative framework of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). What is unique within this regional system, and the focus of this thesis, is that there is now a primary law obligation of solidarity and the fair sharing of responsibility between EU Member States. With the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, Article 80 TFEU provides that EU asylum policy (in addition to immigration and border control) 'shall be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility, including its financial implications, between the Member States.' A binding commitment which has yet to be achieved on the global scale. Despite this, the CEAS is at a critical juncture in terms of compliance. Numerousinterpretations and fluctuating understandings of solidarity combine in oftensuperficial pronouncements and wavering commitments in practice. The focus of this thesis is a very particular manifestation of solidarity within the asylum setting. Specifically, the allocation of responsibility for asylum claims amongst EU Member States and subsequently the current inequitable distribution of said asylum seekers. This thesis traces how the legislative framework at present, and proposals for reform, allocates responsibility for asylum claims internally amongst EU States. This thesis argues that the current legislative framework is operating in a 'solidarity deficit' model. As such, it is argued that the legislation at best permits, or at worst promotes, a lack of solidarity between States from the outset. This consequently ensures that asylum responsibilities are disproportionately shared between States; the fiscal cost borne by fewer States and the human cost borne by asylum seekers themselves who are considered 'transferable' by the legislation and politicians alike.

This thesis explores the relationship between human right law and patent law in Europe. In particular, this thesis addresses the tension between the proliferation of European Patents for diagnostic technology and access to diagnosis.

The soaring problem of internal displacement in Nigeria, particularly as a result of the activities of the Boko Haram sect, the government's response, and the prevalence of sexual violence in the internally displaced persons' camps, raises questions about the adequacy of the national, regional and international human rights framework for the protection of internally displaced women in Nigeria. The gravity of the problem of sexual violence against female conflict- induced displacees in Nigeria has inspired this discussion on the extent of physical and material protection available to them under the auspices of human rights law. The practicality of the available normative standards and the challenges of implementation have been explored in this thesis. Over the course of the discussions, specific socio-cultural factors and the political milieu that foster the hostility or insensitivity of the government and other involved parties were considered while weighing plausible mechanisms to address the situation. This thesis first identifies areas in which available law provides insufficient protection, owing to inexplicit articulation or normative gaps before proffering possible solutions to ensuring the effective protection and assistance of these women caught in displacement within their own country. Internal displacement, sexual violence and terrorism/counter-terrorism are problematic areas of law and policy independently of each other, and far more complex when intersecting. To facilitate discussions, a doctrinal legal research method was adopted with a focus on human rights principles and legislation. This process transcended a simple description of the law to a mixture of interpretive and critical analysis that involved the questioning of the appropriateness of the doctrines developed to address the problems of sexual violence faced by women living in displacement. This analysis resulted in an appreciation of the issue of sexual violence against women during conflict and displacement and the legal responses required to address it. The whole essence resides in its potential to draw attention to a set of concerns that otherwise may have been disregarded. In the end, this thesis contributes to existing scholarship and the burgeoning legal and political debate on how best to address the problem of sexual violence by focusing attention on human rights law as it relates to the plight of female victims of sexual violence in IDP camps in Nigeria.

This thesis argues that there is an implied obligation for State Parties to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights to investigate allegations that those within their jurisdiction are responsible for acts of torture and to submit the results of such investigations for consideration by their prosecuting authorities. This has given rise to the African Commission's assertion that State Parties to the Charter must prosecute, or extradite, those suspected of torture. The detailed content of these implied obligations, which are derived from the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment articulated within Article 5 of the African Charter, is consistent with the express international obligation to investigate and prosecute as set out in the UNCAT. The significance of this is that there is a prevalent preference within Africa to pursue "African solutions to African problems", which has resulted in a reluctance within the region to ground their responses to human rights violations in international instruments such as the UNCAT. The African Charter System, consequently, provides an important legal basis for these obligations which enhances the possibility of such investigations being both conducted and of their resulting in prosecutions within the region.

The impact of corporate harm within society is wide-ranging and egregious, supported by considerable corporate power, which stems partly from corporate rhetoric. This project develops and applies a novel means of analysing the discourse of powerful actors: specifically the harm-related discourse of the corporation. My aims are twofold: first to systematise pre-existing state- and individual-level conceptualisations of denial and acknowledgement, increasing provision of tools available for the examination of corporate social responsibility (CSR) texts specifically, but equally any discourse of a powerful actor. Second I discover how these rhetorical devices are used to create the contemporary corporate actor through its discourse. Discourse being an important aspect of how actors navigate the world, an understanding of denial, and its counterpart acknowledgement, can have implications for scholarship, regulation and corporate discourse itself. Although situated within the field of business and human rights research, in developing the methodology applied in this project, I draw on various literatures. My framework of denial and acknowledgement techniques draws on the state- and individual-level conceptualisation outlined by sociologist Stanley Cohen, and is informed by numerous other scholars in that field. The iterative, inductive analysis uses a reconstruction of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with my framework of denial and acknowledgement techniques providing direction and clarity. The texts which I analyse are drawn from the globally recognised United Nations Global Compact Communication on Progress scheme, considering Anglophone manufacturing and extractive multinationals. In this way, I find that corporations, despite portraying themselves as expert, active, engaged actors in the human rights and CSR conversation, in fact utilise rhetoric which is passive, self-aggrandising and evasive. This project therefore builds on existing limited analyses of corporate rhetoric, which identify reputational traction as a product of corporate discourse (through for example positivity in rhetoric). Equally, however, I find that such positivity does not possess an 'educating' effect, rather serving to minimise harms and victims through its employment - characterised as 'defensive' rhetoric by commentators.

Across the globe, there are 26 million refugees and 4.2 million asylum seekers (RAS), a figure which is continually on the rise as drivers of displacement persist in multiple contexts. Among the challenges facing RAS is the risk and reality of human trafficking. This thesis focuses on the role of international law in addressing this problem. The emphasis is on understanding what international law can and does do so that its potential can be maximised, and its weaknesses mitigated. The assessment centres upon three regimes within the body of international law: international anti-trafficking law, international refugee law, and international human rights law. Throughout the comparative analysis, which encompasses global, regional African and European, and domestic planes, international law's nature is presented as iterative and interactive, particularly insofar as it offers protection to individuals. The thesis argues that, at its core, international law offers considerable promise in its ability to address the problem, both in terms of scope and in relation to the creation and empowerment of various state-empowered entities, which inform, develop, and supervise the implementation of the applicable regimes. Nevertheless, weaknesses remain. Content and implementation gaps persist alongside problematic clashes between the underlying rationale of the applicable frameworks and the overarching policy objectives of states. While not ignoring its weakness, the thesis presents - to borrow Sikkink's phrase - 'evidence for hope' in terms of international law's capacity to play a meaningful role in addressing trafficking among refugees and asylum seekers.

