This chapter begins by introducing the resolution of employment-related disputes at international organizations – by examining the first ever formal example of this, involving an international civil servant employed by the League of Nations. Second, the general legal principles of reviewing employment-related disputes at international organizations are identified, namely: (1) Only adverse administrative decisions may be contested; (2) Deference is owed discretionary authority; and (3) Arbitrariness invalidates authority. Third, three general legal principles of evidence utilized by international administrative tribunals are considered, namely: (1) Claimants must establish arbitrariness; (2) Unreasoned administrative decisions are evidently arbitrary; and (3) Administrative decisions cannot be based upon withheld evidence. Fourth, and in conclusion, the legal basis of employment-related dispute resolution at international organizations is restated.

Chapter 3 asks what is counted and who comes to count in the enactment of epidemiological knowledge. It explores the presence and absence of injury in statistics, blood, chromosomes, memory, and radiation records, and asks how those exposed to toxic environmental harm experience and evaluate epidemiological accounts of their health. It also examines how scientists who use epidemiological reasoning in toxic exposure studies understand and enact the ethics of their practice. It charts how test veterans grappled with the troubling evidentiary burdens of exposure upon which claim-making depends. In attempting to contest accounts of ‘safe’ radiation exposure embedded within government records, test veterans condemned some epidemiological studies and praised others. ‘Good’ numbers were emergent if they were temporally responsive, appropriately connected and detached from study subjects, separable from the state’s influence, epistemically humble, future focused, and contextualized within the practices of their production. ‘Bad’ numbers, by contrast, were those that perpetuated and exacerbated the injuries they denied.

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.

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.

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.

Human rights violations often form part of a pattern or practice of violations, rather than being purely isolated incidents. This context is not consistently taken into account by UNTBs during individual case consideration, however. This chapter explores several ways in which awareness of human rights violations’ embeddedness in wider contexts of violations should inform UNTB practice. In particular, the chapter considers the impact, or potential impact, of patterns and practices of violations on the manner in which UNTBs receive information, and the sorts of sources they recognize in their decisions; on UNTBs approaches to the exhaustion of domestic remedies and the burden of proof; on case structuring; and on findings, recommendations and follow-up procedures. The chapter ends by observing that UNTBs are not only receivers but also key disseminators of information, and suggests ways in which their findings as to the patterns and practices of violations may be more effectively disseminated.

This chapter addresses evidence-related recommendations for the consideration of the UN treaty bodies. Written by three practitioners from the civil society sector, with direct experience of the individual communication procedure before the UNTBs, it also benefited from input from all the contributors to the volume, which it concludes. Part I offers normative reflections. It deals with legal questions, including: What should the applicable standard be when determining human rights claims? How should this standard vary according to the type of claim and the stage of the proceedings? In what circumstances and under which conditions should the burden of proof be shifted from the complainant to the respondent state? Part II deals with organisational, and thus more mundane issues, but it highlights how proper identification and communication of the applicable evidentiary concepts and norms are essential to a transparent, accessible and fair system, therefore necessitating proper resourcing.

This chapter examines what is considered a fact in individual communications processed by the Human Rights Committee (HRC), recognized as the UN’s most authoritative human rights monitoring body. Despite its significance, little is known about the HRC’s handling of individual complaints against states that have signed the optional protocol. Through the case studies of Sanila-Aikio v. Finland (2018) and Näkkäläjärvi et al. v. Finland (2018), which address the inclusion of new voters on the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, the chapter scrutinizes the Committee’s evidentiary practices. Notably, the Finnish Supreme Administrative Court added ninety-three persons to the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll, while an unreferenced study suggested over half a million could be eligible. The Committee included this study without verifying its reliability. The chapter explores how evidence is translated and distanced from Committee members, questioning how material veracity is determined. It concludes by reflecting on how the HRC’s evidentiary regime shapes and supports certain narratives while marginalizing others.

