This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the international legal framework governing Indigenous peoples’ rights, focusing on the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 No. 169 (ILO 169) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples (UNDRIP). It explores the fundamental principle of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) within these instruments and its crucial role in sustainable development. Examining ILO 169, the chapter discusses guidelines related to self-determination, land rights, cultural preservation, and state obligations to cooperate with Indigenous peoples, specifically in the context of Canada’s Indigenous communities. Analysing the UNDRIP, it explores guidelines concerning self-determination, land rights, and states’ duty to obtain FPIC. Emphasizing the significance of consent as a cornerstone of Indigenous rights and sustainable development, the chapter concludes by acknowledging the complexities involved in its practical application. By delving into substantive and procedural aspects of international law, this chapter establishes an understanding of international legal norms in promoting Indigenous rights and facilitating sustainable development.

War and peace underwent radical changes in early modern Europe. Warfare itself, along with diplomacy and peace-making, changed dramatically during this period, but so too did the discussion of war and peace within the discursive domain of moral and juridical-political thought. Fundamental shifts in the early modern discussion of rights of war and peace occurred because previous assumptions were radically challenged by concrete events and experiences (such as the Reformation or the discoveries and occupation of new continents by Europeans). This in turn led to new ways of moral and political thinking which sought to find answers to these new challenges.

The concept of human security was first introduced formally in the 1994 UNDP Report and signaled a significant shift of focus from state security to the security of individual human beings and human communities. Unlike the abstract and theoretical debates within academia around that time about deepening and widening the definition of security, the human security approach was born from within the policy world and was policy-oriented. In the thirty years since its introduction, human security has undergone a series of reformulations, come under serious criticism, and inspired significant policy initiatives and numerous debates. Nevertheless, it remains the most formidable contender against traditional state-centered thinking around national and international security. In this chapter, we will look at the emergence and evolution of the human security approach, its core components, and its relationship with other important notions such as human development and responsibility to protect.

The issue of international migration raises distinctive normative challenges for liberal democratic states, which regard certain rights and liberties as fundamental and have institutionalized them through constitutions. Most migrants want little more than to make better lives for themselves. If people wish to migrate across borders, why shouldn’t they be able to? States exercise power over borders, but what, if anything, justifies this power? If states are justified in excluding some and accepting others, what should be their criteria of selection? This chapter provides an overview of the leading normative positions on migration. It considers two main positions: arguments for open borders and arguments for state sovereignty. It then makes the case for a middle-ground position of qualified state sovereignty, “controlled borders and open doors.” The final section discusses two challenges to liberal constitutionalism posed by migration: what is owed to refugees outside a state’s borders and unauthorized migrants inside a state’s borders.

As increasingly recognized, medieval and early modern corporations were influential models for the emerging European state. E E xisting scholarship documents the influence of the corporation’s constitutionalism on the constitutionalism of the state. T T his article documents the separate influence of the corporation in imparting “juridical personhood” to the state – —the capacity to own and contract as an individual. T T his is a feature of all modern states, regardless of constitutional order, that vastly augments their power and makes possible the current international state system. C C ontrary to reigning assumptions, it did not automatically follow from borrowing the corporation’s constitutional structure, but was a distinct historical development. J J uridical personhood passed from the (corporate) bishopric to the kingdoms of Europe via the medieval bishop–~king analogy. T T he chapter examines this history in England and the Continent, then relates how the American founders resolved the longstanding tension between state sovereignty and state juridicality, i.e.that is, that the state is sovereign yet is under the rule of law and, for example, bound by its contracts. T T he chapter also clears up some modern conceptual confusions regarding peoples, states, and governments.