After decades of prohibition and advocacy for law reform, over 60 countries have legalized cannabis. Legal change has transformed cannabis as an almost wholly illicit substance into a licit one undergoing commodification. Regulations have enabled markets to emerge for an array of cannabis products, designed for medical, 'wellness', recreational and industrial use. But an ongoing movement for reform remains. There are campaigns for legalization, accessibility, and regulatory oversight, intertwined with demands for human rights. Meanwhile, aspects of the counterculture that surrounded illicit cannabis still linger. In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the cannabis market and movement, the people behind processes of change and commodification, and the implications of these activities. I present an ethnographic portrait of both the market and the movement, as they move through different stages of change and development. This is based on multi-sited fieldwork in 11 countries, over 14 months, during which I attended different cannabis events and worked with different people and organizations, using participant observation and interviews. To analyze this data, I turn to Becker's theory of deviance, Bourdieu's discussion about 'rules of the game', and Abolafia's concept of 'markets as cultures'. I build upon, and contribute to, social movement theory, economic anthropology and organizational sociology. The findings demonstrate parallel sets of ongoing processes - legalization, normalization and commercialization - and their complex effects, which result in processes of commodification. This reform is non-linear and dependent on people, activities, events and networks, but cannot be wholly attributable to legalization. I describe the extent to which the market has been supported by the moral norms of the ongoing advocacy movement and historical elements from the days of the counterculture. I focus on local and global processes of change and commodification to demonstrate the importance of the relationship, and sustenance, between the movement and market.

This thesis seeks to problematise the many competing factors that influence how public authorities interpret the equality and good relations obligations codified in Section 75 (s75) of the Northern Ireland Act 1998. Taking the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) (the leading arts and cultural development agency in Northern Ireland) as a case study, I utilise Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) and grounded theory to explore how ACNI's interpretations of s75 shape and inform broader policy developments in both equality policy and cultural policy in Northern Ireland. Section 75 bears significant weight given that it arose from a more stringent need to 'mainstream' equality after previous anti-discrimination laws in Northern Ireland proved inadequate to tackle existing inequalities. In particular, I grapple with the concept of 'ambiguity' as reflected in both s75 and broader cultural policy. The relationship between ambiguity and cultural policy is well established in the academic literature but this thesis attempts to evaluate its impact in light of a very specific and instructive set of statutory obligations, namely the equality duties imposed by s75. In particular it seeks to establish that ambiguity dulls the effectiveness of s75-inspired policies and ultimately contributes to an implicit cultural policy of ambiguity. My analysis of the impact of s75 on ACNI focuses on the interpretation and presentation of key terms such as 'good relations' and 'equality of opportunity' in five primary documents that were created by ACNI in order to comply with s75 obligations. I reflect on the surprising paucity of both quantitative and qualitative evidence regarding s75 compliance and infer that, besides the inherent ambiguity underpinning 'good relations' and 'equality of opportunity', ACNI is not adequately resourced to comprehensively engage with them. The thesis is accompanied by a Portfolio comprised of a Case Note and Legislation Report, which serve to elaborate on and clarify the enforcement of s75. The Case Note studies the recent decision of Re Toner [2017] NIQB 49, which crucially expanded s75 complaints to be brought by way of judicial review. I discuss the implications of introducing judicial review as a route for s75 complaints for an arm's length body such as ACNI. The Legislation Report serves to provide a richer contextual background to the wording of s75 and its place in the broader Northern Ireland Act 1998. I also consider in this report the crucial role of the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) as the key s75 complaints mechanism. Overall, this research project seeks to modestly contribute to a better understanding of how an arts and cultural policy organisation such as ACNI interprets s75, and how, in the very interesting context of Northern Ireland, this ultimately informs and shapes broader cultural policy in the region. My in-depth analysis of ACNI's interpretation of s75 provides an original contribution to knowledge by considering s75's role in perpetuating a cultural policy of ambiguity in Northern Ireland.

In the era of digitalisation, transformative technologies have brought unprecedented security, convenience and efficiency as well as challenges, concerns and uncertainties. One common example is facial recognition technology (FRT), which is a biometric technology capable of identifying and verifying individuals by their faces. How facial biometrics data are gathered, stored and processed, potentially without the subject's consent or opportunity to opt-out, can pose adverse implications on people's privacy. In the UK, the most notable FRT deployment has been in modern policing, where police forces like the South Wales Police have already trialled and adopted FRT for crime prevention purposes. This research focuses on the challenges of FRT through the prism of UK privacy law, of which Bridges is the first judicial decision on the subject. Namely, it primarily asks whether UK privacy law can adapt to the challenges posed by FRT. The first chapter contains a thorough literature review on the conception of privacy and the workflow of FRT. The second chapter investigates if there is a sufficient legal protection framework in the UK against privacy invasion. In the final two chapters, the thesis mainly addresses who might make use of FRT, for what purposes and whether privacy laws have the conceptual flexibility to react to different users. By combining doctrinal and case analysis research methods, this study finds that UK privacy law has adapted differently to different users. Regarding core public authorities, the law has little difficulty in adapting to the challenge of FRT because an individual could simply rely vertically upon Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. As for private actors, even though the tort of misuse of private information has been developed more expansively in recent years, it is unclear how far it might apply to FRT.

In recent years there has been significant scholarship examining implementation and compliance, and the distinction and interplay between 'hard law' and 'soft law'. However, within this discourse less attention has been paid to the practical manner in which soft law is used, by whom and in what contexts. Moreover, the range of soft law 'findings' of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR), namely provisional measures; decisions on individual communications; thematic and country resolutions; recommendations from country missions; advisory opinions; and General Comments, have received limited attention leaving a gap in literature and knowledge. More recently, with the emergence of National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs), established or designated in accordance with the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, there is a growing group of human rights bodies, operating at the domestic level, also generating a range of findings with the aim of influencing State behaviour. The publications submitted detail the findings from my research to address these gaps in scholarship, and capture the role of new bodies within this discourse. This body of work has examined the use and implementation of the findings of the ACHPR to identify the contexts in which they are used by key actors, and the factors which impact on the extent to which they are applied at the national, regional and international levels. My research has also examined the related theme of how the ACHPR and NPMs have interpreted their role to follow-up and monitor implementation of their findings, and identified the opportunities and challenges for them to apply this role in practice.

This ethnographic study utilises quasi-participant observations of football policing operations to further inquiry to discover the role human rights plays in practice. The aim of the study is to reveal aspects of the operative decision-making processes, the communication of decisions, and the justification for decisions taken to ascertain the role human rights considerations play, and if the tactics deployed met the legal standards as determined by domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Following this socio-legal inquiry, I will assess whether the force delivers a human rights approach to the policing of football fans or whether other motives dominate these operations. This includes exploration of the parameters of what a human rights approach consists of, consider the benefits of a human rights approach and identification of the structural and operational limits to delivering such an approach.

