Philip Alston’s research while affiliated with New York Law School and other places

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Publications (18)


Assessing the Strengths and Weaknesses of the European Social Charter's Supervisory System
  • Article

October 2005

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157 Reads

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11 Citations

SSRN Electronic Journal

Philip Alston

Since 1961 the European Social Charter (ESC) has been the flagship of international instruments dealing with social rights broadly defined. It constitutes a benchmark against which other international standards and supervisory arrangements in this field have come to be judged. This paper identifies a range of initiatives designed to make the Charter's supervisory arrangements more effective. It consists of four parts: (i) situating the ESC within the overall European human rights regime; (ii) a comparison with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; (iii) an examination of the ESC's strengths and weaknesses as demonstrated by a case study of Italy; and (iv) specific recommendations for enhancing effectiveness.


The Darfur Commission as a Model for Future Responses to Crisis Situations

July 2005

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43 Reads

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17 Citations

Journal of International Criminal Justice

The various special procedures so far set up by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to investigate serious violations of human rights are very different from what can be achieved by a commission of inquiry. There is almost no comparison in terms of the scale of resources, the expertise mobilized, the amount of detail contained in the Commission's Report, the precision and weight of the legal analysis, and the consequent power of the final product to galvanize both public opinion and inter-governmental action. The Darfur Commission may also serve to expand the bridge being built between the Commission of Human Rights and the Security Council (SC). The practice of appointing commissions of inquiry has immense potential in that it can provide the type of specialist input necessary if the human rights machinery and the SC are to form part of a continuum. Commissions of inquiry reports may contribute to promoting transparency and accountability in the work of the SC, since the Council, when determining whether or not to take action in a human rights situation, has to respond to a carefully documented and a well argued analytical report. Finally, the establishment of such commissions to evaluate whether or not a situation warrants referral to the ICC provides an appropriate filtering mechanism before the Council takes a decision.


Facing Up to the Complexities of the ILO's Core Labour Standards Agenda

June 2005

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78 Reads

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61 Citations

European Journal of International Law

This article responds to two detailed critiques by Brian Langille and Francis Maupain of an article dealing with the `transformation of the international labour rights regime` which followed the adoption by the ILO of the 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. The author argues that the ILO does, in fact, play a central role in the process of defining core labour standards and that its approach is invoked by a wide range of actors seeking legitimacy for their own approaches to such standards, whether in the context of bilateral free trade agreements or of private voluntary initiatives. For these reasons it is important to understand clearly the role played by the ILO, to acknowledge the extent to which the Declaration has become detached from the existing jurisprudence of labour rights, and to seek to ensure that the ILO adopts a more balanced approach which does not unduly privilege a limited range of procedural rights at the expense of equally important substantive social rights. The article concludes by outlining the steps which the ILO ought to take in order to ensure that it remains a relevant and influential actor in efforts to protect the basic rights of workers in the 21st century.


Laying the Foundations for Children's Rights
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  • Full-text available

January 2005

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842 Reads

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25 Citations

This study provides a critical and constructive analysis of how far the international community and individual states have come in their efforts to establish the normative, legal, and institutional frameworks which are essential if the aspirations of the Convention are to be translated into reality. Within this context the study seeks to achieve three objectives: (1) to draw up a balance sheet of some of the Convention’s achievements and shortcomings in terms of laying the foundations for an effective Convention-based regime; (2) to provide a balanced perspective on the Convention’s importance within the overall range of endeavors to improve the well-being of children in the world; and (3) to expose and examine some of the dilemmas and complexities which arise in efforts to promote and give effect to the Convention.

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Resisting the Merger and Acquisition of Human Rights by Trade Law: A Reply to Petersmann

August 2002

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106 Reads

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112 Citations

European Journal of International Law

Petersmann's proposal for the enforcement of human rights through the WTO is presented as though it were simply a logical development of existing policies, rather than representing a radical break with them. In a form of epistemological misappropriation he takes the discourse of international human rights law and uses it to describe something which is in between a Hayekian and an ordoliberal agenda. It is one which has a fundamentally different ideological underpinning from human rights law and would have extremely negative consequences for that body of law. Many of his characterizations of the existing state of the law - whether at the national, EU or international levels - are questionable. What is needed is for all participants in the debate over the future relationship between trade and human rights, be they ordoliberals such as Petersmann or mainstream human rights proponents, to move beyond such analyses and to engage in a systematic and intellectually open debate which acknowledges the underlying assumptions and meets a higher scholarly burden of proof than has so far been the case.


Bills of Rights in Comparative Perspective

January 2000

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1 Read

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4 Citations

In recent years the international community has continued to adopt a flow of both binding and non-binding human rights instruments. But despite the significant domestic impact of these developments, most of the literature on human rights has focused on international procedures and institutions, to the neglect of domestic legal arrangements. In this timely volume Professor Alston and a team of distinguished contributors examine the consequences of international human rights treaty obligations at national level. The problems addressed include the transformation of international norms into national law; how to prepare appropriate domestic arrangements for giving effect to international norms (with particular emphasis on the role of the bill of rights); an assessment of the impact of international obligations on domestic legal regimes. This carefully edited collection will be of interest to all practitioners, scholars, and students of the law and theory of international human rights.


