ABSTRACT: This article demonstrates there is a right to abortion in international human rights law. Using systematic analysis of documents from international human rights bodies, it shows that, through a constellation of rights, international human rights law recognizes a right to abortion. It establishes that (i) criminal regulation of abortion results in serious violations of human rights; (ii) making abortion available on request is the optimal approach to rights-compliant regulation; (iii) states are obliged to remove barriers to abortion access in law and in practice; and (iv) the right to abortion requires both individual and general remedies for denials of access.
ABSTRACT: This study reanimates the principle of the indivisibility of human rights developing the notion of a holistic jurisprudence. The international human rights juridical framework rooted in capitalist modernity and its economic imperatives has obscured a rich panoply of economic pathways—plural epistemologies—hindering the creative rethinking of human rights for social possibility. Coupled with this, the impact of economic inequality on representative democracy is limiting the potential for structural change and challenging the legitimacy of the duty-bearing state of human rights. International human rights law lacks a theory of state beyond that which is implied by its reductive "duty-bearer" schematic. As a result, it lacks an effective determination of the legitimate roles of the duty-bearing state today. This work presents generative pathways for reconceptualizing the normative potential of international human rights, prompting socio-economic rights to enable economic life and its political organization in ways that inculcate far-reaching transformational forms.
ABSTRACT: Decline of democracy, which used to be associated with developing countries, is now a global concern. Democratic principles and institutions are "backsliding" or under attack even in older, "established" democracies. This article offers a comparative analysis of democratic decline during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras – periods characterized by class and identity politics, respectively. It proposes a human rights theory of democracy that explains the decline of democratic systems by the gap between civil-political and social-economic rights. It highlights the pervasive influence of neo-classical and neoliberal economic paradigms as central factors driving this regression.
ABSTRACT: Forced religious conversions of Hindu women in Pakistan remain critically undertheorized within human rights and minority studies, often obscured by narrow analytical frames that treat religious freedom, gender, and caste as separate domains. This article intervenes by conceptualizing forced conversion as intersectional structural violence, a product of converging theocratic governance, patriarchal authority, and caste-based marginalization. Using an intersectional feminist and postcolonial framework and drawing on an original dataset of 120 documented cases from Sindh province (2019–2024) and ten interviews from Hindu women, the study demonstrates how purportedly "voluntary" conversions are institutionally manufactured through coercive legal practices, clerical mediation, and judicial deference that systematically reframe violence as consent. By centering the experiences of Scheduled Caste Hindu women, the analysis reveals how intersecting identities of gender, religion, and caste produce a distinct vulnerability that formal rights frameworks fail to recognize. The findings challenge prevailing minority-rights paradigms and call for a reimagined approach that addresses the embedded hierarchies enabling gendered religious coercion in postcolonial theocracies.
ABSTRACT: This article considers the lawfulness of the measures taken by the Chinese government to pursue the forced repatriation of certain Chinese refugees. Those measures generally fall into two categories: (1) exerting diplomatic pressure and providing economic incentives, and (2) with the host country's consent, dispatching Chinese officials and vehicles/aircraft to take over the targeted Chinese refugees and transporting them back to China. The central arguments of this article are: (1) it is unlikely that China violated its obligation to perform the Refugee Convention in good faith; (2) in certain cases, China should be held indirectly responsible for the internationally wrongful act of refoulement committed by the relevant host countries under article 16 of the ARSIWA; and (3) the second category of measures constitutes a violation of China's obligation not to commit arbitrary deprivation of liberty under customary international law of human rights.
