This article analyzes the role of law in the surveillance and prevention of occupational risks within a large public bureaucracy in France, based on a comparison of three services: a listening unit, an occupational health service, and an inspection mission. Each of these services offers legal intermediation activities that frame forms of legality, ranging from the most spontaneous to the most formal normative references. These references to the law make it possible to differentiate situations in order to create an occupational risk prevention policy that favors actions within the organization rather than external recourse. Deprived of any judicial horizon to use effectively to transform working conditions, the legal intermediaries in charge of occupational health and safety are nevertheless relying, even if in a differentiated way, on the law to work towards better risk prevention.

Taking the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) as its focus, this paper critically examines the Canadian government’s efforts to regulate the extractive industry. Using insight from ideology theory and critical discourse analysis, and drawing empirically from Canadian Parliamentary debates, official government and NGO reports, and various news items regarding the development of the CORE, we document how dominant voices prioritized the economy, downplayed the systemic violence of the industry, and redirected blame to “underdeveloped” countries, on route to a regulatory framework that is voluntary and which fails to address the underlying causes of corporate harm and violence. While the CORE represents a “logical” state response to corporate crime, we nevertheless emphasize the importance of ongoing debates about its role in combating corporate impunity. This not only reinforces the idea that (capitalist) dominance is never absolute but signals the ever-present nature of resistance and possibility for change.

Fifty-two years ago, in 1971, President Nixon declared the “War on Drugs”, identifying drug abuse as a public enemy in the United States. Since then, US drug policy has been militarized and, more recently, privatized. Every year, the US government increasingly contracts private military and security companies to provide intelligence, logistical support and training to armed forces in drug-producing or drug-transit States. In Latin America, this militarization and privatization has increased the intensity of violence and has complexified domestic situations, to the extent that the existing international legal regimes now seem inappropriate to respond to the challenges posed by the War on Drugs. On the one hand, human rights law does not adequately address situations where the State faces organized crime groups that are able to control territory. On the other hand, international humanitarian law (IHL) was not created to address law enforcement situations, which the War on Drugs and the fight against organized crime ostensibly are.

This article examines the situation in Latin America, looking at examples of different types of situations through the lens of intensity and organization of the group involved and, in some cases, the group's control over territory. It discusses the application of IHL and human rights law (focusing on the inter-American system of human rights) in these situations and their complementarity, and debates how these bodies of law are adapting or may need to be adapted.

The leading models of disability struggle to fully encompass all aspects of “disability.” This difficulty arises, the author argues, because the models fundamentally misunderstand the nature of disability. Current theoretical approaches to disability can be understood as “nounal,” in that they understand disability as a thing that is caused or embodied. In contrast, this paper presents an adverbial perspective on disability, which shows that disability is experienced as a personally irremediable impediment to daily-living tasks or goals-like-ours. The picture theory of disability technically constitutes a species of relational approach because its analysis references the interplay between an individual and their environment; it differs from other relational accounts, however, by interpreting disability as a certain kind of negative experience—rather than a function of that relationship. This purely descriptive theory makes no normative claims about disability and operates as both a mechanism for the evaluation of the experience of disability and a heuristic device for the proper interpretation of disability. When disability is reframed in this way, the theory offers a particularist perspective which shows if, when, where, and how disability is experienced.

In Indonesia, swidden practices have been part of traditional rice farming for centuries. Swidden agriculture is a fundamental part of all remaining large tropical forests and provides a critical form of biodiversity-friendly agriculture. Meanwhile, peatland degradation and land conversion for oil palm plantation and agriculture have created an annual transboundary environmental disaster in Southeast Asia. This article adopts a transnational lens to highlight the complex multi-scale interactions that perpetuate recurring transboundary air pollution in the region. Having examined the traditional practices of swidden agriculture in Central Kalimantan and South Sumatra (Indonesia), the article reveals that swidden agriculture has been misunderstood generally, and in particular in international and national law and policy. It argues that existing laws fail to identify the important role that swidden agriculture plays in sustainable ecosystem management and cultural expression. Nuanced understandings of fire use, alongside transnational multi-stakeholder and multi-scale approaches, are required.

