The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is the oldest UN human rights treaty, and for over forty years, the Committee overseeing its implementation, CERD, has had the power to decide individual communications. Despite this long history, a settled evidentiary framework has not materialised yet. The Committee rarely discussed evidence, and when it did, the results could differ markedly: In Dawas and Shava v. Denmark (2012), a case on mob violence, the Committee did not directly engage with the evidence, which led to a resurfacing of evidentiary questions during the follow-up phase, when they could no longer be addressed. Far preferable is the approach adopted in Zapescu v. Moldova (2021), dealing with discriminatory employment practices, where the Committee discussed the standard of proof for procedural violations and the necessary evidence. More elaborations of this kind are needed for a clear evidentiary pathway to emerge.

This introductory chapter illustrates why evidence in the individual communications procedure of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTB) is an issue requiring reflection and clarification. The chapter firstly contextualises this central topic of this book by broadly introducing the UNTBs’ mandates, composition and ways of working, as well as some general features of their individual communications procedures. Indications are given of how this legal, institutional and procedural setting interacts with the handling of evidence by the UNTBs, as well as some of the key questions it raises. The chapter further outlines some of the particular research challenges encountered in tackling the questions at the heart of this book, and how they have been addressed. It then goes on to introduce the four-part structure of the book and its ten chapters, including the final chapter, containing recommendations. Finally, this introduction discusses cross-cutting themes which emerge from the contributions.

The chapter analyzes the conflict between nascent bright green environmentalism and well-established fossil fuel-based developmentalisms, set against a backdrop of global population growth and resource concerns in the 1970s. It addresses the questions of how and why fossil fuel-based developmentalism contributed to the prolonged marginalization of bright green environmentalist ideas about zero-carbon offshore energy generation. Intellectually, architect Kikutake Kiyonori and engineer John P. Craven faced the spatial constraints inherent in island contexts, in this case Hawai’i and Japan. They focused on employing technology to decouple socio-economic development from ecosystem service and resource overexploitation to enable continuous industrial growth. Applying an oceanic-vertical perspective to island ecosystems and their littoral marine regions gives insights in some of the origins of zero-carbon energy technologies like offshore wind, floating solar photovoltaics, and floating nuclear plants. US and Japanese governmental support for already feasible offshore oil and gas exploitation and terrestrial energy generation nevertheless marginalized these ideas for decades.

This chapter reviews the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s (WGAD) approach to issues of evidence and burdens of proof. It aims to provide a useful point of comparison with the UNTBs’ evidentiary procedures. The WGAD has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to evidence, providing strong incentives for other decision-making bodies to take up its conclusions and procedures. In this chapter, the following arguments are substantiated: first, that the Working Group’s increasingly formalised and standardised approach to evidence reflects the maturing of the Working Group and its entrenchment in the ecosystem of human rights bodies; second, that its nuanced evidentiary approach can serve to enhance its credibility with states and claimants, in order to increase compliance rates; and third, its detailed approaches to evidentiary standards and challenges could provide precedents for UNTBs with individual claims mandates to follow a similar approach.

This chapter focuses on the connections between sea surfaces, the atmosphere, and outer space. Its upward-oriented perspective to oceanic history traces these connections from early 20th-century visions like the failed idea of floating airports (seadromes), whose horizontal runways were impractical in aquatic conditions, to later orientation changes. Artificial islands served horizontal helicopter take-off and landing, or offshore rocket launches. The chapter argues that these energy-intensive built environments, enabled by the Age of Oil, spatially and sensually marked the emergence of the oceanic Anthropocene. Platform illumination for helicopters operations, rocket launches, and the flares of oil platforms whose radiation is visible from outer space, created massive “light islands” in marine regions, manifesting carbon emissions. Simultaneously, the light island effect turned into a form of placemaking. Light islands became regular offshore destinations and departure points for other vehicles, creating new oceanic equivalents to terrestrial ports, airports, and spaceports. They also indicated the extension of the human habitat to sea surfaces.

The chapter investigates the conflict between emerging “schools” of environmental thought in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on Buckminster Fuller’s techno-optimist, libertarian environmentalism and its influence on today’s floating city concepts, like the UN-backed project in Busan. It addresses the questions of why and how Buckminster Fuller’s bright green environmentalism—blending ecological design with market-driven innovation—clashed with the technocritical, governmental reform-oriented dark green environmentalism of US officials and public intellectuals. Analyzing three cases, the chapter argues that these conflicts with dark green environmentalists demonstrated a lack of social acceptance for floating urban structures in US society due to Fuller’s libertarian views, aesthetic issues, pollution concerns, and limited governmental control over oceanic space. The chapter also highlights the lasting impact of Fuller’s ideas through the Whole Earth network and countercultural movements. The chapter contends that governmental and intergovernmental support for floating settlement ideas has grown since the 2010s, shaped by reemerging bright green environmentalist ideas.