This thesis is a study of the visual culture of human rights movements in Argentina in the twenty- first century, looking specifically at the mobilisation of photography by activists. In each chapter, I cover different human rights organisations: collectives that respond to the country's dictatorial past (Chapter One), the Malvinas war veterans' organisations (Chapter Two), abortion and feminist activists (Chapter Three), HIV activists (Chapter Four), and citizens' assemblies against the socio- environmental damages caused by open-pit mining (Chapter Five). I explore a variety of photographic genres that are relevant to the movements I study, ranging from fine arts photography to photojournalism and vernacular uses. While the thesis is highly interdisciplinary - navigating cultural studies, history of art, the anthropology of art, citizenship studies and human rights legal frameworks - I ground my analyses in theories of photography to examine how the medium serves the aims of activism. My project advances arguments about both the politics of human rights and about photography as activism. I depart from interpretations of photography as testimony to reveal its performative uses. I argue that, in the hands of activists, photography as activism constitutes a performative effort of imagining time. While acknowledging truth-telling and denunciation as part of the photographic mandate when mobilised for human rights activism, I posit that photography offers another crucial possibility: using the space enabled by photography to imagine and create a different reality. Through photography, activists encounter the present and re-visit the past to materialise the worlds of tomorrow. Through this line of analysis, I also depart from notions of victimhood often tied to a testimonial reading of photography. While recognising victimhood's particular prevalence in Argentine political culture around human rights, I argue that the notion of citizenship is a more stable lens through which to study these photographic practices. Photography as activism is mobilised to give life to rights claims: not as testimony, but as a performative, relational practice where citizenship comes to be constituted as a political subjectivity. In turn, this local, embodied study of photography serves to foreground the importance of equally localised studies of human rights: despite its status as a global discourse on human dignity, the political currency of human rights frameworks is shaped by locality. Human rights are always re-imagined and re- contextualised through local histories and narratives of which the bodies of the activists are the protagonists. The ways in which activists frame and materialise rights claims in order to shape and produce citizenship act as a localised counterpoint to global human rights discourses and debates.

The primary purpose is to examine the role of selected Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostal leaders in child witchcraft accusations in both the UK and Yorubaland. Scholarly investigations of collective faith-based child cruelty (CFCC) linked to child witchcraft and pentecostalism through a transnational dimension are relatively few, and of these, none focuses on one instigator: the Pentecostal leaders. The principal aim is to identify, gain a deeper understanding of, and document the link between Pentecostal religious beliefs and practices and witchcraft accusations of children in Nigerian culture. To addressed this, this work adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes qualitative research applying ethnographic methods targeted at selected Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostal leaders. The three overarching research questions are, Question 1: "What theological, cultural, socio-economic, and legal factors have influenced Pentecostal beliefs and practices regarding child witchcraft accusations in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora in the UK?" The broad subject area is witchcraft-its beliefs and practices (including accusations of child witchcraft among Pentecostal churches in two Nigerian cities) and its relationship to pentecostalism in Nigeria, Christian theological anthropology, and human rights discourse. The project analyses the socio-political, theological, and ethnographic influences that fuel occultism and accusations of child witchcraft, in particular, to situate these phenomena in a cultural context to understand better and address the underlying issues. Question 2. "To what extent are issues of power, gender relations, and Pentecostal leadership dynamics implicated in the perpetuation of accusations of child witchcraft among Nigerian Pentecostals?" It also discusses questions of power and charismatic leadership. Question 3. "How have Nigerian Pentecostal beliefs and practices related to child witchcraft accusations been adapted or recontextualised through migration and transnationalism?" The investigation places great emphasis on studying this religious practice in the United Kingdom, looking at the churches' deliverance doctrines and modes of worship, talking to participants, and going to Nigeria, the home country, to look at the foundations of these religious practices and the witchcraft child practices. Face-to-face and telephone semi-structured interviews were carried out with forty-six pastors and two non-pastors. As a participant as observer and as an observer as participant, I made brief participant observations in person and virtually. As a participant as observer, I completed these in-person participant-observations in churches in London, UK, and Lagos, Nigeria, from 2018 through 2019. I conducted the virtual participant observation as an observer as participant for four months in 2020 during a COVID-19 global lockdown. I carried out the textual analysis of publications from three celebrity pastors of Yoruba megachurches. The significant original contributions to knowledge from this project are, a) Bringing transnationalism into research about child witchcraft accusations. Although other key players address witchcraft, deliverance, and related subjects, they have not touched on child witchcraft by bringing in transnationalism, and this is the gap that my research filled. b) Two concluding results-constructed shared belief and collective complicity- merged from the ten-theme findings. These address the complexities of constructed shared beliefs and how they influence leadership positions and liturgical practices. c) Some studies on Nigerian Pentecostalism slightly touch on the area of witchcraft and deliverance, but none focuses specifically on this. d) There are several articles or book chapters with related discussions, but there is little extensive research on child witchcraft focusing on Yorubaland. This work will be beneficial for child protection practitioners and policymakers. This research concludes that the practice of accusing children of witchcraft is part of the religious traditions of some of these worshippers and not a general practice among the Yoruba (Nigerian) Pentecostals. Unless significantly more investigations are made into the role of pentecostal leaders in the phenomenon, it is difficult to conclude that the accusations of child witchcraft are not normative in this movement.

This thesis seeks to contribute to the debate about constitutionalism and the rule of law in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on one of its core themes - the enforcement of fundamental rights. It does so with reference to a detailed exploration of an understudied jurisdiction in this region, Bulgaria. The thesis develops an analytical framework informed by institutional design, legal culture, and their interplay in the context of Bulgaria's constitutional experience. It provides an original, in-depth study of the rights-based jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court. A core argument is that this Court has evaded its mandate to adjudicate fundamental rights, standing in contrast to the robust, rights-based activism that has been associated with the constitutional courts created in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe after World War II, and after the end of communism. All these constitutional frameworks adopted the centralised model of judicial review associated with Hans Kelsen. As initially designed by Kelsen, this model focused on the resolution of separation of powers disputes between governmental organs and not on individual rights protection. The latter function, however, has become a distinctive and central feature of the 'modern Kelsenian courts' that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. After considering two paradigmatic examples of such courts - the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Hungarian Constitutional Court - the thesis demonstrates that, thus far, the Bulgarian Constitutional Court has fulfilled a function more closely associated with Kelsen's archetypal design as an umpire of intra-governmental disputes, rather than that of a human rights court. This development is explained with reference to Bulgaria's constitutional history and legal culture, the post-communist constitution-making process and the adopted constitutional design, as well as the rights-based jurisprudence of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court.

