Democracies And International Law

Contrasts democratic and authoritarian approaches to international law, explaining how their interaction will affect the world in the future.

PART V CRITICAL APPROACHES.

Professor Crawford's inaugural lecture as Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge addresses a number of facets of the relationship between international law and democratic principles. In particular he examines the ways in which international law may or may not underwrite those principles, a subject which has increased greatly in significance as governments and international organisations search for a 'New World Order' in the post Cold War world.

At the end of the Cold War, international law scholars engaged in furious debate over whether principles of democratic legitimacy had entered international law. Many argued that a 'democratic entitlement' was emerging. Others were skeptical that international practice in democracy promotion was either consistent or sufficiently widespread and many found the idea of democratic entitlement dangerous. Those debates, while ongoing, have not been comprehensively revisited in almost twenty years. Together with an original introduction, this volume collects the leading scholarship of the past two decades on these and other questions. It focuses particular attention on the normative consequences of the recent 'democratic recession' in many regions of the world.

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With the rise of direct-democratic instruments, the relationship between popular sovereignty and the rule of law is set to become one of the defining political issues of our time. This important and timely book provides an in-depth analysis of the limits imposed on referendums and citizens’ initiatives, as well as of systems of reviewing compliance with these limits, in 11 European states.

Our world is in urgent need of global answers on subjects such as Big Data, climate change, and the interconnected global economy. This volume tackles those issues and more, with the goal of advancing more democratic modes of decision-making.

This book explores the right to democracy in international law and contemporary democratic theory, asking whether international law encompasses a substantive or procedural understanding of the notion. The book considers whether there can be considered to be a basis for the right to democracy in international customary law through identification of the relevant State practice and opinio juris, as well as through an evaluation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and whether the relevant provisions might be interpreted as forming customary law. The book then goes on to explore the relevant provisions in international treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights before looking at the role of regional organizations and human rights regimes including the European Court of Human Rights and the Arab human rights regime. Khalifa A. Alfadhel draws on the work of John Rawls in order to put forward a theoretical basis for the right to democracy.