How do domestic elite cues shape public attitudes toward international organizations (IOs)? Political elites with populist rhetoric frequently criticize IOs on grounds of representation, popular sovereignty, elitism, detachment from local concerns, and a uniform approach to global problems without accounting for local nuances. We argue that discursive delegitimization by domestic populist elites negatively influences public perceptions of IOs. We conducted an original survey experiment in South Korea, focusing on changes in public attitudes toward the Committee against Torture, one of the core UN human rights treaty bodies. The findings confirm that individuals exposed to populist delegitimizing cues exhibited increased skepticism regarding the performance of IOs and decreased willingness to adhere to their recommendations. We also found that this effect is observed across individuals with different ideological orientations, suggesting that populist rhetoric exerts a broader influence than previously assumed.
Artificial intelligence-driven automation is reshaping cognitive and service work, raising urgent questions for the protection of workers' rights. Unlike earlier automation focused on routine tasks, contemporary AI reaches nonroutine, mid-skill occupations, directly engaging the rights to freely chosen work and to just and favorable conditions of work under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This article proposes a rights-based governance architecture that binds AI deployment to worker voice, enforceable human rights due diligence under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and universal social-protection floors. It links foundational UN human rights doctrine to existing national, regional, and multilateral regimes and analyzes comparative approaches in the European Union, the United States, China, and the Global South. Particular attention is given to how the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the World Trade Organization, and global trade-union federations can translate norms into enforceable safeguards. The article contributes a layered, implementable framework that turns abstract rights into operational protections, showing how technological transitions can be governed to secure dignity, equality, and security for workers. The primary threat is structural: AI-driven automation risks displacing entire categories of mid-skill work faster than complementary roles emerge, concentrating gains in capital and high-skill labor. Compounding this structural displacement are second-order harms-algorithmic discrimination, invasive monitoring, wage erosion, and precarity-that degrade job quality for workers who remain.
Child labor in Malaysia's agricultural sector presents a critical yet understudied subject, particularly in oil palm smallholder farming in Sabah, where the involvement of migrant children in daily farming activities is often normalized. Child labor is considered a serious violation of human rights. However, the lived realities of migrant children and their families in Sabah are marked by unregulated routines, social invisibility, and a precarious future. Methodologically, we employed both a PhotoVoice method, involving 10 migrant children expressing their voices creatively via visual art, and 14 semistructured interviews with a range of informants, including smallholders, workers, and other relevant stakeholders. This study reveals that although not all migrant children are in child labor conditions, the presence of harmful, hazardous, and exploitative elements endured by some suggests a textbook example of child labor. Notably, the complex intersection of socio-economic and cultural realities confronting migrant children in Sabah continues to shape their involvement in oil palm activities both invisible and exploitative. As one of the earliest studies to center migrant children's narratives through PhotoVoice in Sabah, we contribute to the evolving approach in qualitative research, especially involving vulnerable populations by treating migrant children as active knowledge producers.
Does compliance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) concessional lending conditions improve or harm the fulfillment of economic and social rights? While existing scholarship examines IMF program participation, the duration of programs, and the number of conditions imposed, compliance remains an underexplored dimension of this literature. We argue that compliance with IMF conditionality will have an overall negative effect on economic and social rights. Additionally, increased levels of compliance reduces the potential policy space governments are able to choose, meaning that compliance will also decrease the heterogeneity of outcomes. Drawing on data from the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangements dataset and the Human Rights Measurement Initiative's (HRMI) Economic and Social Rights scores, we analyze 63 countries between the years 2003 and 2021 to evaluate whether compliance with IMF conditionality affects government fulfillment of economic and social rights. We find, using a variety of quantitative methodologies, robust support for our arguments. We also disaggregate policy conditionality by category and find that compliance with both political conditions and revenue conditions independently produce negative ESR outcomes. Further, increased compliance does, on average, reduce heterogeneity. These findings provide important evidence that the Fund has not adequately addressed the human rights consequences of its programs.
International human rights norms protect the right to freedom of assembly, yet states increasingly use the legal system to criminalize dissent. A key philosophical idea used to distinguish "legitimate" from "illegitimate" acts of civil disobedience is the punishment proviso, which insists activists must willingly accept the resulting legal consequences of their actions. Building on grounded normative theory (GNT), we assess whether and when this proviso is consistent with contemporary protest rights. Drawing on 57 semistructured interviews with experienced protesters in Rio de Janeiro, London, and New York, we show that activists understand civil disobedience as extending into the legal process-through plea decisions, defenses, and refusals of sanction-rather than ending at arrest. We developed a rights-compatible refusal test (RCRT) that specifies conditions under which declining to accept punishment can be justified as part of rights-respecting civil disobedience: when procedures are unfair or discriminatory, legal sanctions are disproportionate or chilling of public assembly and freedom of expression rights, and defenders face reprisals, among others. Acceptance of punishment is neither necessary nor presumptively desirable as a criterion of legitimacy. Courts and prosecutors should evaluate protest cases through necessity, proportionality, and nondiscrimination rather than treating acceptance of punishment as a litmus test.