This thesis critically analyses the mobilisation of the language of human rights by and within three UN principal organs involved in counter-terrorism: The General Assembly, the Security Council and the office of the Secretary-General. The thesis shows that, in the context of counter-terrorism, human rights language is strategically deployed in order to assert or contest political power, legal authority and moral authority. Focusing on both the meetings and the soft-law output of these three organs, the thesis explores a number of ways in which the language of human rights is invoked in the context of the UN's counter-terrorism work. Firstly, the thesis shows how the notion of 'respect for human rights' is invoked in order to differentiate between a democracy-loving, peaceful, civilised 'us' and the barbarous terrorist enemy, sustaining the narrative of the war on terror that was written by the United States and its allies in the aftermath of September 11. Secondly, the thesis explores the rhetoric of states of the Global South. These states frequently use the language of human rights in order to criticise the counter-terrorism policies and practices of the United States and its allies in the war on terror, highlighting the irony in the latter's claims to be global defenders of human rights. Thirdly, the thesis examines how human rights promotion itself has, over time, come to be spoken of as a counter-terrorism measure. Finally, the thesis suggests that human rights provide a set of standards for evaluation of the conduct and decisions of UN branches. Thus, overall, the thesis charts and analyses the politics of human rights as it has played out in the UN's counter-terrorism work over the past two decades, reflecting upon the implications of these developments for both international law and the human rights movement.

This dissertation is an examination of scepticism towards rights within political theology and related disciplines. This scepticism is prominent in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, Oliver O'Donovan, William Cavanaugh, John Milbank, and others. The work contextualises and critiques this scepticism through three separate arguments, each developed over the course of a chapter. The first of these rebuts claims that the nominalism and voluntarism of the late medieval period gave birth to rights language, arguing instead that this language developed out of the need to respond to increasingly powerful and centralising institutions. The work of Brian Tierney and Charles Reid is drawn on to make this argument. The second chapter focus on bringing the work of Francisco de Vitoria into conversation with certain approaches to rights. The discussion of Vitoria is used to demonstrate the need for rights language within the common good framework favoured by thinkers such as Hauerwas and MacIntyre as well as to demonstrate the dangers of accounts of rights which are too anaemic. Vitoria's own late career embrace of rights is also criticised as being problematically imperialistic, but an alternative, drawing on concepts formulated by Vitoria, is offered as one which might be useful for in current discussions of rights. The third chapter investigates whether virtue theory can do without rights language by examining the potential of a MacIntyrean virtue approach to be both anti-imperial and robust enough to offer rational grounds for protecting minorities and dissenters. MacIntyre's approach is shown to be compatible with some aspects of postcolonial and decolonial theory but is also shown to be prone to premature epistemic closure. It is suggested that MacIntyre needs a concurrent rights discourse formulated around access to goods he labels as 'external' to counter this closure.

International rules regulating copyright pose obstacles to accessing educational materials, particularly impacting persons living in poverty, persons living with disabilities and other marginalised groups. This Thesis argues that access to educational materials is a human right under the right to education and imposes obligations upon states. State obligations under human rights law thus appear to conflict with international copyright obligations for common parties. In demonstrating that states can reconcile these competing obligations harmoniously, the Thesis advances a rights-based response to the problem of access for those neglected by the market. This Thesis is divided into two Parts. Part I locates access to educational materials as a human right and gives content to states parties' obligations. It identifies and analyses educational 'exceptions' to copyright in the relevant copyright treaties. It argues that these 'exceptions' coincide with states parties' human rights obligations to facilitate access. States parties can thus concurrently fulfil both sets of obligations to respond to the problem of access for the most marginalised. However, after analysing the relative institutional design of the international trade system and human rights treaty bodies, Part I concludes that trade-based obligations are likely to be prioritised over human rights obligations. This prioritisation negatively impacts access to educational materials in countries that cannot afford to pay for free access for all. Part II investigates the manner in which two countries in the global South have sought to reconcile these obligations. South Africa's draft copyright legislation seeks to do this but the President has declined to assent to it due to concerns emanating from the international trade system and related actors. This illustrates the conclusions at the end of Part I. In contrast, a recent Indian court decision demonstrates the possibility of adopting a harmonious interpretation that facilitates equitable access for the most marginalised. The Thesis thus emphasises the crucial role of domestic constitutional actors in harmonising competing international obligations.

In 1988, the Brazilian Constitution enshrined in its text the right to universal health care, which formed the basis of the public health system, SUS. However, since the 90s the country observed an increasing trend of citizens starting legal action against the State to get access to drugs, treatments and medical devices not offered by SUS. The stark increase in successful health care cases is today a source of major concern. Against this backdrop, this thesis aims to understand what are the main socio-legal factors that influence the rise of successful litigation for access to health care in Brazil. To answer this question, the thesis provides an in-depth analysis of qualitative empirical data about health care litigation in Brazil, based on semi-structured interviews with 55 actors - with a particular focus on judges and litigants. The main outcome of the research is a middle-range theory about the links between internal and external socio-legal factors that influence the rise of successful health care litigation in Brazil. The thesis argues that there is a complex socio-legal web which combines various types of factors. A central factor which influences judges to grant health care claims is a deep-sited distrust in the quality of the health care public policy and the policy maker, aligned with an individual self-empowerment and tendency to altruism. The result is an attenuated form of judicial activism which uses the substantive constitutional law as a hindsight justification for granting claims. In parallel, a utilitarian trust in the positive outcome of legal action and low costs of litigating incentivises litigants to start legal action against the state. These various factors are analysed in the context of a post-colonial society, where citizens' individualist approach to the state, and the commodification of health incentivise the multiplication of individual litigation for access to health care.

Bringing together field-based interviews in Haiti and New York and international law analysis, this dissertation contributes a socio-legal perspective on human rights in practice. The dissertation examines how and why the UN's international human rights obligations did not gain traction in the reality of the peace operation in Haiti and the organisation's response to the cholera crisis. The analysis examines how the UN's approach to cholera in Haiti and its international human rights obligations were at odds and offers three potential explanations: (1) ambiguities under international law on the status of the UN's human rights obligations; (2) the UN's resistance to recognising its obligations in practice; and (3) the sidelining of human rights in civil society advocacy on behalf of cholera victims. The dissertation offers a legal account of the UN's international human rights obligations and of their relationship to the UN's immunities from legal process, and legal analysis of how the UN's human rights obligations were engaged at every stage of the cholera epidemic in Haiti. Socio-legal analysis of the Haiti context also offers an insight into the relationship between human rights on paper and in practice more generally. The dissertation identifies a key distinction between human rights that are based in the law and human rights articulated by actors in practice, who ground these articulations in non-binding and flexible norms. The latter are described as 'plastic' human rights, due to the non-binding, malleable, and ad hoc ways in which they are formulated. The distinction between law-based and plastic human rights supports an understanding of how the UN's international human rights obligations did not gain traction in the context of the cholera outbreak in Haiti. Recognising plastic human rights as distinct from law-based human rights allows a fuller understanding of the limited impact of law-based human rights, and is relevant to understanding the relationship between human rights in theory and in practice more widely. Insights from the dissertation inform the scholarly discourse around the UN's approach to cholera in Haiti, as well as a wider inquiry on the impact of the law in practice, and on the role of practitioners in how and why human rights under international law do and do not gain traction.