This chapter addresses the ethical and legal dimensions of malleable persuasions, focusing on William Godwin’s and William Wordsworth’s responses to the rise of probabilism, specifically the new allowance in English law courts for circumstantial evidence, or narratives that connected causes to effects in plausible ways. As such evidence in the 1790s became subject to abuse, Godwin and Wordsworth came to share a concern with how plausibility might instead serve the cause of justice. In Things as They Are, Godwin draws on Cicero to show how the use of another’s words as evidence can either intensify persuasion or call it into question, thus breaking with his insistence on unvarnished truth and rationality in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Wordsworth in The Borderers explores the ambivalences of plausibility in the thirteenth-century borderland between England and Scotland, where individual judgment carried the weight of legal conviction. Wordsworth’s imagination of a miscarriage of justice comes to share with Godwin’s novel a sense of the value of eschewing rigid convictions when grounds are wanting, even as it attests to their powerful appeal.

Capability is the informational focus of the theory of justice developed by Sen. This means that, according to this theory, people’s relative advantages and disadvantages should be assessed in terms of their capability. I present and discuss some of the investigational requirements that this entails. A key challenge here is that a capability relates not only to what people actually end up being and doing that is of value to them (achieved functionings) but also to what they are in fact able to do, irrespective of whether they choose to realise such an opportunity. This seems to produce a paradox in Sen’s writings – capability assessment being quite complex on the one hand but surprisingly simple on the other. Drawing on what Sen has to say on the relationship between capability and human rights, I offer a possible explanation for the apparent paradox. Two case studies are given, showing some methods that may be used to assess capability and how the validity and relevance of the resulting evidence can be assessed. I conclude by suggesting that Sen’s capability approach can be considered a realist and non-ideal theory of justice and that specific approaches to capability assessment should be in line with this.

Three questions have usually been asked about the French Revolution: why did it happen?; why was it so violent? and what was its legacy? At first sight all three questions seem to beg other, more conceptually ambitious questions, whether about causation, violence or legacies. The aim of this short book is to answer both sets of questions by bringing together events with ideas. Combining the two actually helps to make the answers to the second, more conceptually oriented set of questions more historically and analytically focussed. It does so because the French Revolution owes much of its complexity to ideas and, more particularly, to the range and multiplicity of appearances and temporalities that ideas can lend to events. Complexity, not only in France and not only at the time of the French Revolution, is more than an effect of large numbers of people living in different circumstances with different, sometimes antagonistic, interests. It is also an effect of the range of occasionally compelling, but occasionally competing, emotional responses, moral evaluations and causal assessments made by, or of, people living in similar circumstances with similar, overlapping or complementary interests.

This chapter posits that risk assessment necessary as a condition precedent to settlement requires evidentiary transparency as to all stakeholders, including the arbitral tribunal. Moreover, this chapter discusses and asserts that settlement and mediation techniques are futile absent a thorough understanding of the underlying evidence, and objective procedural methodologies governing admissibility, relevance, materiality, and weight of the evidence. Thus, the chapter analyzes features and possible amendments to the rules of the leading ICA institutional administrative bodies that would enhance the predictive value of determinations based on existing evidence. Consequently, the evidential framework of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC), the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), the International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), and the German Arbitration Institute (DIS) rules are analyzed.

This chapter concerns the nature and role of the International Court of Justice. It begins by describing the organisation of the Court and the procedure for the appointment of the judges, then passes to the critical question of the jurisdiction of the Court. This is divided into interstate contentious jurisdiction and advisory jurisdiction. The former is based on consent, whether express or based upon a pre-existing obligation (whether a treaty or a declaration by the relevant states as deposited with the Court) as reflected in the Statute of the Court and its Rules. The sources of law, judicial propriety and legal interest are then considered, followed by an analysis of the question of evidence. The chapter turns to the indication of provisional measures, counterclaims and intervention by third parties. The question of remedies is then addressed, before the chapter turns to the advisory jurisdiction of the Court, where requested by the UN and its organs. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of the Court and the problem of the proliferation of courts and tribunals.

This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

Assembling and evaluating warrant for your claims involves giving reasons why these claims might be true or false. Such reasons may be understood as consisting of conjunctions of factual and relevance claims which may be adduced in favour of the claims in question. These claims themselves may in turn be warranted by further such conjunctions, and so on through indefinite higher ‘levels’ of evidence. We show how to structure relevant claims into an evidence role-map. We set out how to apply this to indirect local evidence, referencing a situation-specific causal equation model of each causal step. By reference to our pluralistic account of causation, we identify eight categories of evidence for each step. We introduce a notation for this approach and illustrate it using the Barbados sugar-sweetened beverage tax example, describing its use in post-hoc evaluation and ex ante prediction.