The chapter explores multi-species interactions between humans and marine life. Mariculture (marine organism farming) has experienced a gigantic global production increase since the mid-twentieth century. The chapter addresses the questions of why and how mariculture-related coevolution between humans and marine species has aimed to reorient coastal marine food webs towards human consumption. The argument of the chapter is that the construction of floating mariculture structures—or new dual-habitat structures for marine species and humans—facilitated human access to submerged habitats, enabling large biomass concentration. The new plastic structures of the Age of Oil were designed to vertically integrate two habitats, each located on one side of the sea surface. They intentionally simplified and localized the previously complex interactions within marine ecosystems. The process of Japanese mariculture pioneers designing these new dual-habitat structures after WWII was also encouraged and inhibited by multiple social and environmental problems, including food security, land reclamation destroying nursery grounds, petrochemical pollution, overfertilization, and coastal overfishing.

The concept of ‘stereotypes’ refers to generalisations that are made about the behaviour adopted and/or the characteristics possessed by the members of a particular group. Involving presumptions about human actions and attributes, a stereotype provides ready-made narratives as to how and why some events unfold as they do. Thus, stereotypes, especially when they operate ‘undetected’, hamper an objective analysis of the factual situation. In the courtroom, they tend to have a polluting effect on the assessment of evidence, leading to relevant pieces of evidence being ignored, irrelevant circumstances being given weight, and higher standards of proof being imposed than would have been the case in their absence. This chapter focuses on the approach of the CEDAW Committee in examining the impact of gender stereotypes on the evaluation of evidence performed by domestic courts. It provides an in-depth analysis of the views adopted by the Committee in selected individual communications.

Over time, United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) have developed an admissibility requirement that individuals’ allegations be ‘sufficiently substantiated’ or ‘not manifestly unfounded’. Explanations of these terms have varied, but States, treaty body members and scholars have equated them with a prima facie threshold. Among international tribunals, prima facie is commonly understood to require the complainant to make a plausible claim. However, review of UNTB decisions indicates that application of this requirement clashes with the accepted meaning of prima facie by: (1) often requiring the complainant to present convincing allegations; (2) taking into account – or giving greater weight to – the state’s arguments and evidence at the admissibility stage; and 3) sometimes requiring the complainant to pre-emptively overcome the state’s possible defences. This chapter seeks to identify relevant trends in order to both better understand current UNTB practice and illuminate paths to greater consistency and clarity in admissibility determinations.

Before accessing the UN treaty bodies’ individual communications procedure, a complainant must have exhausted domestic remedies. This admissibility rule exists for good reasons, but it has limits. In particular, exemptions must be recognised in respect to domestic remedies which lack effectiveness, including accessibility. Regrettably, UNTBs are currently reverting to a formalistic and mechanical application of this admissibility rule. What justice requires, however, is the opposite: an expansive consideration of the plethora of barriers that prevent access to domestic justice, as well as a reflection about how each barrier can realistically be evidenced by a complainant. This can be achieved, this chapter argues, through an individual-centred, contextual approach, which achieves the aim of preventing the state from escaping international scrutiny, while highlighting the crucial role domestic justice should play in remedying human rights wrongs.

The chapter introduces the concept of Earth’s amphibious transformation—the technological and socio-political extension of the human habitat onto sea surfaces since the mid-20th century. It frames this transformation as a key driver of the oceanic Anthropocene, characterized by intensified vertical interactions with spatial layers above and below the sea surface, reaching from fossil fuels beneath the seabed to outer space. Through oil platforms, wind turbines, mariculture cages, offshore rocket launches, and many other types of artificial islands, marine regions have become central to developmentalist agendas and environmental degradation concerns. The chapter establishes two interrelated analytical perspectives: an oceanic-vertical one that reveals new artificial islands’ upward and downward-oriented access to spatial layers, and a terraqueous-horizontal one connecting these artificial islands to coastlines. Ultimately, reorienting our gaze toward the ocean, the chapter proposes a paradigm shift in recognizing the central role of many marine regions in the Anthropocene, emphasizing artificial islands as both symptom and agent of anthropogenic transformations of planetary scale.