This thesis explores how the decision to try to mitigate risks when working with non-state, substate, or other more irregular armed groups might affect the decision to engage with these groups. It does so by examining nine case studies of US partnerships with local, hybrid, and substate forces (LHSFs) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria from 2005 to 2019. The risk mitigation mechanisms that emerged in these US-LHSF relationships typify the sort of control mechanisms that Principal-Agent theory assumes patrons will deploy to better control or constrain agents. However, in many situations, these control mechanisms appeared to be driven more by political bargaining between different actors in the policy-making process, or as the result of bureaucratic protocols, elements that are more central to Bureaucratic or Foreign Policy Analysis. Analysis of these US-LHSF relationships from these two lenses offers theoretical contributions to both analytical models: it adds nuance to our understanding of how Principal-Agent theories might devolve within these non-state or irregular force partnerships, and some of the limitations of those theories, while also expanding the type of bargaining situations and bargaining players that might be analyzed under Bureaucratic Policy Analysis. The conclusion blends insights from both lenses to understand what might underlie this emerging trend toward regulating irregular actors, and also to more broadly understand how states respond to the risks surrounding non-state or substate actors within hybrid or complex security landscapes.

If we think that the environment is less important than the economy, then we should try holding our breath while we count our money. This thesis examines the legal framework governing the oil and gas industry in Nigeria. The oil and gas industry in Nigeria is beset by many institutional ills, including a lack of political will by regulators to be accountable for enforcing laws and regulations, to be accountable for environmental degradation in the Niger Delta, and an inadequate compensation regime - amongst other mishaps. This thesis contends that a regional approach to holding multinational corporations accountable for human rights violations is the preferable alternative to improving the institutional ills currently affecting the current framework governing the oil and gas industry. The thesis considers the impact of the voluntary framework but avers that a regional approach and institution holding multinational corporations (MNCs) to account is the preferable approach to addressing human rights violations by MNCs in Nigeria. It advocates the strengthening of the African Charter. This is because the current regulation models have not recorded significant successes in holding MNCs accountable in Africa and Nigeria specifically. The void created in the regulatory sector by the non-performance of government regulatory bodies and the non-implementation of existing legal enactments is gradually being filled by the African Commission in Nigeria. The regional institution has proven by their antecedents that they have a major role to play in the accountability paradigm in the oil and gas industry. This thesis will demonstrate how legal and policy-making institutions in the African Union (AU) can add a regional accountability layer and strengthen solutions within the continent, including providing effective corporate accountability and oversight within Nigeria. Furthermore, it argues that remedies to victims of corporate human rights violations in Africa may be found at the regional level. Africa needs to be the leading character in its affairs and move away from its continuous feature in international relations. This means having to take the lead in making decisions that will affect the lives of millions living in Africa.

This thesis addresses the question: Has incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights secured better judicial enforcement of human rights in England and Wales? Using the example of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), it asserts that for human rights instruments to achieve a high level of human rights protection for individuals in England and Wales, such instruments need to be incorporated. In doing so it makes use of a comparison of the English and Welsh courts' experience with incorporated and unincorporated human rights instruments. It compares the ECHR, an example of an incorporated human rights instrument, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an example of an unincorporated human rights instrument. It examines three periods of time to make direct comparisons of the enforcement of rights of two legal instruments containing similar rights in the courts England and Wales (prior to 1953, between 1953 and 1998, and between 1998 and 2018). In each of these periods, this thesis carries out a doctrinal analysis of what the law on human rights in England and Wales was or is, providing clear explanation of how the law should operate in respect of individual rights. To complement this, quantitative socio-legal analysis shows what actually happened during this period: the vast increase in reference to international human rights law but the divergence between citations of the ECHR and ICCPR. This thesis demonstrates the extent to which the ICCPR has not been used by the courts, compared with the increasing use of the ECHR. Indeed, between 1998 and 2018 the ECHR was referred to by courts 39 times more than the ICCPR. Although the increase in reference to the ICCPR after 1998 illustrates a growing awareness of, and willingness to engage with, international human rights law in domestic courts, the extent to which it lagged behind the ECHR serves to highlight the difference incorporation makes to the influence of such instruments. This thesis concludes that incorporation of the ECHR secured better judicial enforcement of human rights in England and Wales.

Human rights and security, are frequently managed as detached concepts. This thesis unites them in a relationship that implies that there has always been an underlying association between keeping humans safe whilst securing their space through the use of force. International norms, like the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), have this human rights and security relationship in their core. Theoretically, I stem from a constructivist stance that cross-borders with the English School and adds to the growing literature on non-state actors that seek to improve arms control and to inflict change in the global governance of international humanitarian law. By deconstructing and reconstructing through a genealogical constitutive framework of analysis of the relationship, I argue that the actors and actions of the ATT implementation demonstrate that the relationship is constructed by a complex nexus of moral and material interests. I analyse three case studies: Control Arms-ATT Monitor, an NGO pushing for Treaty fulfilment; the UK, as a large arms exporter being held accountable by an independent NGO for apparent failure to implement the Treaty; and Norway, a small arms exporting state intertwined with diverse actors to achieve Treaty implementation. Empirically, I claim that the norm implementation dynamics of the Treaty expose a human rights and security relationship that reflects the constant change and strains amongst its actors, between morality and materialism and between human rights and security. I introduce norm implementers as key actors that can go beyond the typical state and non-state limits exposing their semi-permeated boundaries and that can also operate within the state. I demonstrate the multilayer realm where the human rights and security relationship develops and how its construction implies material survival, false use of morality and giving rights whilst controlling the means of violence.

Owing to corruption, between USD20 billion and USD40 billion is estimated to be in flight from developing countries annually - with only USD5 billion in stolen assets having been successfully repatriated in the past 15 years. The Arab Spring served only to strengthen the view that civil recovery is a helpful tool in the fight against the evils of corruption. However, difficult tensions exist between civil recovery and principles of criminal justice and human rights, including the presumption of innocence and the right to property. This thesis is centrally concerned with the civil classification of the civil recovery regime of England and Wales, as provided for in Part 5 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA 2002), and its use to recover the proceeds of grand corruption. I conclude that grand corruption is a serious criminal wrong requiring it to be, except in a very limited number of exceptions, prosecuted in the criminal law. I also conclude that there are strong human rights-based objections to the court's classification of civil recovery as 'civil', and that Part 5 powers ought to be considered criminal in substance thereby attracting the procedural protections of the criminal law and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The core values of liberty, autonomy and freedom that underpin human rights are threatened by Part 5 proceedings since assets are recovered without any criminal conviction or any of the enhanced protections of the criminal law. Yet, at the same time, the recovery and repatriation of illicit assets through civil recovery can enhance human rights, in particular social and economic rights, and corrupt acts can in themselves constitute a violation of human rights. The thesis concludes that despite the important potential human rights benefits of civil recovery, the weakening of certain protections of Article 6 by the use of civil recovery can only be justified in extreme cases when clear criteria are met.