This article seeks to unpack the potential and limits of markets as instruments of economic planning in sustainability capitalism. Recent policies for sustainability transitions in the United States (USA) and the European Union (EU) (eg, Infrastructure Law, EU Green Deal) have signaled aspirations for a more prominent role of the state in coordinating the economy, while still relying primarily on market mechanisms for such coordination. Yet, could the market itself be conceptualised and structured as a political instrumentality for the achievement of social objectives? An important part of the puzzle of sustainability transitions is the transportation sector, and specifically the transition to Electric Vehicles, or New Energy Vehicles (NEVs). I explore the comparative legal constructions of markets for NEVs in China – the current global leader in NEVs – the USA, and the EU. Drawing from this case study, I first argue that law makes planning possible within markets, as the functional power of market processes can be strategically deployed for the achievement of politically set objectives. Acknowledging the deliberate and artificial character of markets raises the question of what we want markets for, broadening the scope of the political possibilities enclosed in them. I, then, proceed to challenge the enduring argument of the epistemic deficit of central planners, which morphs into prescriptions of decentralisation. I show that arguments against legal centralism and planning cannot stand on just epistemological grounds and are inevitably political. Finally, I attempt to outline the limits of planning within markets – and thus, to a certain extent, the limits of the constitutive function of law – for broader projects of social transformation.

Plastic litter is introduced into the oceans from land-based sources located in many countries around the world. Marine plastic pollution may therefore be attributable to multiple states, resulting in shared state responsibility. This article discusses the issue of shared state responsibility for land-based marine plastic pollution by examining (i) primary rules of international law concerning the prevention of land-based marine plastic pollution; (ii) secondary rules of international law on this subject; and (iii) possible ways of strengthening the primary rules. It concludes that the barrier for the invocation of state responsibility may become higher in cases of shared state responsibility. Three cumulative solutions to this problem are proposed: elaborating the obligation of due diligence, strengthening compliance procedures, and interlinking regimes governing the marine environment and international watercourses.

The act of whistleblowing is not common in Nigeria; this can be attributed to the cultural norms of Nigerian society where deference is paid to those in positions of power and it is often viewed as taboo to speak up against them. This problem of not speaking up is further compounded by the lack of robust whistleblowing legislation which protects whistleblowers from reprisals. The need to protect whistleblowers was brought to the forefront after the implementation in 2016 of the Nigerian stopgap policy on whistleblowing, leading to the Whistleblower Protection Bill proposed in 2019, legislation that seeks to provide wider protection to whistleblowers. This article examines this bill, identifying its limitations; it does not rehash previous scholarly debates about whether incentives are necessary, but rather focuses on bringing the Nigerian perspective to the fore, thus contributing to the existing literature in this area.

Article 32(3) of the Constitution of Uganda (1995) establishes the Equal Opportunities Commission; section 14 of the Equal Opportunities Commission Act provides for the functions of the Commission. These include ensuring that the laws, policies and customs of both public and private entities are not discriminatory and do not marginalize any person or deny him / her equal opportunities. The Commission has handled a few complaints dealing with discrimination, affirmative action, marginalization and impairment of equal opportunities. I rely on the drafting history of the Act, among other sources, to argue, inter alia, that the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Act is exhaustive and that the Commission does not have jurisdiction to deal with complaints alleging discrimination on some grounds. I demonstrate that the Commission has been inconsistent in its definition of discrimination and in dealing with remedies where it has found instances of discrimination, marginalization or denial of opportunities. In some cases, the Commission has blurred the distinction between discrimination and marginalization.

Over the years, Soviet and post-Soviet Russian legal practice has responded to foreign and international economic sanctions reactively. As a rule, Russia has not initiated economic sanctions as an assertive measure against other countries, will apply sanctions authorized by an international organization of which it is a member and for which sanctions it has voted, and retaliates almost reflexively against economic sanctions imposed by others specifically against Russia, seemingly with little regard for the self-imposed consequences of its actions. The Civil Code of the Russian Federation authorizes (Article 1194), as did its predecessor the 1964 Civil Code of the RSFSR, the introduction of retaliatory measures (retorsion) in response to similar measures against Russian citizens and juridical persons in other states.