The international framework on corporate responsibility evolves around the formally nonbinding UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights of 2011 (UNGPs). A UN intergovernmental working group has been discussing and negotiating a legally binding instrument (LBI) on business and human rights for 10 years, but has yet to reach a consensus. Learning from the drafting experiences of other international human rights treaties contributes to an understanding of the challenges and opportunities of the current process surrounding the LBI. This article analyzes substantive and procedural elements in the negotiations of these treaties such as building on international consensus enshrined in nonbinding declarations, aligning treaties with domestic policy preferences, and including affected rightsholders and civil society organizations in the negotiations. The article applies these findings to the negotiating process and contents of the LBI to identify pathways toward realizing a treaty on business and human rights.
This article critically examines international child labor governance through a postcolonial lens, focusing on the lived experiences of girl hawkers. Despite global commitments-such as Sustainable Development Goal 8.7, which aims to eradicate child labor by 2025-progress has stalled, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where child labor rates have increased. Although international legal frameworks such as ILO conventions promote children's rights through education and protection from hazardous work, their universalist assumptions often fail to reflect the complex realities in postcolonial settings. Drawing on postcolonial critiques and the concept of "multiple childhoods," the article challenges dominant portrayals that frame working children as passive victims or as existing outside of "modern" childhood. It argues that conventional child rights discourses rooted in liberal ideals, such as individual freedom and compulsory schooling, obscure the relational and structural conditions under which children live and work. It also calls for a historicized and context-sensitive approach to children's rights that centers the voices and lived knowledge of marginalized children. By interrogating the mismatch between legal protections and everyday realities, this article highlights how rights-based governance risks reproducing inequality when divorced from the socio-cultural and economic contexts of the Global South.
A significant move toward advancing the right to development (RtD) occurred in 2018, when the Human Rights Council called for drafting a legally binding treaty on the RtD. Despite the substantial progress made by the UN Working Group since then, this right remains undertheorized and continues to be contested on various grounds. As we embark on a treaty, the urgent challenge lies in clarifying the concept of the RtD. Drawing on the need, interest, and capability (NIC) theory of rights and the two key documents of the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development and 2023 Draft International Covenant on the Right to Development, this article puts forward a new theoretical model for the RtD in order to serve four main purposes: first, to illuminate that well-being, as the outcome of development, does not refer to individual well-being-which can leave the right with unlimited scope and at the risk of losing its meaning by becoming a right to everything-but, rather, to collective well-being; second, to illustrate that the RtD is a human right to an enabling environment for improving the well-being of the whole population and individuals as a member of a group; third, to explore the nature of the RtD as a collective right held jointly by individuals; and fourth, to uncover the six key constituent components of the RtD as a composite right.
The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights has in recent years experienced significant backlash from African Union member governments, with five states withdrawing permission for their citizens to submit cases to the Court since 2016 (including Tanzania, where the Court is located). This study explores how the Court's remedial mandates have evolved during this period of crisis for the young Court. I find that the scope of the Court's remedial mandates has actually expanded in recent years, suggesting that Court judges are not inclined to entice government cooperation by walking back the uniquely holistic and intensive remedial approach that the Court has forged. Relative to scholarship on other regional human rights courts, the ACtHPR's remedial jurisprudence is severely understudied. This analysis contributes to correcting that imbalance by employing a novel typology to trace the development of the Court's remedial mandates throughout the institution's history.
Traditionally a state-centric regime, international human rights law (IHRL) has not quite caught up with the global trend whereby cities are increasingly engaging with international human rights norms. Normative gaps in IHRL prevail in conceptualizing the complementary roles of local governments in undertaking human rights obligations and the concurrent human rights responsibilities of non-state actors. This article contributes to addressing these normative gaps by outlining a research agenda in relation to the right to food that connects the currently siloed bodies of scholarship on IHRL and urban food governance (UFG). Proliferating in cities across the world over the last two decades, UFG initiatives aim at bringing together stakeholders across different sectors to tackle food-related problems. This article argues that their place-based nature and multi-actor governance model render UFG initiatives rich case studies for contextualizing and conceptualizing the nature and scope of local governments' obligations and non-state actors' responsibilities under IHRL. Importantly, the article proposes a research framework underpinned by a human rights localization perspective to foster interaction between IHRL and UFG scholarship to inform the normative development of the notions of complementary obligations and concurrent responsibilities under IHRL in a way that responds to empirical realities in urban governance.
The adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights has marked a global shift toward holding corporations accountable for human rights violations. Yet, in Southeast Asia, the regional implementation of these norms remains limited. Despite ASEAN's rhetorical support for human rights, its economic integration agenda led by the ASEAN Economic Community has largely excluded binding human rights obligations. This gap raises a central question: Why has ASEAN failed to embed business and human rights norms into its regional economic governance? This article argues that ASEAN's fragmented approach is driven by the political economy of its member states, in which economic growth and market liberalization are prioritized over human rights enforcement. Institutional commitments to sovereignty, noninterference, and consensus further entrench this dynamic by shielding powerful business sectors from scrutiny. Drawing on a structural analysis of ASEAN's institutional design and member state interests, the study explains the region's persistent accountability gaps. It contributes to debates on regional human rights governance by showing how economic imperatives and elite interests continue to undermine efforts to institutionalize the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in Southeast Asia.