This study examined the relationship between military professionalism and civil-military relations in Nigeria. Focusing on the period between 1960 and 2007, it explored the connection between understandings of professionalism amongst members of the armed forces and the way they relate to the rest of Nigerian society. Prolonged military rule (1966-1999) and the military's heavy involvement in domestic security, resulted in increased militarization of Nigerian society and placed considerable strain on civil-military relations. The conduct of Nigerian military personnel in their dealings with civilians and their representatives faced criticism by members of the Nigerian civil society and the international community for being exploitative, heavy-handed and inconsistent with expected standards of military professionalism. Yet, during this period the military also increased its international profile, and came to be regarded, especially in the area of international peacekeeping, as a significant force within its region and beyond. Greater accountability and stricter adherence to professional standards were part of the democracy dividends expected by Nigerians when successful elections were held in 1999. Yet, two decades later, the relationship between the military sphere and the civilian sphere has been fractious and conflictual. This thesis considers that efforts to promote military professionalism need to engage with apparent and evidential understandings of military professionalism held amongst military personnel themselves. On this basis, the study has sought to introduce military voices into the discourse on military professionalism. The study adopted a mixed methods approach incorporating both qualitative and quantitative methods in gathering perspectives held by members of the Nigerian military and the civil population about military professionalism. It found that the military's self-image, in terms of its professionalism and values, is markedly at odds with the way it is perceived by the civilian population many of whom see it as a highly politicised, unethical and coercive institution. Further, that the military identity is deeply complicated by pluralism, religious and ethnic diversity in Nigeria with specific consequences for its professionalism.

This thesis explores militaries' efforts to prevent and respond to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). As militaries around the world declare their commitment to gender mainstreaming and implementation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, CRSV tests the limits of what militaries can and should do. CRSV presents complex legal questions in view of the convergence between international humanitarian law and international human rights law in military operations. For critics of militaries, CRSV also raises dilemmas over whether to resist militarism or urge militaries to change. In examining both these aspects, this thesis opens a new dialogue between feminist approaches to international law and scholarship on gender and militaries. This study examines international law obligations applying to military action to prevent and respond to CRSV committed by third parties, proposing the relevance of a range of human rights standards. It uses NATO and the British Armed Forces as case studies to explore how militaries understand and integrate these obligations. Using interviews, observation of training, and review of policy, doctrine, directives and training materials, this research traces NATO and the British Armed Forces' commitments and action concerning CSRV since 2006, identifying key progress, shortcomings and constraints. The analysis is guided by feminist methodologies of identifying structural bias within the law. This thesis proposes that, in certain circumstances, armed forces have an obligation of due diligence to prevent CRSV by third parties and to support the investigation of CRSV. What this requires in practice has been inadequately considered. It finds that NATO and the British Armed Forces have made strides in incorporating CRSV into policy, doctrine and training, in particular since 2012. NATO has established institutional structures to support gender mainstreaming and issued a series of operational directives. The British Armed Forces have delivered CRSV training to foreign forces and introduced policy on human security. In both contexts, however, there remain conceptual and cultural obstacles to effectively preventing or responding to CRSV. CRSV is framed with reference to the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: in political rather than legal terms. Exploring how militaries understand their possibilities for action concerning CRSV reveals how the primacy of combat in militaries' strategic culture limits what they consider reasonable, and how this shapes and is shaped by understandings of legal obligation. In demonstrating the difficulties of and resistance to responding to CRSV, this study offers a sobering counterpoint to progressive visions for the transformation of militaries. It questions any expectation that adopting a human rights framework for armed intervention will be enough to orient militaries to human security. In exploring the place of international law in military understandings of CRSV and what militaries see their role in countering CRSV to be, this thesis contributes new insights to scholarship concerning law in armed conflict as well as to critical scholarship on gender, militaries, and security. It urges critical engagement with militaries and military organisations to deepen militaries' commitment to human security goals.

The embarkation of private armed guards on commercial ships in Somalia has provided a unique opportunity to test the bounds of international law. The phenomenon was new. Until that point shipowners had been reticent to carry weapons or engage the services of those carrying weapons. The legal and practical risks of such carriage or engagement outweighed the potential benefits they offered to defend vessels. Somalia, however, was genuinely peculiar. While shipowners had contended with piracy before, for example in the Straits of Malacca, Somalia represented a potent combination of a failed State with a large, difficult-to-patrol and strategically vulnerable coastline. Shipowners began to engage the services of private maritime security companies (PMSCs) and their privately contracted armed security personnel (PCASP) to safeguard the passage of vessels through the Gulf of Aden, adjacent to Somalia, which is also the second busiest shipping lane in the world. By 2011 it was estimated that up to 50% of vessels sailing through the Gulf of Aden were using the services of armed guards. This new phenomenon gave rise to particular concerns under public international law regarding the law of the sea (and the safety of life at sea in particular) and international human rights protection. These concerns reverberated into private domestic legal concerns as shipowners, marine underwriters and indemnifiers became alarmed at the potential vulnerability of their commercial arrangements on the grounds of illeg- ality and public policy, in addition to their potential liability stemming from the use of force. While international law did have some norms relevant to the embarkation of armed guards, targeted regulation was lacking. Applicable rules had to be distilled from a variety of legal worlds: international and domestic, public and private. Member States of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) were slow to respond to this phenomenon. Many States were reticent to cooperate on regulatory initiatives out of fear that such initiatives would be seen to condone the use of guards. Despite this, shipowners and PMSCs did not stop embarking armed guards due to the lack of regulation. Rather, some PMSCs took advantage of the lack of regulation to cut corners and contract on terms that were arguably a prima facie violation of the law of the sea (in particular the role of the shipmaster). The use of armed guards off the Somali coast has tested the ability of the law of the sea framework enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to respond to the use of force at sea. A lack of targeted governmental regulation motivated the shipping and insurance industries to develop regulatory initiatives including: the ISO 28007-1:2015 Guidelines for PMSCs Providing PCASP on Board Ships (ISO 28007:2015), the GUARDCON Contract for the Employment of Security Guards on Vessels and the 100 Series Rules as to the Use of Force (100 Series RUF). These instruments incorporate international norms concerning the law of the sea and human rights law into commercial shipping and insurance arrangements. This dissertation examines both the public international law framework and the role of private ordering in this context. The following research questions are addressed: 1. Who is responsible for the acts of PCASP at sea and why? 2. How does private ordering contribute to the governance of PCASP at sea? This dissertation argues that, despite public international law having the substantive norms necessary to address the embarkation of armed guards at sea, it is undermined by the prominent and problematic doctrine of flag State jurisdiction over vessels. The result has been gaps in the enforcement of international law giving rise to a practical impunity being enjoyed by armed guards in terms of their conduct. The industry initiatives have a unique role to play alongside public international law in helping to close these enforcement gaps. Despite this, the potential of these industry initiatives is weakened by the difficultly of measuring their effectiveness given the lack of transparency over how they are enforced in practice. Their potential is further undermined by a lack of dispute resolution options to effectively redress harm caused by armed guards. While industry contributions to regulation have great promise, they would be strengthened through stronger reporting requirements and the adoption of current proposals to allow arbitration of human rights violations committed at sea.