Given change in the universal developmental agenda and the quality of governance in the last two decades, this paper re-examines the relationship between governance, health expenditure and maternal mortality using panel data for 184 countries from 1996 to 2019. By employing the ‘dynamic panel data regression model’, the study reveals that a one-point improvement in the governance index decreases maternal mortality by 10–21%. We also find that good governance can better translate health expenditure into improved maternal health outcomes through effective allocation and equitable distribution of available resources. These results are robust to alternative instruments, alternative dependent variables (such as infant mortality rate and life expectancy), estimation by different governance dimensions and at the sub-national level. Additional findings using ‘Quantile regression’ estimates show that the quality of governance matters more than the health expenditure in countries with a higher level of maternal mortality. While the ‘Path regression’ analysis exhibits the specific direct and indirect mechanisms through which the causal inference operates between governance and maternal mortality.

From the age of empires to the apartheid regime in South Africa, pass laws have defined the scope of the mobility of subjects by relying on a paper document, the pass. This essay focusses on the pass document to understand the governance of mobility in the Indian ocean. In doing so, it shows how the pass document in its various forms through many centuries in fact, illuminates a form of inter-legal governance through which racialized life came to be constituted via convention and statute.

The use of force in foreign territories has been contained in the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, with the authorisation of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, in ‘cases deemed legitimate by international law’ and where required by international treaties to which Turkey is a party. Yet Turkey's extraterritorial use of force against armed non-state actors lead to the most important question of identifying the circumstances under which the Turkish authorities have long justified military intervention in foreign territories. This article aims to assess whether Turkey's use of force and alleged extraterritorial self-defence contravenes international law. In order to address how Turkey interprets the right to use armed force and the right of self-defence, and to bring clarity to the state's approach to international law on the use of force (jus ad bellum), the article explores Turkey's practice based on the assessment of the Turkish military intervention in Syria, in line with both bilateral security or defence treaties to which Turkey is a party and the use of force in self-defence. The aim is to determine whether Turkey's justifications are compatible with the jus ad bellum criteria.

On September 22, 2022, the Human Rights Committee (HRC) published its views in the communication of Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia, originally submitted in May 2019. Although not the first case before human rights treaty bodies on matters relevant to climate change, it is the first time the Human Rights Committee has found a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in breach of its obligations under the ICCPR for failure to take mitigation and adaptation measures to combat the effects of climate change. In doing so, it made a number of comments on both procedural and substantive issues, which may well pave the way for future action.

This paper connects two trends in contemporary legal scholarship that do not often intersect, namely commentary on the increasingly diverse nature of family law advice and support services, and calls for a refresh of the regulatory environment in which legal services in general are provided. Focusing on the law and landscape in England and Wales, we argue that regulatory challenges are particularly acute in the field of family law, where the range and reach of services provided by non-lawyers is extraordinary. We illustrate how particular aspects of debates over regulating and diversifying legal services apply to the family law context, noting that such concerns as there are have not always been well targeted. Finally, we identify a sub-set of innovative ‘extra-legal’ services that set private family law even further apart from other sub-fields of law when it comes to regulatory and professional challenge. These services clearly sit inside the landscape of family dispute resolution but equally clearly fall outside the boundaries of what is usually considered ‘legal’. This, we suggest, highlights the need for a concerted effort to define the contours of family law and family legal services so that a holistic approach might be taken to understanding and managing the standards and effectiveness of different service and support types.

In an attempt to reassert the relevance of international human rights law in contemporary urban contexts, this article considers the extent to which the provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights lend themselves to fruitful application in African cities, appropriation by African cities and the development of rights to African cities. The article ultimately argues that, despite the rural inclinations of its drafting context, certain textual shortcomings and the existence of major political hurdles to its effective implementation, the African Charter, as interpreted and applied by the African Commission and African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, is well-placed for the regional human rights system’s adaptation to the urban age.