PART V CRITICAL APPROACHES.

Over the past several decades, democracy has taken root or been re-established in a number of countries with support from other democratic states and private groups. While the increase in the number of democracies worldwide has been widely heralded, very little has been written on how democracy can be protected and sustained where it has been chosen by the people of a state. In this first comprehensive guide to preventing and responding to threats to coups and erosions in democracies. Through case studies and in-depth analyses, this book provides legal and policy justification for these processes and discusses how they can be made more effective, combining the findings of an international task force on threats to democracy with contributions from leading scholars and policymakers.

This book uses comparative law and comparative international law approaches to explore the role of human rights ombuds, classic-based ombuds and other types of ombuds institutions in human rights protection and promotion, their methods of application of international and domestic human rights law and their roles in strengthening good governance. It highlights the increasing importance of national human rights ombuds institutions globally and their roles as national human rights institutions (NHRIs). Chapters address: ombuds institutions as mechanisms to strengthen democratic, horizontal and vertical accountability, the rule of law and good governance; national human rights ombuds institutions as NHRIs; the investigatory, litigation, promotional and other powers of human rights and classic-based ombuds and their methods for applying international and domestic human rights law; ombuds institutions and the protection and promotion of international children’s rights; national human rights ombuds additional mandates as OPCAT national preventive mechanisms, UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Article 33(2) framework mechanisms and EU national equality bodies; human rights ombuds and business and human rights; ombuds institutions, gender and women’s rights; the European Ombudsman and human rights; national human rights ombuds and other ombuds models by region, accompanied by case studies on national human rights ombuds; and the legal and extra-legal factors affecting ombuds institutional effectiveness.

This book continues the series Select Proceedings of the European Society of International Law, containing the proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Conference organised by ESIL and the University of Cambridge in 2010. The title of the conference was 'International Law 1989-2010: A Performance Appraisal'. The highlights, selected for publication in this volume, cover a wide spectrum of topics in international law.

Despite its Finnish initiative and pedigrees, "The Finnish Yearbook of International Law" does not restrict itself to purely Finnish' topics. On the contrary, it reflects the many connections in law between the national and the international. "The Finnish Yearbook of International Law" annually publishes articles of high quality dealing with all aspects of international law, including international law aspects of European law, with close attention to developments that affect Finland. Its offerings include: longer articles of a theoretical nature, exploring new avenues and approaches; shorter polemics; commentaries on current international law developments; book reviews; and documentation of relevance to Finland's foreign relations not easily available elsewhere. "The Finnish Yearbook" offers a fertile ground for the expression of and reflection on the connections between Finnish law and international law as a whole and insight into the richness of this interaction.

This Oxford Handbook provides an authoritative and comprehensive analysis of one of the most controversial areas of international law. Over seventy contributors assess the current state of the international law prohibiting the use of force, assessing its development and analysing the many recent controversies that have arisen in this field.

The book examines one of the most debated issues in current international law: to what extent the international legal system has constitutional features comparable to what we find in national law. This question has become increasingly relevant in a time of globalization, where new international institutions and courts are established to address international issues. Constitutionalization beyond the nation state has for many years been discussed in relation to the European Union. This book asks whether we now see constitutionalization taking place also at the global level. The book investigates what should be characterized as constitutional features of the current international order, in what way the challenges differ from those at the national level and what could be a proper interaction between different international arrangements as well as between the international and national constitutional level. Finally, it sketches the outlines of what a constitutionalized world order could and should imply. The book is a critical appraisal of constitutionalist ideas and of their critique. It argues that the reconstruction of the current evolution of international law as a process of constitutionalization -against a background of, and partly in competition with, the verticalization of substantive law and the deformalization and fragmentation of international law- has some explanatory power, permits new insights and allows for new arguments. The book thus identifies constitutional trends and challenges in establishing international organisational structures, and designs procedures for standard-setting, implementation and judicial functions. This paperback edition features the authors' discussion of this book on the EJIL Talks blog.

This book analyses the emerging practice in the post-Cold War era of the creation of a democratic political system along with the creation of new states. The existing literature either tends to conflate self-determination and democracy or dismisses the legal relevance of the emerging practice on the basis that democracy is not a statehood criterion. Such arguments are simplistic. The statehood criteria in contemporary international law are largely irrelevant and do not automatically or self-evidently determine whether or not an entity has emerged as a new state. The question to be asked, therefore, is not whether democracy has become a statehood criterion. The emergence of new states is rather a law-governed political process in which certain requirements regarding the type of a government may be imposed internationally. And in this process the introduction of a democratic political system is equally as relevant or irrelevant as the statehood criteria. The book demonstrates that via the right of self-determination the law of statehood requires state creation to be a democratic process, but that this requirement should not be interpreted too broadly. The democratic process in this context governs independence referenda and does not interfere with the choice of a political system. This book has been awarded Joint Second Prize for the 2014 Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

This book explores the implications of a multipolar world for the development of international law, including contributions from Nigel White, Alexander Orakhelashvili and Christian Pippan. The contributions explore issues including the use of force, governance, regionalism and the relevance of the UN, considering the relationship between power and law.

This book argues that since the end of the Cold War an international community of liberal states has crystallised within the broader international society of sovereign states. Significantly, this international community has demonstrated a tendency to deny non-liberal states their previously held sovereign right to non-intervention. Instead, the international community considers only those states that demonstrate respect for liberal democratic standards to be sovereign equals. Indeed the international community, motivated by the theory that international peace and security can only be achieved in a world composed exclusively of liberal states, has engaged in a sustained campaign to promote its liberal values to non-liberal states. This campaign has had (and continues to have) a profound impact upon the structure and content of international law. In light of this, this book deploys the concepts of the international society and the international community in order to construct an explanatory framework that can enable us to better understand recent changes to the political and legal structure of the world order and why violations of international peace and security occur.