Chapter 2 focuses on the text of ECHR Article 9 and other international provisions protecting the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion including Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and Article 1 of the Declaration on the Elimination of all Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination based on Religion or Belief (1981 Declaration). It also explores the drafting history of these Articles through an examination of the relevant travaux préparatoires. By analysing this material, and drawing upon a recent, deeply valuable contribution to the understanding of ICCPR Article 18, Chapter 2 seeks to demonstrate that it is more faithful to these text of the ECHR Article 9 and the relevant travaux préparatoires to understand the forum internum and forum externum aspects of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion in terms of a relationship rather than in terms of a binary and hierarchical distinction.

This Chapter argues that natural law philosophy gives the best conceptual resources for understanding the rights of the family in seminal international human rights instruments. The expression, ‘rights of the family,’ includes a broader discussion about marriage and the right to married life, rights of parents and children, the human person and his or her dignity. The interpretation of the texts is based on a good faith reading of the ordinary meaning of the words in their context taking into consideration the text’s object and purpose. Various challenges to the said interpretation are considered and responses to them are provided.

Beginning in the immediate post-WWII moment and carrying on to the present, international law’s Human Rights and Development missions mirror the US Evangelical ethos that emerged and gained traction at a similar pace. Making no causal claims, this Chapter focuses less on the UDHR’s expressions of monotheistic beliefs and more on the actors and ethos that informed those expressions. Specifically, it explores how legal communicative strategies and ideas used by human rights and development champions parallel those deployed at the same time by dominant US Evangelical leaders. The communicative strategies, inter alia, recall the desperate straits of the ‘unsaved’ other, present information as good news (gospel) and as truth, appeal to Messianic notions of history, and offer salvationist promises to transform afflicted lives. And the parallels form some of the many rationalizing forces that can be viewed as an expression of quasi-religious faith in American approaches to social and economic governance, and a call for those approaches to be internationalized. Like the Kingdom of God, this faith must be true for everyone to be true for anyone, and truth knows no borders. In other words, it is international law as evangelism.

Chapter 4 first analyzes how Article 13 was dealt with during the drafting of the Convention. A central conclusion is that the drafting does not explain the Court’s timid development of Article 13 in early years and that it, rather, may provide support for a further development of Article 13 in the present. The chapter then describes how the number of cases concerning Article 13 has increased in tandem with the general rise in the Court’s case law and how, in more recent years, the Court actually considers whether Article 13 has been violated, in addition to substantive Articles. However, the Court rarely explains why this is necessary. This makes it difficult to distinguish between similar remedial requirements arising under both Article 13 and substantive Articles. However, as the chapter explains, this could be necessary in order to underline specific remedial purposes and to avoid undercommunicating remedial goals, most notably achieving sufficient redress, but, also, procederual requirements necessary in order to ahcieve redress. The chapter, also, provides a more detailed overview of how Article 13 has been dealt with in conjunction with substantive Articles.

This chapter answers two key questions, integral to the issues addressed in this book. First, are patent rights human rights under international human rights law? Second, is the incorporation of a model of human rights compatible with the TRIPS Agreement? The answers will determine whether developing countries can successfully incorporate a model of human rights into the design, implementation, interpretation, and enforcement of their national patent laws. Section 3.2 examines the human right to health under international law. Section 3.3 provides an analysis of the nature of the relationship between patent rights and the right to health under international human rights law and answers the first key question. Section 3.4 examines the extent to which the TRIPS Agreement permits developing countries to fulfil their right to health obligations and answers the second key question. The chapter concludes with the view that patent rights should not be considered as human rights under international human rights law and that the model of human rights is compatible with the TRIPS Agreement. Thus, there is nothing that prohibits a developing country from insisting on the primacy of human rights obligations when attempting to resolve the tension between patent rights and the right to health at the national level.

Chapter Five charts human dignity in its second constitutive stage, characterized by the rise of international human rights law. Its first expressions in the 1920s (which echoed developments in connection with slave trade and slavery in the nineteenth century) and later in 1944 (with the Philadelphia Declaration), must be considered in the light of the decisive adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, in 1948, and the adoption of the Convention against Genocide later that year. But it is difficult to consider these entry points, however important, as sufficient for the consolidation of human dignity in the form of human ‘rights’. In earnest, the consolidation process was not completed until the adoption of the two human rights Covenants in 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Outlines the supranational framework of treaties, conventions, protocols, etc. relating to religion and explains the limited remit of the accompanying judicial and regulatory bodies. Considers the importance of the freedoms of religion, expression and association, their tendency to become entangled and their significance for the state–church relationship. Explains that a broadly similar platform of human rights and equality provisions now exists in all modern developed nations. Discusses the levelling effect of such national provisions when applied in tandem with international convention requirements. Focuses on the related case law generated by issues arising on the church–state interface, identifying governing principles from judgments delivered by the ECJ and the ECtHR, and drawing attention in particular to principles such as "proportionality" and "necessary in a democratic society". It notes those judicial rulings that specifically uphold the state’s duty of neutrality and impartiality when dealing with religious matters and the state’s right to protect its traditional primary religion and cultural identity. It identifies and discusses problematic aspects of the role of the state as it intersects with religion, such as the funding of faith schools, and considers their destabilising consequences for civil society.

This chapter elevates and explores factors that have played a role in the advancement of human rights. The term “psychosocial” is used to mean the reciprocal and iterative relationship between psychological processes and social movements. We illustrate how psychosocial gains can create sociocultural climates and sociopolitical changes conducive to the instantiation of human rights. We begin by identifying some of the psychosocial dynamics that were in play when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. Subsequently, we focus on psychosocial gains and the advancement of human rights in three case studies involving people with disabilities, women, and people who are most adversely affected by climate change. The centrality of psychosocial processes in the run-up to declarations of human rights is emphasized. While declarations are highly visible outcomes, our research suggests that declarations are often preceded by a diffuse pattern of smaller psychosocial and sociopolitical gains. Given the centrality of psychosocial processes, we discuss emerging roles for psychologists as emancipatory practitioners who accompany marginalized people and assist in cultivating “new power” relationships that establish and promote a digital presence for movements aimed at the advancement of human rights.

In 1963, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities published a study that found that more people were ‘effectively confined behind their national boundaries today than in previous periods of history’.The study, written by Filipino Judge José D. Inglés in his capacity as Special Rapporteur, represented the first attempt within UN institutions to examine the emerging right under international law of individuals to leave any country including their own, and to systematically document how various states were recognising – or failing to recognise – this right in their domestic laws and regulations.

When Charles de Gaulle learned that France’s former colonies in Africa had chosen independence, the General shrugged dismissively: ‘[t]hey are the dust of empire’. This disdain toward the non-Euro others characterised as Eurocentrism is typical of, and almost defines approaches to, the post-Westphalian order. This disdain is naturalised in the early era of what I have elsewhere called ‘conquest colonisation’, where resources, territories, nations and even people are plundered and looted, and governance by predation and the politics of discrimination prevail. Paradigmatically, conquest globalisation engages in ruthless subjugation of peoples marked by the altogether resolute denial of their humanity and confiscation of their natural habitat, social relations and human resources. At times, it even entails the total physical destruction of peoples, or cultural destruction, as the histories of indigenous peoples everywhere testify. Conquest globalisation founds itself on, and takes pride in, reiterating and calibrating various forms of production of human rightlessness of the subjugated peoples.