Civil and political rights emerged out of fundamental rights conceptions protecting life, integrity, liberty and opinion of a person against an overbearing state. Rights such as the right to life and freedom from ill-treatment may also be at risk from other sources, namely non-state actors in the domestic and other spheres, which have taken on a growing importance in the wake of states’ withdrawal from public functions. While international human rights standards have been developed to provide adequate protection in these circumstances, their implementation requires certain structures without which it is unlikely that core civil and political rights can be effectively protected. There are deep-seated structural factors that can, and have, undermined the effective protection of rights in all systems. Social exclusion, inequality and discrimination in particular are prone to significantly increase vulnerability, as evident in the higher likelihood of persons from certain ethnic or class or national backgrounds being subject to arbitrary arrest, detention, ill-treatment and other violations. Against this background this chapter identifies the normative content of the right to life, the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (other ill-treatment), the right to liberty and security, the right to a fair trial and qualified rights, particularly freedom of expression, and examines the challenge of ensuring their effective protection.

This chapter discusses the right to life and the prohibition of the death penalty as laid down in the European Convention on Human Rights, in Council of Europe instruments, in EU law and in international instruments. It also pays attention to matters such as the beginning and end of life and preventive and investigative positive obligations. In the final section, a short comparison between the different instruments is made.

This chapter discusses the interpretation and application of the complex notions of necessity and proportionality, a cornerstone for any human rights adjudication and rights balancing exercise. Through an original and comprehensive analysis of the practice of the human rights bodies, this chapter shows the reader how these bodies managed to reach convergence on the interpretation and application of necessity and proportionality, despite all the impending factors.

The chapter traces the origins of human dignity, showing how it was originally used to denote titles of honor but is now seen as a universal human right or as undergirding universal human rights. In the context of discussing dignity rights, the chapter highlights international human rights treaties and national constitutions making refeerence to the concept of human dignity, which, in modern usage, has to do with the inherent worth of a life. The chapter discusses how human dignity is the foundation for many human rights, including the right to life, the right to be free from torture and other forms of cruelty, and the right to be free of discrimination. The chapter describes existing jus cogens norms prohibiting various acts that violate fundamental human rights, concluding that the death penalty must be abolished because it makes use of credible death threats, inflicts psychological torture, and violates an array of basic human rights. The chapter details how non-lethal corporal punmishments have already been abandoned and how the death penalty has been abolished or curtailed in many countries, with international criminal law tribunals precluding the death penalty's use.

This chapter provides an overview of key judgments by international courts and tribunals dealing with environmental and human rights protection. It focuses mainly on regional human rights courts to show how environmental protection has been dealt with under these mechanisms. The objective is not to offer a comprehensive analysis of the environmental jurisprudence of these judicial mechanisms, but to signal how a specific synergistic and anthropocentric framing of environmental protection emerged in catalytic judgments. A particular narrative of how the protection of the environment would benefit human rights – especially the right to health, to life and to adequate living conditions or family life, as well as the right to private property and the right to (ancestral) land – was produced and consistently re-affirmed through judicial cross-referencing. This was done by pointing out how environmental harms and ecological deterioration and pollution directly hamper human rights, including those of indigenous peoples and cultural minorities. In so doing, courts played a pivotal role in strengthening environmental protection in relation to human concerns, thereby also consolidating a particular representation of how a protected environment serves human interests and needs. A specific anthropocentric and synergistic understanding of the human–environment is thereby enacted and reenforced.

Although the Korean understanding of human dignity as an abstract constitutional value is little different from that in other jurisdictions, the way it has been operationalized in Korean shows interesting nuances that will reward comparative analysis. The establishment in 1988 of the Constitutional Court of Korea opened a new era of constitutional jurisprudence on human dignity. This chapter features a critical analysis of the various ways in which the Court has interpreted the clause “dignity and worth as human beings” in the Korean Constitution. The Court seems to oscillate between, on the one hand, regarding the clause as an abstract general principle and, on the other, using it to derive concrete justiciable rights. The chapter then discusses the different modes of interaction between the constitutional ideal of human dignity and the larger social, political, and cultural milieu of modern Korea. The focus is on those cases in which human dignity grounded challenges to the constitutionality of certain rules and practices rooted in Confucian tradition. This chapter highlights the ongoing negotiation between Western liberal ideals and Korea’s local cultural norms and values.

International human rights law applies at all times to protect civilians, even though the status of civilian does not exist in the same way that it does under international humanitarian law (IHL). The law binds primarily States, which become party to human rights treaties; they are also bound by rules of customary human rights law. But the duty to respect fundamental human rights also applies to international organisations, including the United Nations, and arguably also to armed groups and corporate entities, as the chapter describes. The human rights duty to investigate suspicious deaths is also considered.

This chapter discusses the theoretical controversies surrouding the death penalty, the status of the death penalty under international human rights law, the death penalty in the United States and China. It also explores other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments including mass incarceration, life imprisonment, shackling, and solitary confinement.

Chapter 5 delves into three additional cases of treaty interpretation by the human rights treaty bodies. The aim of the chapter is to probe the plausibility of the TLC concept across the human rights regime. I use insights and findings gathered from the drafting process of GC No. 15 to articulate a typology that distinguishes the treaty bodies by their likelihood to need external input when drafting GCs. Drawing on a combination of data – documents and existing scholarship, as well as interviews and personal observations – the case studies ultimately demonstrate the TLC concept to be applicable to drafting processes in other treaty bodies, even where their formation is less likely.

This chapter describes the duty of States to respect and protect the right to life in the context of assemblies, including demonstrations, marches, and protests. The right to assembly peacefully is a fundamental human right. General Comment 37 on the right of peaceful assembly, adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in July 2020, is an important normative reference.

Foreseeable threats to life such as from accidents, disease, and natural disasters, demand both preventive and reparative action from the authorities, and such action must be of a minimum level of competence. The General Comment on the right to life issued by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 2015 stipulates that the African Charter demands that States act to protect life against threats from natural disasters, famines, and outbreaks of infectious diseases.

At the regional level, by far the most prolific in terms of jurisprudence is the European Court of Human Rights: between its first judgment on the right to life in September 1995 and through late November 2020, 3,875 judgments concerned the right, of which 476 were issued by the Court’s Grand Chamber. But the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has also made a significant contribution to our understanding of the scope and legal status of the right to life, while the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights brought together learning at the regional and global level in an important General Comment issued in 2015. A major gap in regional human rights protection exists across Asia and the Pacific.