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This introductory chapter sets the scene for the book, explaining its tripartite structure and identifying the key questions addressed. The chapter offers a brief overview of European consensus as an interpretative technique, discusses the inherent limitations in the attempts to conceptualise it and normatively evaluate it, and provides some insights into the direction of travel that further study of European consensus may take.
Should prisoners have voting rights? Should terminally ill patients have a right to assisted suicide? Should same-sex couples have a right to marry and adopt? The book examines how such questions can be resolved within the framework of the European Convention of Human Rights. 'European consensus' is a tool of interpretation used by the European Court of Human Rights as a means to identify evolution in the laws and practices of national legal systems when addressing morally sensitive or politically controversial human rights questions. If European consensus exists, the Court can establish new human rights standards that will be binding across European states. The chapters of the book are structured around three themes: a) conceptualisation of European consensus, its modus operandi and its effects; b) critical evaluation of its legitimacy and of its outputs; c) comparison with similar methods of judicial interpretation in other legal systems.
The article argues that, by bringing a number of changes of systemic proportions in the order of international law, the internationalization of national constitutional human rights law has led to the ‘constitutionalization’ of international law. To build that argument, the paper first critically assesses the constitutionalization narrative. To that end it explains the reasons for its agnostic stance vis-à-vis the constitutionalization narrative and highlights the fact that international law has always contained some general, “constitutional” features that are particular to its systemic physiognomy. The article then explains how human rights law, as a special branch of international law, expands beyond the so-called humanization of international law narrative, acting as an important ingredient in a number of other narratives such as the constitutionalization of international law and the ones that are comparable to it, like legal pluralism and fragmentation. As to the systemic changes the internationalization of human rights has brought to the order of public international law, the examples given are those of collective enforcement at the decentralized level for the protection of common interests/values, sui generis normative hierarchy beyond jus cogens and the idea of the responsibility of states to act in a protective manner linked with the principle of due diligence and the so-called positive effect that human rights develop.
The history of international law is replete with concepts that have generated change: individual criminal responsibility, common heritage of mankind and sustainable development to name but a few. These are concepts that have influenced the scope, structure and purpose of international law. This book explores the extent to which Responsibility to Protect (R2P) possesses the same transformative potential, showing how R2P shifts our understanding of both the potential and practice of international law. Responsibility to Protect is both an ambitious and an ambiguous concept in international law. Ambiguity creates space for debate and the potential for legal development, but it may also generate misunderstanding, false expectations and uncertainty. Despite its ambiguity, R2P has quickly found a place within international legal texts. At the same time its ambiguity -or rather the tensions the concept generates - has also helped generate an enormous range of scholarship. This collection of essays presents a more fundamental critical evaluation of R2P, exploring how it interacts with existing concepts and values, and how this influences normative developments within international law. In particular, the essays explore the influence of R2P upon sovereignty as responsibility, the continued advance of positive human rights obligations and the safeguarding of international community interests. These themes are explored in a range of essays written by new and established scholars. The essays explore the moral and political foundations of R2P, the expansion of R2P to non-state actors, and the interaction between R2P and certain branches of international law, such as use of force, responsibility as liability, humanitarian law and international criminal law. With contributions by: Richard A. Barnes, Vassilis P. Tzevelekos, Henry Jones, Markus P. Beham, Ralph R.A. Janik, Tony Ward, Nabil Hajjami, John Heieck, Julia Schmidt, Nigel D. White, Antal Berkes, Jennifer Dee Halbert, Hitoshi Nasu, Humberto Cantú Rivera, Kasey L. McCall-Smith, Lucas Lixinski, Sophie Rondeau, Raphaël van Steenberghe, David Turns, Vito Todeschini, Barbara Sonczyk, Lindsay Moir, Ludovica Poli, Tomoko Yamashita, Lenneke Sprik, Elena Katselli and Nicholas Tsagourias.