Considerations of legal pluralism and human rights do not go readily hand in hand – on the face of it they appear to have different core concerns and motivations, with the former being conceptual in character while the latter is normative (Provost & Sheppard 2012: 1). This panel challenges this alleged incompatibility, and proceeds on...
Counter-terrorism, IHL and the right to rebel
In my paper, I discuss the overlap of the legal regimes of anti-terrorism law and international humanitarian law (IHL). Increasingly, IHL gives way to anti-terrorism law, affecting the right to oppose an oppressive regime. Since 9/11 counter-terrorism policies have generated a growing body of legal cooperation regimes, at the international and regional level. Increasingly, domestic...
Legal Pluralism: Challenging ‘Default Settings‘ in IHR
This paper argues employs the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case of the Bakassi Peninsula (2002) as a lens through which to consider fertile intersections of legal pluralism and human rights, with a focus on two particular issues. First, the challenge of addressing contemporary border disputes that can trace their origins to colonialisation, and; second,...
Pluralising the Rule of Law
Armed opposition groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan and the FARC in Colombia often establish their own ‘courts‘ in territory they control. Can such rebel courts be seen as embodiments of the rule of law, or does the rule or law‘s association with state sovereignty preclude this? Drawing on fieldwork on the judicial practice of...
Subsidiarity and Interpretive Pluralism in International Human Rights Law
The salience of principles & practices of subsidiarity in IHRL is linked to value pluralism & communal self-determination. I argue that an analysis of the variations in the practice of subsidiarity by different IHRL mechanisms is a useful proxy to elucidate the idea of legitimate interpretive pluralism in IHRL, defined as a plurality of incompatible,...