The Best Interests Principle: Towards a Reconciliation of Culture and Human Rights

April 1994

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477 Reads

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177 Citations

International Journal of Law Policy and the Family

The ‘universality’ to which international human rights standards aspire has been strongly contested in recent years. Nevertheless, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is likely to achieve near-universal ratification within the next year or two. This analysis uses the Convention, and especially Article 3(1), which incorporates the principle that, in all actions concerning children, ‘the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration’, to examine the broader relationship between culture and human rights.



Citations (17)


... These principles provide robustness and endur-ance to our constitutional arrangements precisely because they prevent society from operating as a simple hierarchy of cascading contracts. (Matheson, 1997: 179) Various authors have argued the case for the Constitutional protection of social rights on a similar basis (Allars, 2001;Darrow and Alston, 1999;Ewing, 1999). ...

Reference:

The ‘new contractualism’, social protection and the Yeatman thesis
Bills of Rights in Comparative Perspective
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2000

... 79 Even though the constitution of the World Court is seen by many as a radical and utopian idea (e.g. Alston, 80 Trechsel 81 ), the draft Statute received support from the Association of Human Rights Institutes, experts (e.g. Kirkpatrick, 82 Ulfstein 83 ) and some states (e.g. ...

Against a World Court for Human Rights
  • Citing Article
  • June 2014

Ethics & International Affairs

... Structure is also needed for improved inter-organizational information exchange, which is hampered by the heterogeneous character of both the cases and the involved actors (Harrison et al. 2020). As Alston and Gillespie (2012) have shown, the current human rights system suffers from dispersed information, a term established by Sunstein (2006). ...

Global Human Rights Monitoring, New Technologies, and the Politics of Information
  • Citing Article
  • December 2012

European Journal of International Law

... However, de facto impunity allows state law enforcement organizations to commit gross human rights violations without obstruction. Alston (2010) finds a culture of impunity the most responsible factor behind human rights violations. Thus, the government's unwillingness or incompetence in tackling the serious issue of impunity may result in massive human rights violations. ...

The Challenges of Responding to Extrajudicial Executions: Interview with Philip Alston
  • Citing Article
  • October 2010

Journal of Human Rights Practice

... According to Alston (1986), children are not having any protection if compare to women, typically on married women during the old age. He mentioned the first efforts of the rights of a child was taken into action internationally by the League of Nations which established a special committee to deal with the protection of children and adopted conventions prohibiting the traffic of women and children (1921) and slavery (1926). ...

CHILDREN'S RIGHTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW
  • Citing Article

... Taken together, all sorts of criticisms spurred movements towards the reformation of the Commission, a rare moment of convergence in international politics, at least with regard to three points: the Commission failed and needed to be replaced; a new body, with new rules, should be created; and the UN's institutional human rights machinery needed to be strengthened (Alston 2006). The process of international negotiations to replace the Commission happened amid the reformist impulse led by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and involved proposals from states from different regional and political positions, recommendations from the Secretary-General and suggestions from the High-Level Panel, composed of independent experts (Castro and Ramanzini 2020). ...

Reconceiving the UN Human Rights Regime: Challenges Confronting the New UN Human Rights Council
  • Citing Article
  • June 2006

SSRN Electronic Journal

... The United States is internationally known as an "exceptionalist" state when it comes to human rights. This attitude has been described as the understanding that the U.S. constitutional tradition with its strong focus on civil and political rights is superior to global frameworks, and that some of the rights globally codified, especially socioeconomic rights, are not legal rights, but rather aspirational goals (Alston 2009). Not only is this attitude widely criticized as a misinterpretation of the holistic nature of human rights, it has also led to minimal domestic engagement with human rights, reflected in the low number of international human rights treaties the United States has ratified. ...

Putting Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Back on the Agenda of the United States
  • Citing Article
  • May 2009

SSRN Electronic Journal

... 164 Sociale rechten worden vaak als het ondergeschoven kindje van de Raad van Europa gezien, waar de meeste aandacht uitgaat naar de overwegend burger-en politieke rechten in het EVRM. 165 Ten tweede valt op dat de verklaring sociale rechtvaardigheid verbindt aan democratische stabiliteit en veiligheid. Zoals de PACE heeft uitgelegd, kan meer aandacht voor sociale rechten een van de problemen achter democratische backsliding adresseren, aangezien sociale ongelijkheid een voedingsbodem vormt voor onder meer wantrouwen tegen de politieke elite, wat op zijn beurt leidt tot bijvoorbeeld populisme. ...

Assessing the Strengths and Weaknesses of the European Social Charter's Supervisory System
  • Citing Article
  • October 2005

SSRN Electronic Journal

... 17 15 Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR), Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, HR/PUB/11/04 (2011). 16 Sachs (n. 5) 175, 176; On the issue of limited resources, stressing the role of individuals, see also, Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, 'Taking Human Dignity, Poverty and Empowerment of Individuals More Seriously: Rejoinder to Alston' (2002) 13(4) European Journal of International Law 845, 848: 'Personal self-development in dignity depends on access to scarce resources and to a welfare-increasing division of labour as matters of individual rights and of individual responsibility, not only as a matter of government benevolence'. 17 As per international law, socio-economic rights are human rights which find their natural seat in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). ...

Resisting the Merger and Acquisition of Human Rights by Trade Law: A Reply to Petersmann
  • Citing Article
  • August 2002

European Journal of International Law