Chapter Five charts human dignity in its second constitutive stage, characterized by the rise of international human rights law. Its first expressions in the 1920s (which echoed developments in connection with slave trade and slavery in the nineteenth century) and later in 1944 (with the Philadelphia Declaration), must be considered in the light of the decisive adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, in 1948, and the adoption of the Convention against Genocide later that year. But it is difficult to consider these entry points, however important, as sufficient for the consolidation of human dignity in the form of human ‘rights’. In earnest, the consolidation process was not completed until the adoption of the two human rights Covenants in 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

This introduction states the basic thesis underpinning the entire book: over a period of two centuries, human dignity moved from the fringes to the centre of the international legal system. In a system shaped by another embodiment of dignity, sovereign dignity, human dignity came to nuance, then influence and, ultimately, fundamentally transform the very architecture of international law. The introduction summarizes the long and sinuous road followed by human dignity as a value and then as a norm. It then describes the analytical angle adopted in the book, and the overall organization of the demonstration.

Chapter Six explores the third and last constitutive stage of human dignity in international criminal law. Human dignity’s first manifestations coincide with the adoption and entry into force of the Hague Law (1899 and 1907) and the largely symbolic, in retrospect, Article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, under which the German Kaiser was to be brought to justice, although that did not happen. In 1945, with the Nuremberg Statute, human dignity is unequivocally enshrined in legal form, both in the definition of international crimes, including ‘against humanity’, and in the necessary corollary of an international prosecution of such crimes. The institutional and legal criminal framework of the 1990s, however, provides a more solid basis for the consolidation of human dignity through international criminal law, vesting it with an actionable nature. Aside from the expansion of conflict-specific international tribunals, the conclusion in 1998 of the Rome Statute establishing a general International Criminal Court, defining both crimes and institutional processes for the prosecution, consolidates the incremental approach prevailing until them in international criminal law.

Chapter Two focuses on the concept of dignity. It characterizes the two main competing conceptions subsequently analysed in the book, sovereign and human dignity. It begins by exploring the intellectual origins of the concept of dignity – with its religious and philosophical strands. Within human dignity, particular emphasis is laid on the Christian and Kantian (secularised) conceptions of human dignity due to their distinctive historical influence on the shaping of international law. On this basis, the first component of the analytical framework is built, namely the conceptual categories of dignity that will, subsequently, be used to explore how dignity has found expression in international law.

Chapter One is devoted to the clarification of the methodological structure. It characterizes the analytical framework developed to study the place of human dignity in international law introducing its four main components: (i) the definition of the concept of dignity and of the main analytical distinctions used in the study; (ii) the characterization of the processes of progressive recognition of human dignity in international law, which are referred to in this study as ‘constitutive stages’; (iii) an analytical cartography of different legal instruments, understood as specific ways of formulating a norm (principles, rights, obligations, crimes), on which the analysis of the legal expression of human dignity in international law is subsequently conducted; and (iv) the main overall narrative and argument regarding the place of human dignity in international law developed in the study.

In the concluding Chapter Seven, the study brings together the analysis conducted in previous chapters in order to extract their combined meaning. This book shows that the concept of human dignity made its first appearance in legal history in a religious form and was later transformed into a secularized concept, as a reaction to and limit upon the classical conception of sovereign dignity, enshrined in State sovereignty. This origin is at the root of and is still manifested in the various legal formulations of human dignity in different areas of law. To explain human dignity, to seek its religious roots, to see its evolution and its many legal manifestations, ultimately demonstrates that international law was historically shaped, despite the multi-cultural context in which it unfolded, by a secularization process akin to that of many domestic legal systems. Chapter Seven adopts this macro view and discusses the secularization argument in the light of the transformative function of human dignity in international law.

When states are involved in a dispute in the international sphere, they can take different paths to resolve it in a peaceful way. Among other things, they can resort to arbitration or they can send the case to an international court. Arbitration played an important part in the early stages of international law, before permanent courts were created in the twentieth century. International adjudication, however, retains its arbitral foundation, since the consent of the contending states is always necessary for a court to have jurisdiction to settle a dispute. The chapter criticizes the consent theory and the conception of state sovereignty that has impeded the formation of courts endowed with compulsory jurisdiction. The international legal order is constitutionally defective when it comes to its adjudicative structures.

The attempt to make abuse of right a part of international law was championed by Politis and Lauterpacht in the wake of the horrors of World War I. Their motivation was essentially idealistic, radical, and subversive; they wanted the concept to be used as a tool to overcome the stubborn refusal of states to yield sovereignty.