This thesis explores the way that international law and its rules, rights, and obligations can address the impacts of climate change and respond to the risks they create for those most vulnerable. More specifically, it focuses on obligations related to adaptation within the climate change regime and argues that human mobility is part of the process of adaptation that States are obliged to enable in certain circumstances. In doing so, the thesis offers an addition to the legal protection provided by other areas of international law, which is often limited to movement that is forced and tends to provide legal status only after people have moved or crossed State borders. Furthermore, unlike legal scholarship that considers the problems posed by climate-related displacement, this thesis begins from the premise that mobility can be a beneficial adaptation strategy-particularly if undertaken in an anticipatory, proactive, and precautionary manner. To reach this conclusion, the thesis applies the tools of treaty interpretation to argue that international human rights law should be integrated into the interpretation and application of adaptation obligations in the climate change regime. The analysis focuses on the rights to life and to an adequate standard of living. It highlights the need to integrate the positive duties accompanying these rights, particularly those related to survival and subsistence, which are central to the ability and decision to move. The process of interpretation also includes the operative principles of the regime, with precaution, equity, and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities being the most pertinent. Combined with the integration of international human rights law, these principles provide the basis for the key arguments of this thesis: that States must act to address foreseeable risks to human rights; in doing so, they must prioritize those most vulnerable; in some contexts, this requires that States plan for and implement measures to facilitate adaptive mobility, whether within or across borders; and that developed countries are obliged to support vulnerable developing countries in undertaking such measures.

My work on human rights rests on two complementary processes of legislative reform through research-based policy recommendations, and education on sustainable access to socioeconomic rights, specifically education and work, starting with minorities and marginalised populations in Iran. Given Iran's rich diversity, securing universal access to rights demands proficiency in collective expression and action through a multidisciplinary lens. For this reason, and given the efficacy of law in action, I have made a concerted effort to focus my contributions to gaps in literature that advance human rights law education in a manner that is of relevance to the everyday life of grassroots populations.

In the face of extreme violence, some Indigenous women-led social movement organisations defending human rights from the abuses related to mega-projects have achieved favourable changes in corporate practices. In the predominantly patriarchal, capitalist and racist context of Latin America, what explains the success (or not) of Indigenous women-led mobilisations regarding the most politically and economically powerful actors? Although there is a well-established literature on social movements, some dedicated to the influence on corporate practices, there is a lacuna concerning the agency, leadership and impact of Indigenous women-led movements in the context of mega-projects. This thesis uses a multi-level qualitative research methodology to develop a theoretical framework to explain their outcomes. It involves three main comparisons of cases of success and non-success: (1) within-country variation comparing Lenca women-led organisations contesting abuses related to hydroelectric dam projects in Honduras; (2) within-case variation over time of a Binni'za women-led mobilisation against violations connected to wind farm projects in Mexico; and (3) a small-N cross-national comparison of mobilisations in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia led by Sarayaku, Asháninka and Wayuu women challenging the abuses related to oil extractives, hydroelectric dam projects, and coal mining respectively. Also, I develop a qualitative comparative analysis of all these cases, which includes a Boolean minimisation process. The thesis finds that in a minimally favourable context the following four factors operating together in a braid of action lead to success (i.e., a favourable change in corporate behaviour): (1) transforming the territory into power; (2) Indigenous women's effective leadership; (3) human rights framing; and, (4) reacting to a grave violation overtly involving corporations. These four strands interweaved in a tough braid of action are capable of harnessing mobilisation power, achieving success over much materially powerful corporate forces. If some of the strands are weak or frayed, the braid cannot achieve this success.

This research critiques the Philippine anti-trafficking sector’s conflation of sex work with victimhood and shows that this conflation is inconsistent with the lived realities of many sex workers. It examines the politics of knowledge production in the anti-trafficking sector and posits that the exclusion of sex workers from policymaking conversations is a form of epistemic injustice. Using a framework that foregrounds sex workers’ speech practices, self-representations, and reflections on their own work, it demonstrates that there was a mixture of choice and coercion in my interviewees’ engagement with sex work, but that they were not victims in need of ‘rescuing’ through the criminal justice system. Sex work was better than their realistic alternatives and allowed them to contest their displacement in the labour market and resist gendered low-paid and labour-intensive jobs such as sewing and domestic work. Social stigma undermined their esteem, self-worth, and ability to exercise agency, but they also reworked social scripts by distinguishing their work as clean and honest, in contrast to the hypocrisy of ‘moral entrepreneurs’. Partially as a reactive form of self-construction, many saw their engagement in sex work as a moral project, through which they demonstrated virtue as mothers and daughters. Some saw themselves as entrepreneurial, capitalising on their attractiveness and the male demand for sex. Some, indeed, saw themselves as victims. However, close attention to their rendering of the word ‘victim’ reveals that they saw themselves as victims of poverty, stigma, and policies and practices that removed their control over their working conditions and exposed them to extortion and abuse. Instead of raids and rehabilitation, they wanted political agency and recognition. Based on these findings, I propose approaching sex work from a labour rights and social justice lens rather than full or partial criminalisation. This research also engages with broader conversations on methodological issues in feminist social research, especially around ethical ways of establishing trust with stigmatised populations, treating sex workers as partners in knowledge production while still preserving a critical distance for academic reflection, and negotiating research decisions with gatekeepers.

This study is a response to the need for reconsideration of the place of human rights in offender management following the Human Rights Act 1998. Probation has remained hesitant in engaging with the rights of offenders and victims when other expectations in relation to punishment, public protection and risk become the service’s priority. The same concepts have created dilemmas for probation practitioners who find themselves in the arena of rehabilitation where offenders, victims and the public coexist. The thesis’ emphasis is placed on unravelling these professional attitudes towards balancing the forces between the interests of the individual offender and the interests of victims and the public. The research initially examines the literature in the area and reviews the factors that appear directly linked to human rights, such as the current probation context, risk assessment, relationships, public protection, and the interplay between crime control and due process. The methods employed include documentary analysis of case law on offenders’ human rights claims to ascertain the legal expectations of practitioners, and content analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with active MAPPA probation officers based in West Midlands to identify their human rights understandings and awareness, balancing approaches towards individual and public interests and what affects their perceptions. The study found a variability of human rights understandings that operate on the street-level and in most instances do not appear in line with the HRA or the accurate meaning of proportionality. There does not appear to be any human rights training in the experience of the participants or specific attention to human rights considerations in risk assessments. Their attitudes towards balancing rights, risk and public protection are rather constructed and cannot be considered as their own because they remain affected and determined by cumulative failures of the service, external socio-political factors, and misplaced public expectations.

