There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

Business corporations can and do violate human rights all over the world, and they are often not held to account. Emblematic cases and situations such as the state of the Niger Delta and the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory are examples of corporate human rights abuses which are not adequately prevented and remedied. Business and human rights as a field seeks to enhance the accountability of business – companies and businesspeople – in the human rights area, or, to phrase it differently, to bridge the accountability gap. Bridging the accountability gap is to be understood as both setting standards and holding corporations and businesspeople to account if violations occur. Adopting a legal perspective, this book presents the ways in which this dual undertaking has been and could be further carried out in the future, and evaluates the extent to which the various initiatives in the field bridge the corporate accountability gap. It looks at the historical background of the field of business and human rights, and examines salient periods, events and cases. The book then goes on to explore the relevance of international human rights law and international criminal law for global business. International soft law and policy initiatives which have blossomed in recent years are evaluated along with private modes of regulation. The book also examines how domestic law, especially the domestic law of multinational companies’ home countries, can be used to prevent and redress corporate related human rights violations.

At a time when human rights are coming under increasing pressure, in-depth knowledge and understanding of their foundations, conceptual underpinnings and current practice remain crucial. The second edition of Walter Kalin and Jorg Kunzli's authoritative book provides a concise but comprehensive legal analysis of international human rights protection at the global and regional levels. It shows that human rights are real rights creating legal entitlements for those who are protected by them and imposing legal obligations on those bound by them. Based, in particular, on a wide-ranging analysis of international case-law, the book focuses on the sources and scope of application of human rights and a discussion of their substantive guarantees. Further chapters describe the different mechanisms to monitor the implementation of human rights obligations, ranging from the regional human rights courts in Africa, the Americas and Europe and the UN treaty bodies to the international criminal tribunals, the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council. The book is based on an understanding of human rights as legal concepts that address basic human needs and vulnerabilities, and highlights the indivisibility of civil and political rights on the one and economic, social and cultural rights on the other hand. It also highlights the convergence of international human rights and international humanitarian law and the interlinkages with international criminal law as well as general international law, in particular the law of state responsibility.

The Law and Slavery sets out the articles, book reviews and case notes by Professor Jean Allain which led to pioneering exploration of forced labour, servitudes, slavery, the slave trade, and trafficking in his 2013 Slavery in International Law: Of Human Exploitation and Trafficking (MNP). This collection brings together Professor Allain’s considerations of the evolution of legal abolition internationally, his critique of the then status quo in the area of slavery and the law, and goes on to develop the foundations of a legal understanding of various servitudes and slavery based on his archival research and legal analysis. Professor Allain’s research has transformed the landscape of how we understand contemporary slavery and those other servitudes which constitute human exploitation.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Slavery in International Law sets out the law related to slavery and lesser servitudes, including forced labour and debt bondage; thus developing an overall understanding of the term human ‘exploitation’, which is at the heart of the definition of trafficking.