Rosana Garciandia’s research while affiliated with British Institute of International and Comparative Law and other places

The awakening of inter-state communications with the first ever three cases before the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in 2018 has inspired new avenues of research about their potential and shortfalls. This article opens a new line of exploration, considering the mechanism’s potential as an avenue for collective action at a time when many States are responding to violations of international law, even when not directly affected by those violations. Those responses have included massive third-party interventions ( Ukraine v Russia ), and the initiation of proceedings before the icj by States not directly injured ( The Gambia v Myanmar, Canada and the Netherlands v Syrian Arab Republic, South Africa v Israel ). This article argues that enabling collective inter-state communications before UN treaty bodies could strengthen the mechanism as an avenue for treaty compliance and the protection of human rights, and for amplifying sovereign voices as part of peaceful dispute settlement processes.

In 1997, the Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations General Assembly decided to convene the third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. All the major United Nations treaties protecting individuals from racial discrimination had been adopted prior to 1997 and the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance had been created in 1993. But the Durban Conference, symbolically held in post- apartheid South Africa, generated new momentum for these political and legal commitments against racial discrimination. This chapter presents an overview of the United Nations mechanisms and initiatives tackling racial discrimination and the thematic developments since 1997. In light of contemporary challenges posed by the use of technology and pandemics, and reflecting on the intersectional nature of discrimination, it concludes with reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the United Nations response to racial discrimination. The chapter identifies areas for further attention, including racial profiling in law enforcement and border security, racism in sport, and the deepening inequalities caused by global emergencies.

Mauritania was the last state in the world to formally abolish “chattel slavery” in 1980. It has since committed to work towards the elimination of slavery by 2030 under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Agenda and has progressively adopted domestic legislation complying with international law, such as the 2007 Anti-Slavery Act and the 2015 Anti-Slavery Act. Such legislation strengthened the domestic framework with the creation of special anti-slavery tribunals, an increase in penalties and the acknowledgement of victims’ rights and of the role of civil society organizations in protecting them. Yet, Mauritania faces significant challenges in the enforcement of its anti-slavery legislation and the government’s response remains insufficient.

Since the contemporary human rights machinery started to develop in the aftermath of World War II, an increasing number of human rights mechanisms allow individuals and non-state actors to pursue claims against states to protect their rights, such as individual complaint procedures before the UN Human Rights Committee under the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. International human rights law has been described as the framework that has expanded state responsibility beyond the protection of aliens to benefit all individuals, nationals and non-nationals,¹ with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as one of the systems contributing most strongly towards that end. The accountability of states, however, remains a core element of the protection of human rights, as states undertake obligations to comply with human rights and to adopt the necessary measures to ensure that individuals and non-state actors enjoy their rights. Inter-state mechanisms are one of the most effective avenues to guarantee that accountability, with the ECHR again providing one of the strongest mechanisms in comparison with other regional human rights systems and with universal human rights protection, although inter-state complaints represent only a small portion of cases before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) follows its own rules regarding the responsibility of states, although the international law of state responsibility enshrined in the International Law Commission (ILC) Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA) remains, as general international law, relevant to its decisions. However, case law of the ECtHR shows that the Court is departing from certain ARSIWA principles as it adopts a broad interpretation of rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) giving rise to positive obligations. ¹ Exploring those trends in the state responsibility regime of the ECHR, this article argues that, by clarifying certain ARSIWA provisions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can play an important role by contributing to a higher degree of judicial integration on the law of state responsibility. It is desirable that the ICJ takes any upcoming opportunity to provide greater clarity on the challenges and nuances of the applicability of the law of state responsibility, in particular as it relates to positive obligations. That would contribute to a more systematic use of those rules by regional courts such as the ECtHR, and ultimately to guaranteeing a greater protection of human rights.

International law prohibits slavery and slavery-like practices under treaties that have been in force for more than a century. Yet, contemporary forms of slavery are one of the prevailing challenges for the international community, with 40.3 million people in modern slavery on any given day in 2016. The State has been largely overlooked as a perpetrator or accomplice in the global movement to eradicate modern slavery. The hand of the State can however be found in contemporary cases of modern slavery. This article identifies five scenarios of State involvement in modern slavery and aims to uncover and bridge the responsibility gap.

Under the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), as well as under regional conventions, Latin-American and European States are strengthening their efforts to combat corruption by, among other measures, consolidating their international cooperation. Building on the increasingly acknowledged impact of corruption on human rights, this paper explores how the substantive link between corruption and human rights could be unfolded to develop cooperation strategies against corruption with a positive impact on human rights. It does it using as examples a selection of initiatives of inter-regional cooperation against corruption between Europe and Latin-America. © 2018 Departamento de Literatura Espan-Universidad de Sevilla. All rights reserved.