This chapter explores the synergies, limitations, and challenges of addressing statelessness through human rights and development approaches, using the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka as a case study. In addressing the legacy of statelessness, both the human rights and development frameworks must be drawn on and used simultaneously. However, a frameworks approach alone falls short in addressing statelessness, given the political, economic and societal factors that perpetuate discrimination. Instead, as the case of the Hill Country Tamils demonstrates, both human rights and development approaches must be underpinned by a deeper commitment to pursuing equality and combatting discrimination at large. Despite claims of success, the legacy of statelessness in Sri Lanka still lingers. The Hill Country Tamils are still among the ‘furthest behind’ in Sri Lanka and continue to experience severe discrimination well after securing formal citizenship. The community’s prolonged statelessness has led to long-term deterioration in human rights conditions, such that a grant of formal citizenship alone is inadequate to address structural drivers of disadvantage that the community continues to endure.

The classification of natural spaces and cultural practices as ‘heritage’ profoundly alters their form and function. Individuals and communities responsible for maintaining the space or practice are often subjected to the dictates of governments, non-governmental institutions and tourists’ tastes, whilst the symbols of heritage themselves are projected as emblematic of how the state wishes itself to be perceived. The condition of statelessness magnifies the vulnerability of communities to these processes of heritagization, with the state co-opting cultural attributes into icons of heritage without any prospect of redress and exacerbating the invisibility and relative lack of agency that characterize many stateless communities. This chapter explores these issues in the context of mobile maritime communities that are stateless or at risk of statelessness in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar have introduced restrictions on everyday livelihood practices through the imposition of marine protected areas and transformed other aspects of these communities’ lives, such as their houseboats, into objects of touristic consumption under the aegis of natural, cultural and intangible ‘heritage’ that serve to benefit the state yet further degrade the human rights of individuals in the affected communities.

The European Union adopted region-wide binding legal norms and a multifaceted legal approach to human trafficking. This chapter explains that the EU has competence (legal authority or jurisdiction) over human trafficking because trafficking is seen as a crime that moves across borders. By contrast, the EU needs another source of competence to tackle forced labour in supply chains. These different sources of competence over different drivers of unfree labour resulted in a proliferation of gendered governance strategies. Pushed by the Council of Europe’s Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, the EU incorporated the rights of trafficking victims. The chapter illustrates how victim’s rights were subsumed under the EU’s primary goal of hardening Member States’ borders against undesirable outsiders, exemplified by migrant sex workers. The EU also promoted a corporate sustainability due-diligence directive and a product ban targeting unfree labour in supply chains, thereby extending EU values beyond Member States’ borders.

This chapter examines how the Council of Europe sought to promote the rule of law in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s ambition to construct a “common European home,” to be pursued in concert with European states and international organizations, was advanced by Russian president Boris Yeltsin and, at least initially, by his successor as president, Vladimir Putin. But after roughly a decade of concrete reforms, that effort foundered, reversed, and then collapsed. Russia descended again into authoritarianism and, shortly after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe. Thus, this story now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This chapter explores that story and how the dynamics of Russia’s pursuit and rocky course of membership in the Council of Europe affected both the Russian state and the international organization that sought to admit it to membership.

International organizations have issued recommendations and prescriptions on constitution-making and reform, especially since 1989. However, such constitution-shaping activities by European and universal organizations, notably the UN, have for the most part not led to a better operation of the rule of law on the ground. Besides these problems of effectiveness, normative concerns against constitutional assistance and advice by international organizations have been raised. It is suggested that, in order to become more legitimate (which might then also improve effectiveness), constitution-shaping by international organizations needs to absorb postcolonial concerns. This includes respect for local rule-of-law cultures flowing from non-European constitutional thought and the inclusion of a much deeper social agenda with a global ambition. Thus revamped, international organizations’ constitution-shaping role could be reinvigorated so as to sustain the rule of law on the domestic level, thereby contributing to transnational ordering and global constitutionalism.

Social justice, human rights, and equality are norms based on the Holy Qur’an’s perspective. They are profoundly rooted in Islam’s teachings and promote the construction of a strong, interdependent, and healthy community. It emphasizes practicing them not only on Muslims but on every human being regardless of their religion or beliefs. The superiority of any individual is defined strictly on their piety and righteousness and not on skin color, race, biological sex, nationality, or social position. Allah has required justice to be an essential part of the behavior of every Muslim covering all aspects of life as well as all people.

This chapter challenges the idea that the classical Roman jurists were “pioneers of human rights.” The jurists had no doubts about the legitimacy of the hunt for human prey in war. Quite the contrary: they thought of the capture and enslavement of enemies as a paradigm of just acquisition. It is crucial that we come to terms with this ancient belief system: We must recognize that the classical jurists did not see any need for justification for slavery beyond the fact of victory in battle or in the sack of cities. The use of theories like Aristotelean natural slavery or the teaching that slavery arose out of the consent of the victim date only to the early modern period. The chapter closes by discussing how the jurists used the model of the hunt for human and animal prey as the basis for analogical reasoning.