This article critically considers the prominent "ending statelessness" framing within global statelessness work to expose potential risks around such dominant approaches-both for advocacy efficacy and discursively (primarily for those directly impacted by the issue: i.e., stateless individuals). In probing the focus on "eradication" framing, the article focuses on the IBelong campaign launched by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to end statelessness in a decade (2014-2024). Drawing comparatively from lessons learned from other global initiatives seeking to end a perceived global ill (specifically 2005's Make Poverty History and the UN target to End AIDS by 2030), I question whether the eradication framing is, in fact, the most effective way to address statelessness, while considering the-sometimes negative-implications this can have for people with lived experience of statelessness. Reflection on the discursive implications of such framing should complement more programmatic considerations given to the IBelong campaign within existing evaluations. This analysis is timely given that, following the end of IBelong campaign's implementation period, the next phase within the ending statelessness endeavor is already under way. Although ending statelessness is undoubtedly desirable for (most, if not all) people affected by it, alternative framing approaches more sensitive to, and privileging, the insights and experiences of such individuals may provide a basis to recalibrate ongoing efforts to address statelessness worldwide, and ultimately better serve their interests.
Repression against human rights defenders has escalated globally, becoming increasingly dangerous over the last decade. Their human rights advocacy work and the information they wield about abuses by those in power put these defenders at mortal risk. We review what research tells us about where and why defenders are targeted and killed, and discuss why better data can give us more nuanced insights about these assassinations. We describe our new dataset, which contains disaggregated and geocoded event data for each of the 2,877 reported targeted killings of human rights defenders globally from 2014 to 2023, as well as aggregated country-year data on the number of defenders killed, total and by issue type. We examine the data, revealing new insights about where, when, why, and by whom human rights defenders are killed. We also discuss the reliability and validity of the data; how the data enables more research in this crucial area; and how it provides a resource that may be useful beyond researchers, to advocates and policymakers in their work to accurately document, advocate for protections for, and reduce impunity for those who threaten the actors on the front lines of the defense of human rights.
This article interrogates the concept of extraterritorial ecocide as a form of epistemic injustice, arguing that transboundary environmental harm not only devastates ecosystems but also annihilates the knowledge systems of the communities that depend on them. It introduces the notion of environmental sovereignty, the collective right of communities to sustain the ecological and epistemic conditions necessary for self-determination, and defines epistemicide as the systematic destruction of community-based knowledge systems through ecological disruption. By bridging doctrines of international environmental law, human rights, and decolonial epistemology, the article advances a framework for recognizing epistemic harm as a distinct category of injury under international law. Drawing on jurisprudence from Teitiota v. New Zealand, Saramaka, Endorois, and Sarayaku, it demonstrates that violations of free, prior, and informed consent often entail epistemic destruction, including the loss of ecological indicators, rituals, and linguistic taxonomies. The article proposes two complementary mechanisms to address these harms: a global tribunal for environmental sovereignty and epistemic justice and the integration of epistemic impact assessments (EIA[E]) into existing loss and damage frameworks. These mechanisms extend accountability beyond state-centric liability toward a pluralistic model that values both ecological and epistemic restoration. By foregrounding the right to environmental sovereignty, the study offers an actionable path to operationalize epistemic justice within international law and to restore the cognitive foundations that enable communities to live with dignity amid environmental collapse.
Climate-induced migration challenges existing legal and moral frameworks by exposing the limitations of state-centered responsibility in addressing global human rights harms. This article examines the concept of responsibility through the integration of Shue's triple-pronged theory and Fineman's vulnerability theory, to propose a conceptual framework for shared responsibility between states, multinational corporations, and global institutions. By analyzing the shifting role of states in a globalized context and the growing influence of multinationals, the article critiques the legal vacuum surrounding climate displacement and calls for a structural transformation of international human rights obligations. It argues for a holistic ecosystem that reflects the interdependence of global actors, in which both state and nonstate entities are accountable for preventing harm, protecting vulnerable populations, and ensuring access to remedy. The article concludes that this reconceptualization advances the discourse on climate justice and offers a rights-based foundation for addressing climate-induced migration in the Anthropocene.
Recent scholarship in international relations has shown that nonstate actors' access to international institutions has expanded, including for victims of human rights abuse. Yet, although children are protected by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and are considered ideal victims, they face significant barriers to justice. In 2011, children gained direct access to submit petitions to the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Who are these children, and what do they petition about? We introduce novel data on children's petitions, including country targets, topics, ages, legal representation, and decisions. We find that migration is a dominant topic of petitions and that young children are unlikely to be the authors of petitions. In contrast to scholarship for other treaty bodies, we also find that children are overwhelmingly accompanied by lawyers and family members in the Committee on the Rights of the Child. This article centers children themselves as active participants in international governance and provides meaningful insights into both academic and policy debates over children's agency and nonstate access to international institutions.