Human rights apply universally to all human beings, however human rights violations have been well-documented in forensic services. Forensic inpatient psychiatric services (FIPS) in the UK occupy a unique position as a healthcare service with obligations to the criminal justice system. This presents challenges in providing patient-centred and human rights-supportive care due to environmental, ethical and legal constraints. In order to understand these challenges and the position of human rights in FIPS, staff were interviewed to explore their understandings of human rights and human rights issues in FIPS. A critical realist epistemological stance was taken and a qualitative research design employed. Eleven FIPS staff were individually interviewed and a thematic analysis was conducted, yielding four key themes: Theme 1: “I Don’t Know an Awful Lot About Them”: Broad Concepts of Human Rights Theme 2: “It Always, Always Comes Back to Risk”: Human Rights in FIPS Theme 3: “Do We Know We’re Violating? Maybe Not”: Human Rights Issues Theme 4: “I Think I-, I’m ... Confused”: Tools and Resources in FIPS In seeking to understand staff’s perspectives of human rights in FIPS, this study found that human rights were not widely considered in practice. Practice was predominantly focused around risk and the key legislation considered was the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA). Both of these factors were seen to justify legally infringing upon human rights, although several practices, lawful under the MHA, were raised as human rights issues, such as restraint and forced medication. Several factors were identified as obstacles to human rights-supportive practice, such as risk management requirements, service culture, and individual practice. However, participants highlighted a need for human rights principles to be integrated into FIPS to improve practice and patient outcomes.

The centrepiece of the Australian legal order is the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia (the ‘Constitution’). While the Constitution has proven to be a long-lasting force for stability in Australia, it does not cover the field in terms of constitutional law. Australian lawyers have long considered what lies beneath the written Constitution. This is particularly so in light of the fact that Australia lacks a constitutional or statutory charter of rights. Despite this apparent lacuna of rights protection, it has increasingly been acknowledged that the common law plays an important role in the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms in Australia. Indeed, it has been suggested that a ‘common law bill of rights’ now operates in Australia, and that common law rights protections have a ‘constitutional dimension’. In this PhD thesis I consider why, what and how fundamental rights are protected by the common law in Australia. I argue that it is Australia’s common law constitution that provides the overarching answer to each of these questions. After introducing my contention, the notion of common law constitutionalism and my methodological approach in the Introduction, I move to the question of why such a small ‘c’ constitution exists in Part B. This is done via chapters considering the history of the Australian legal order, the central notion of the rule of law, and the source of legitimacy underpinning the Australian constitutional order. After laying these foundations, in Part C I turn to what fundamental common law rights are protected in Australia. Rather than cataloguing the whole range of rights protected by the common law, I focus on three examples: personal liberty, access to court and freedom of speech. Consideration of these examples illustrates the type of rights protected by the common law, and how the courts come to determine their existence. In Part D, I then explore how such rights are protected, with a focus on the remedial options available to courts where common law rights are infringed by legislation. In particular, I consider the presumption of statutory interpretation known as the principle of legality, pursuant to which legislation will not be construed so as to infringe common law rights absent express words or necessary implications. I also consider the invalidation of statutes on the basis that they are incompatible with fundamental common law rights. I argue that the invalidation route is highly unlikely to ever be taken by the High Court, and that it is unnecessary in any event, for the Court has other more palatable avenues by which to avoid the sting of a statute which egregiously breaches common law rights.

This thesis asks what a commitment to ethical value pluralism (EVP) can contribute to the current understanding of sovereignty in United Kingdom (UK) constitutional law. It is this ethical approach that serves as the core contribution to the current sovereignty debates. The thesis considers whether criticisms of the dominant philosophical underlay of legal sovereignty, namely liberal universalism, can provide insight into current UK divisions over the concept. These divisions exist in the public sphere surrounding where legal sovereignty should lie, such as with ‘Brexit’ and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and in legal opinion over where legal sovereignty does lie, such as with Parliament or in the rule or law, or indeed ‘the people’. Two related criticisms of liberal universalism form the bedrock on which the thesis seeks to make its contributions: a rejection of abstract universalism and of ethical monism. Ultimately, these criticisms take the thesis towards the view that a commitment to EVP might provide direction for the de-escalation of division over legal sovereignty. EVP, for these purposes, is understood to be the idea that human ends are multiple, can conflict and are sometimes incommensurable. This idea is distinct from relativism and corresponds with an internal and embedded essentialism. The thesis takes care to demonstrate this relationship and therefore the normativity within EVP, by understanding universal values in terms of truly human ways of interacting (the ‘human faculties’ approach). On this foundation, it progresses to identify certain process-orientated values, which derive from the ways in which human beings live, to sit comfortably with EVP, such as the familiar ‘self-creation’ and ‘practical reason’, and the slightly less familiar ‘empathy’ and ‘affiliation’. The thesis suggests that these values should form part of a UK constitutional value statement directing human and institutional interactions at this level and potentially beyond. Equally, by understanding universalism as embedded, a set of ‘other’ more substantive values are expected to exist as hierarchical within a constitution, such as human rights, but these values are established by political contestation and ultimately agreement. Otherwise, the thesis focuses on the UK’s internal constitutional structures and suggests that an embrace of EVP should amend the direction of the current constitutional flow. A direction which has in recent years been towards a more philosophically monist national legal system. EVP is best understood as rejecting any one claim to absolute sovereignty and instead supports a distributed sovereignty both within and beyond state boundaries, with a greater emphasis on ‘shared rule’. It is suggested that the UK’s current devolution structures have the potential to support an internal constitutional pluralism structure, more reflective of the norms of EVP. Finally, while the process values ought to also direct an increased egalitarian liberalism within the UK by re-balancing the constitution towards empathy and affiliation, values that speak to the dependant and society-based nature of humans, the most important contribution of EVP is the process and character it fosters before final decisions result.

A global urban housing crisis marked by gross unaffordability, economic, social, cultural, and political displacements, increasing homelessness, and socio-spatial segregation and exclusion has taken hold. Deprivations are occurring in states across the development spectrum, and urban housing tensions are becoming topics of daily conversation if not outright protest. Much of the difficulty can be attributed to the financialization of housing and the global competitive pressures with which cities increasingly contend. An ‘urban turn’ has even become evident in the global discourse and practice, and this is apparent in the adoption of an urban specific UN Sustainable Development Goal in 2015, Goal 11, which commits to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, with ambitious targets to be achieved by 2030. Local governments have become more assertive with respect to implementing international norms and forming transnational networks of cooperation. In these respects, a few notable scholars have begun to examine the role of cities in international law, and this body of literature is now steadily growing. This PhD thesis aims to make a significant contribution by focusing specifically on the question of housing in cities and by emphasizing the social dimensions of sustainable development. Its central argument is for a human right to housing in the city with a duty to act collectively to ensure this right. Analysis of the scope and content of the right to housing finds its present interpretation narrow and wanting in the face of contemporary urban challenges. There is an urgent need to reorient the right to housing in order to ensure access to urban space and to address the dispossessions taking place in cities.