States’ obligations towards migrants and asylum seekers arise from international refugee law and human rights law. For those obligations, physical proximity between the person seeking protection and the state regularly matters: Refugee law prohibits the refoulement of persons, yet with visa restrictions and the safe third country concept, this binds foremost states neighboring the refugee’s country of origin. Human rights law obliges states only from the moment they exercise effective control over persons, which is interpreted mostly as physical control. The importance of physical proximity for states’ obligations towards persons seeking protection can seem in contrast to the universalism that underlies human rights and refugee law. The contribution explores the role of physical proximity in law and arguments about its legitimacy. It proposes viewing proximity as one possible concrete link that assigns universalist obligations to particular states. While such a concrete link is necessary in a world of territorial political communities and limited freedom of movement, proximity should not remain the only factor for assigning responsibility. For a viable system of protection, states must base their responsibility on a variety of concrete links, considering also factors such as causation and refugees’ choices.

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

Chapter 9 analyses the extent to which lawmakers have taken the peculiarities of e-evidence into account and highlights flaws in the resulting legal regime. It addresses the Belgian preservation of general data retention and the possibility to use unlawfully retained and/or accessed data. Next, it delves into the wide spectrum of duties for (internet) service providers to cooperate in criminal proceedings. It discusses the broad interpretation of the territorial scope of the Yahoo! and Skype case law from Belgian courts and its codification in subsequent legislation, including how voluntary cooperation with law enforcement remains important in practice. It briefly examines the legal framework for cross-border cooperation, often perceived as ineffective and needlessly time-consuming. Lastly, it sheds light on the potential impact of the EU e-Evidence Regulation, concluding that, under domestic legislation, a coherent, completely fundamental-rights-proof legal framework is still lacking. It shows Belgium’s support for a pan-EU regime and better international cooperation, provided its law enforcement can maintain the possibility of direct cooperation in a sufficiently effective way.

This chapter develops a critique of the “safe third country” concept, its legality, and its implications for understanding the nature and purpose of international refugee law. It does so, in part, on a different plane of analysis than has predominated the literature thus far. While most scholars have criticized the safe third country concept as undermining individual rights protection, this author argues that it is implicated in a preceding and more foundational harm: It deforms the possibility of democratic responsibility. We would do well to see the violations of refugee rights in question as more than privatized harms inflicted on an individual. They are relational and structural wrongs that concern the objective relationships guaranteed by domestic constitutional and administrative law. Perceiving this harm illuminates not only how the safe third country concept has corrupted international refugee law, but also why international human rights should be understood, more broadly, to protect the political agency of democratic citizens. This conclusion yields an important analytic shift, in which we see commitments to international human rights and humanitarian ideals to align, constructively and in new form, with the public integrity of democratic states.

This chapter explores arguments for assistance and asylum (nonrefoulement) that those who are driven by climate to cross international borders can and should claim. It seeks to amend the standards developed by the Model International Mobility Convention and it draws upon the jurisprudence of the Teitiota Case and other recent cases that probe claims for asylum based on climate necessity. It addresses the 2022 Torres Straits Island Case and the significant additional protections it recognizes under international human rights law. It concludes that relying on general human rights conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is not adequate and that a special convention focused on climate refugees is required along the lines of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which specifically addressed those facing “persecution” on grounds of “race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.”

This chapter canvasses coalitions for and against pluralism that emerged with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It shows that while the early nation-builders pursued a unitary, ethno-nationalist project, Kemalism also entailed an “embedded liberalism” inherited from late Ottoman modernization, including resources for eventual democratization. Throughout the twentieth century, political actors sought to mobilize these resources toward pluralizing the political system across a series of critical junctures (e.g., the 1920s’ cultural revolution; the 1950 transition to multiparty democracy; successive coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980; and a 1997 “postmodern coup.”) Across these junctures, the chapter argues, there were only two pronounced periods of secularist/Islamist cleavages. More often, conflict was driven by significant, cross-camp cooperation and intra-camp rivalry. Tracing when and why pluralizing and anti-pluralist alignments succeeded or failed, the chapter captures a key dynamic: the installation of an ethno(-religious nationalist project – the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) – as national project, even as ideas and actors invested in pluralization continued to mobilize.

This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.

As a “Digital Swing State,” South Africa’s approach to digital sovereignty is unique. This chapter analyzes South Africa’s involvement in international processes relevant to digital sovereignty and critically assesses its national policy and regulatory response to the digital economy, focusing on online content regulation, cybercrime, and data policy. Attention is given also to the challenges faced by South Africa, such as cyber vulnerabilities, institutional failures in implementing digital policies, and the struggle to protect citizens’ rights in the digital space. South Africa’s emerging digital sovereignty posture is analyzed through the lens of securitization and development, revealing a complex balance between leveraging digital transformation for socioeconomic development and addressing cybersecurity threats. The chapter reveals while developmental aspirations inform South Africa’s digital policy to reap the benefits of digitalization, they are also increasingly influenced by securitization trends to protect national digital assets and avoid loss of control. The chapter recommends for South Africa to balance its securitization agenda with respect for human rights, calling for proportionate, legitimate, and human-centric policies. The aim is to achieve a positive digital sovereignty agenda that respects human rights and promotes human security, as enshrined in the 1996 Constitution, while effectively implementing digital policies for socioeconomic development.