The right to land plays a key role in the realisation of a plethora of human rights, including the right to food, water, housing, employment, a clean and healthy environment, an adequate standard of living, social status and the power to make decisions. Property rights over land can take many forms, from mere access rights to ownership. Due to a growing world population and various global crises and developments such as agrarian reform, land is becoming scarce. The result is that land prices increase and the poorest sectors of society are deprived of access to land whilst State authorities and foreign investors practise land grabbing to make way for palm oil, animal feed and biofuel plantations, tourist resorts, or as speculative investment. In addition, arable land is not only claimed for residential purposes, but also by industries that in turn pollute the soil and water.Many groups in society, especially in developing States, need access to land for their subsistence. It is these smallholders, landless farmers, rural youths, indigenous peoples and women who often suffer the worst consequences of land reform schemes and land grabbing practices. They are not well protected by the existing forms of land tenure and State authorities often fail to live up to their human rights obligations to respect and protect the land rights of people in all sectors of their society.Legal Aspects of Land Rights is the result of the cooperation of scholars from five Indonesian faculties of law, the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights, and the Maastricht European Transnational Research Institute (METRO), together known as the Land Rights Consortium.Fons Coomans and Roman Herre make the link between land rights and the right to food. While Coomans focuses on a normative human rights approach, analysing relevant hard and soft human rights law and the duty of the authorities to protect vulnerable groups, Herre looks at the issue from an NGO perspective, focusing his chapter on disadvantaged groups and the social struggle for land that is often forgotten when States and international organisations draw up regulations and guidelines on the use of land.Ben White draws attention to the existing forms of land tenure that fail to protect the rights of those who need the land the most-that is, for their very survival. He suggests alternatives better suited to present and future challenges and the needs of smallholder farming communities, including young aspiring farmers in rural areas.Michael Faure and Andri Wibisana concentrate on land and pollution and the various types of conflict that may arise in this respect both in the East and in the West. They explore the 'first use' doctrine, the 'coming to nuisance' defence and the 'regulatory takings', and the difficulties in gaining access to justice for victims of pollution in Indonesia.Finally, Ingrid Westendorp and Elin Hilwig discuss the need to examine tradition and customary law concerning women's right to land in terms of a State's human rights obligations-particularly the obligation to achieve equality between the sexes both in law and in practice. With a basis on field research, they discuss the situation in Bali (Indonesia) and in Acholi (Uganda).The book will be of interest to scholars, students, and representatives of NGOs who examine economic and social human rights, in particular the right to land, and who want to understand the contemporary difficulties faced by people who wish to exercise this right.

This book is the second of two volumes published in the context of the research project 'Protecting Young Suspects in Interrogations'. This EU-funded research project sprung from the observation that knowledge of the existing level of procedural protection offered to juvenile suspects during interrogation is limited. The research project aimed to fill at least part of this gap by shedding more light on the existing procedural rights for juveniles during interrogations in five EU Member States with different systems of juvenile justice (Belgium, England and Wales, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands). In doing so, it intended to identify legal and empirical patterns to improve the effective protection of the juvenile suspect. The project has been a joint effort of Maastricht University, Warwick University, Antwerp University, Jagiellonian University and Macerata University in cooperation with Defence for Children and PLOT Limburg. The results of the first part of the project - a legal and comparative study into existing legal procedural safeguards for juvenile suspects during interrogation in the five selected Member States - have been published in a separate volume (M. Panzavolta, D. de Vocht, M. van Oosterhout and M. Vanderhallen, Interrogating Young Suspects: Procedural Safeguards from a Legal Perspective, Cambridge: Intersentia 2015). This second volume reflects the results of the second and third part of the research project. First, it contains the results of the empirical research conducted in the five Member States consisting of focus group interviews and observations of recorded interrogations. The empirical findings of each Member State are discussed in separate chapters to provide an in-depth account of perceptions and practices in the context of each jurisdiction. Second, the country reports are followed by an integrated analysis resulting from the merging of the legal and empirical findings offering a comparative overview and combining the national findings into an integrated perspective. Finally, the book contains a set of guidelines - a framework of minimum rules - developed on the basis of the research project's findings. The guidelines and their additional explanatory remarks include recommendations for good practices and are intended to serve as an inspiration for promoting good practice in the context of juvenile suspect interrogations throughout the EU. The book is intended for practitioners, academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the area of juvenile justice and interrogation.

The safeguarding of human rights remains highly problematic, despite the proliferation of human rights instruments and the many actions taken by a variety of actors, such as governmental and non-governmental organisations, (individual) states and the international community over the past decades. Human rights violations do still occur on a large scale and injustice remains rampant. Central to this problem appears to be that social, economic, cultural and political structures in societies provide denialist defence mechanisms. Such deeply embedded denialism causes and/or facilitates human rights violations, because the true nature of the problems involved remains fully or partly unacknowledged and as a result appropriate action remains absent. In order to safeguard the effectuation of human rights it is thus pertinent to acknowledge and address this problem of denialism and develop strategies to move beyond it. To address the above-mentioned problem, an international conference was organised on the theme of Denialism and Human Rights by the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights in 2015, which brought together scholars, practitioners and students from various disciplines and fields to unearth and address denialism in the context of their own particular area of research. The present volume contains a unique collection of papers that were presented during the conference. The content of the papers ranges from more general reflections on the theme of denialism and human rights to more specific areas of research that are relevant in terms of denialism such as genocide, children's rights, the role of (inter)national organisations, penology, and social, economic and cultural rights.