This chapter describes a series of regulatory “tactics” for the conducting of conduct with respect to improving human rights performance, and maps the contours of what it calls the “governmentalisation of global human rights governance”. It draws on the work of Miller and Rose to describe this as a phenomenon of “governing human rights at a distance”. It demonstrates that this consists of three broad and overlapping categories of tactics: auditing and other methods borrowed from financial management and accounting; the pluralisation and atomisation of governing functions; and the specification of new subjectivities. Taken together, these result in the creation of a regulatory sphere in which actors are continually enjoined to monitor themselves and others in light of human rights obligations or “responsibilities”; in which the governing of human rights is dispersed between public authorities, NGOs and other civil society actors, businesses and international organisations; and in which this entire range of actors, and even human individuals themselves, are re-conceived as being “human rights governors” in their own right.

The chapter concludes that the notion that negative and positive obligations can be reconciled, or even are mutually supportive, is misguided. It argues instead that the two are antagonistic, and that the solution will only ever be an unsatisfactory and messy compromise. If this compromise resolves too much in favour of a view of rights which sees them as declaring conditions to be realised on the road to universal human welfare, then this will ultimately work to undermine individual agency. This will more than likely have the unintended consequence of making people less, rather than more, enthusiastic about the human rights movement.

This chapter situates the results of the book in the wider context of the EU enlargement process and international LGBT politics. The chapter first summarises the key findings of the empirical material – namely that the EU enlargement process should be thought of as a political process in which the combination and imbrication of domestic and international politics produce outcomes that the dominant approaches in the Europeanisation literature cannot fully explain. In short, the domestic responses to EU enlargement are not simply a product of domestic hegemonic struggles as these do not occur in isolation but are the result of the specific configuration of the different scales of the political integration process and their associated politics. It is further highlighted that EU policies and/or norms cannot be viewed as given (or fixed), but that it is through their particular usage within a transnational context, and the interaction between domestic and international politics, that the meaning of these policies and/or norms are negotiated, (re)defined and reinterpreted. As such, the argument is made for a more critical analysis of the civilizational politics embedded in the EU enlargement process: that future research must go beyond institutional changes to included specific transnational configurations of politics and the complex (negotiated) outcomes they produce. Next, the chapter situates these findings beyond the European context and reflects on their wider implications on the global politics of LGBT equality and how international actors can engage with local struggles for LGBT equality.

In this chapter we explore a range of ethical and legal dilemmas at the end of life. From mercy killing to involuntary euthanasia to assisted dying we consider the legal approaches to protecting dignity, autonomy and reverence for life in decisions about death and dying.

This chapter looks at the doctrinal principles of clinical negligence. The civil law of negligence is designed to provide compensation for one individual injured by another’s negligence. Clinical negligence involves certain special factors.

In this chapter, we examine how (outwith the context of transplantation) English law regulates the removal, retention and uses of human body parts and we consider briefly how far (if at all) we own our own bodies. We examine the relevant provisions of the Human Tissue Act 2004 and the role of the Human Tissue Authority. In addition, we address some aspects of the role of the coroner, a key factor in the regulation of the use of bodies and body parts post-mortem.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry made unprecedented efforts to collaborate and work in the public interest to develop novel treatments, diagnostics and vaccines. But a long history of opacity, competitiveness and catastrophes mean there is much ground to make up. Starting with the thalidomide tragedy, a series of disasters taught us the painful lesson that drugs can be dangerous and their use must be paid for. This chapter considers routes to redress, focusing on negligence and the Consumer Protection Act.

Although it has been recognised that Belgrade Pride forced the topic of LGBT issues into the public debate and forced the state authorities to recognise the presence of LGBT lives, this chapter demonstrates how the history of Belgrade Pride has contributed to a transformation of Pride’s politics in Serbia. Overall, the chapter argues that the international context in which Belgrade Pride has been taking place has had several (unintended) consequences on the meaning of Pride for the local LGBT population. Contextualising the political meaning of Belgrade Pride in the EU’s approach to Pride – i.e. a litmus test for fundamental rights and the rule of law – it becomes clear that the inconsistency of EU pressure and the associated discontinuity of Prides has negatively impacted Pride’s potential to create visibility of LGBT people. The Pride bans, and the fact that international actors did not question the conditions in which Pride takes place, not only anchored Belgrade Pride in the realm of human rights, but also contributed to a dislocation of Pride, away from local LGBT people’s grievances. As such, the chapter argues that Belgrade Pride was voided of its transformational politics, while the Serbian state, in turn, stepped into the political vacuum to appropriate Pride. It used the event to promote its European character internationally, while domestically, the government uses Pride to emphasise the state’s power and sovereignty, while delimiting the possibility of creating meaningful visibility of LGBT people.

In this chapter we consider in particular: (1) The authority to carry out research on the human adult derives from that person’s consent. How satisfactory are the principles governing consent to participation in clinical research? (2) The law on medical treatment demands that the physician respects the confidences of their patients. How does this translate into medical research? (3) What provision does the law make for an individual suffering injury in the course of their participation in such clinical research?