The issue of corporate responsibilities has had a tumultuous history at the United Nations. When the Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed John Ruggie's Guiding Principles in June 2011, it was the first time that the UN stated authoritatively its expectations in the area of business and human rights. This volume captures this special moment in time: a moment of taking stock of a successfully concluded UN Special Representative mandate (2005-2011) and of preparing for the massive task of following up with more operational guidance, effective governance mechanisms and sound theoretical...

In 1997, The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Compilation of Human Rights Instruments was published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers as the first volume in the series "The Raoul Wallenberg Institute Human Rights Library". In 2004, the second edition of that Compilation was published, and the present publication is the third, revised edition of the book. Since the second edition of the Compilation went out of print, major human rights treaties have entered, or are about to enter, into force, and a number of non-treaty instruments have been adopted. The dynamic development in international human rights...

The Concept of Group Rights in International Law offers a critical appraisal of the concept of group rights in international law on the basis of an extensive survey of existing group rights in contemporary international law. Among some of its findings is the observation that an ideological way of arguing about this legal category is widespread among scholars as well as practitioners; it sees this ideological framing as one of the main reasons why international law has so far been very reluctant to provide group rights and to call them by their name. Accordingly, the book re-evaluates the...

The overall objective of this unique volume is to understand what effects globalisation has had on the traditional views of sovereignty, seen from a Chinese and European, primarily Swedish, perspective. Does the cultural-historical approach have any value in China today or is it only seen as political reminiscence with very little real effects in the wake of globalisation? What are the differences between different understandings of sovereignty in different parts of the world? How has the concept changed generally because of a different international structure, with for example regional...

The European Human Rights Culture - A Paradox of Human Rights Protection in Europe? analyses the political term "European Human Rights Culture," a term first introduced by EU Commission President Barroso. Located in the fields of comparative law and European law, this book analyses, through first-hand interviews with the European judiciary, the judicial perspective on the European human rights culture and sets this in context to the political dimension of the term. In addition, it looks at the structures and procedures of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the...

The chapters in this volume have their origins in papers presented at a Workshop held at Lund University in Sweden. The Workshop gathered together experts from Europe, the United States and Australia, including leading academics as well as representatives from the ICRC, the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Red Cross Societies and the Swedish and Norwegian governments, to examine the relevance and adequacy of the existing regime for environmental protection during armed conflict as well as the ability of other international legal mechanisms to contribute to the amelioration of damage to the...

Law enforcement at sea has become an increasingly important tool for combating transnational crime. Such law enforcement operations are commonly directed by multinational missions composed of military rather than police forces, and are often carried out in maritime areas not subject to national jurisdiction. Because of these characteristics, maritime law enforcement operations touch upon many unresolved human rights issues. In the present study, counter-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia and in the Indian Ocean serve as the quintessential example of how law enforcement measures taken...