Shielding Humanity

On the contemporary international law scene, there are not many jurists who match the eminence and stature of Abdul G. Koroma, who served as distinguished judge of the International Court of Justice for 18 years. This volume of outstanding essays, Shielding Humanity, written by renowned judges, scholars and practitioners of international law in honour of Judge Koroma, discuss both classical and contemporary topics of significant relevance to the current and future of international law.

A chilling global history of the human shield phenomenon. From Syrian civilians locked in iron cages to veterans joining peaceful indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, from Sri Lanka to Iraq and from Yemen to the United States, human beings have been used as shields for protection, coercion, or deterrence. Over the past decade, human shields have also appeared with increasing frequency in antinuclear struggles, civil and environmental protests, and even computer games. The phenomenon, however, is by no means a new one. Describing the use of human shields in key historical and contemporary moments across the globe, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini demonstrate how the increasing weaponization of human beings has made the position of civilians trapped in theaters of violence more precarious and their lives more expendable. They show how the law facilitates the use of lethal violence against vulnerable people while portraying it as humane, but they also reveal how people can and do use their own vulnerability to resist violence and denounce forms of dehumanization. Ultimately, Human Shields unsettles our common ethical assumptions about violence and the law and urges us to imagine entirely new forms of humane politics.

This book shows how anthropology can provide an innovative perspective on the human movement into space. It examines adaptation to space on timescales of generations, rather than merely months or years, and uses evolutionary adaptation as a guiding theme. Employing the lessons of evolutionary adaptation, Principles of Extraterrestrial Anthropology recommends evolutionarily-sound strategies of space settlement, covering genetics at the organismal and population levels. The author organizes the concept of cultural adaptation to environments beyond Earth according to observed patterns in human adaptation on Earth. He uses original artwork and tables to help convey complex information in a form accessible to undergraduate and graduate students. Though primarily written to engage students interested in space settlement and exploration, who will eventually build a full anthropology of space settlement, Principles of Extraterrestrial Anthropology is engaging to anthropologists across sub-disciplines, as well as scholars interested in the human dimensions of space exploration and settlement. Just as the term exobiology was invented only a few decades ago to shape the field of space life studies, exoanthropology is outlined to assist in the perpetuation of Earth life through human space settlement.

After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of 'new states' in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, Umut Özsu recounts the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century's last major wave of decolonization. Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly's landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, the book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from 'First World' and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the 'Third World' and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.

The current framework for the regulation of human subjects research emerged largely in reaction to the horrors of Nazi human experiment, revealed at the Nuremburg trials, and the Tuskegee syphilis study, conducted by US government researchers from 1932 to 1972. This framework combining elements of paternalism with efforts to preserve individual autonomy, has remained fundamentally unchanged for decades Yet, as this book documents, it has significant flaws-including its potential to burden important research, overprotect some subjects and inadequately protect others, generate inconsistent results, and lag behind developments in how research is conducted. Invigorated by the US government's first steps toward change in over twenty years, Human Subjects Research Regulation brings together the leading thinkers this field from ethics, law, medicine, and public policy to discuss how to make the system better. The result is a collection of novel ideas-some incremental, some radical - for the future of research oversight and human subject protection. After reviewing the history of US research regulations, the contributors consider such topics as risk-based regulation; research involving vulnerable populations (including military personnel, children, and prisoners); the relationships among subjects, investigators, sponsors, and institutional review boards; privacy; especially regarding biospecimens and tissue banking; and the possibility of fundamental paradigm shifts. Book jacket.

This book reflects on how the concept of human dignity, a central and classical concept in public international law, is used to protect the rights of particularly vulnerable sectors of contemporary society.

This volume analyses the prospects and challenges of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights in context. The book is for all readers interested in African institutions and contemporary global challenges of peace, security, human rights, and international law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This collection of essays in honour of Frans Viljoen shines a light on the increasingly important place of compliance in international law. With essays from leading scholars in the field of international human rights law, this festschrift provides compelling analysis of the nature of compliance in the African human rights context, the challenges that affect its place in these legal systems, and the ways in which increased compliance can be achieved. The volume is divided into three parts exploring: theoretical perspectives, thematic perspectives, and institutional perspectives. Each in turn helps to build a picture of theory and practice charting the historic developments of human rights law with several case studies to illustrate. Contributors provide detailed comparison with other national legal systems, such as the Inter-American IACHR and Court, placing these reflections in their global comparative context. The work concludes by considering the ways in which challenges can be overcome to achieve increased compliance with international human rights law in Africa. Compliance with International Human Rights Law in Africa is not only a work to honour the contributions of Frans Viljoen but is also an invaluable resource for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, in the field of international human rights law.