For Peaceful Conflict Resolution
Reposted from EJIL Talk! June 10 Post, where we address some of the recent developments in outer space law. As this activity prompted a debate among major spacefaring countries, including the Russian Federation, we offer an interdisciplinary comment on this recent satellite launch.
https://www.ejiltalk.org/defining-military-activities-in-outer-space-the-launching-of-the-iranian-satellite-nour-1/
The report “Achieving balanced participation of women and men in political and public decision making in the Russian Federation. European Best Practices” has been developed in the framework of the project “Co-operation on the implementation of the Russian Federation National Action Strategy for Women (2017-2022)” by Prof Marianna Muravyeva and Dr Joanna Hoare.
The aim of the report is to analyse the current situation in regard to balanced participation of women and men in political and public decision-making in the Russian and compile relevant European best practices to draw inspiration from.
In responding to identified challenges, the report proposes a number of solutions that worked in similar contexts. The following areas are covered in the report: election processes and political parties, improving gender sensitivity of legislation and policies, better working conditions, training and mentoring and working with the media.
Check the English version of the report here: https://www.coe.int/en/web/genderequality/-/balanced-participation-of-women-and-men-in-decision-making-in-the-russian-federation-a-new-publication-is-available
by: Elena Cirkovic
The current crisis of overcrowded refugee camps on Lesbos and other Greek islands is reaching even more dire proportions with the Coronavirus pandemic. Around 20 percent of the global populations have been put under lockdown due to coronavirus, while there are over 70.8 million people forcibly displaced from their homes.
The already present inhumane conditions have been the face of the European Union’s asylum and migration policy. After the unilateral opening of the border by Turkey, many refugees tried to enter the EU to apply for asylum. In response, on March 1, 2020, the Greek government suspended the reception of asylum applications evoking Article 78(3) of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU (TFEU). The action was prompted by the Turkish governments’ announcement on February 28, 2020, that it would cease controlling the land and sea borders with Europe and open the passage for migrants wishing to cross. Article 78 (3) of TFEU allows for provisional measures to be adopted by the Council, on a proposal from the Commission and in consultation with the European Parliament, in the event that one or more Member States are confronted by an emergency situation characterized by a sudden inflow of third-country nationals. At the same time, the provision cannot suspend the internationally recognized right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulment that is also emphasized in EU law.
Individual State obligations towards refugees have always demonstrated the persistent tension between the ‘humanity’s law’ project, and particular rights and interests of States. The nonrefoulement rule, stipulated in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (‘1951 Refugee Convention’ or ‘Convention’) has been consistently challenged in practice, and especially in the situations of so-called “mass influx”. The rights of asylum seekers have been conditioned by their numbers for quite some time. For instance, temporary protection directives (TPD) developed in response to “mass influx situations”, thereby suspending or limiting Convention rights. Indeed, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has called for temporary protection in such situations, and the United Nations Security Council has included mass displacement as an example of a threat to international peace and security. More recently, the EU the European Council and Turkey reached an agreement, or the so-called ‘EU-Turkey Statement’ of 18 March 2016 (or ‘the Statement’), aimed at stopping the flow of irregular migration via Turkey to Europe. The Statement challenges the legal status of refugees as conferred by and consistent with the provisions of the 1951 Convention, and all rights and responsibilities deriving from this status.
On 19 September 2016, the United Nations General Assembly hosted a Summit for Refugees and Migrants that aimed at improving the way in which the international community responds to large movements of refugees and migrants. At the Summit, the Member States of the United Nations unanimously adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (Resolution 71/1). It affirmed the relevance of fundamental international and human rights norms relating to the movement of people across borders as well as the sovereign right of States to control their borders. The Declaration also gave UNHCR the task of building upon the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), contained in Annex I of the New York Declaration, to develop a ‘global compact on refugees’. The Global Compact on Refugees (Refugee Compact) was affirmed by the member states of the UN General Assembly on 17 December 2018 in the annual resolution on the work of UNHCR. The accompanying Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework states that ‘[t]he scale and nature of refugee displacement today requires us to act in a comprehensive and predictable manner in large-scale refugee movements’(Para 1). The Refugee Compact was intended to address the absence of agreement on the common operational mechanisms and clear provisions for international cooperation in emergency situations.
The 1951 Refugee Convention already allows for the large margin of interpretation of the rule of non-refoulment, which has resulted in a history of determent and containment practices. These, in turn, hinder asylum seekers from reaching the territory. The more recent developments: including the ‘global’ nature of the Refugee Compact and the regional measures in the EU-Turkey Statement affirm further the policies of containment. Hence, the existing tensions surrounding the rule of non-refoulment, as it is stipulated in the Convention, are also evident in the more recent instruments.
Certainly, existing gaps in international refugee law have resulted in a concentration of refugees in regions neighboring the states of origin, which often struggle with infrastructure capacities. Humanitarian assistance offered in those countries has focused on practices such as resilience-building in spaces such as refugee camps, deflecting further from possibilities for permanent residency. The Refugee Compact lists as one of its principal objectives, the need to ‘ease pressures on host countries’ (para 7). This objective merely supports the already existing deterrent and extraterritorial measures, which states have introduced to prevent refugee movements thus forming a more restrictive modern refugee regime: a non-entrée regime, or the argument that ‘the main property of the modern refugee regime is its restrictiveness’.
However, in the context of a pandemic and global emergency, the existing tension built in the 1951 Refugee Convention, between the absolute principle of non-refoulment on the one hand, and the exceptions under which states are allowed to deny access across its borders, is only becoming stronger, if not even more brutal. Even without the existential threat of something like a virus, measures such as the EU- Turkey Statement already pose a challenge to the legal architecture of the ECHR, and how the broader interpretation of what constitutes a national emergency can result in legally questionable solutions. Finally, the recent breakdown of the EU-Turkey relations demonstrates the consequences of such politically charged measures, which in this case resulted in the suspension of the rule of law at the Greek border. The Refugee Compact as an example of the developing global framework expresses as one of its objectives, provision for more support for individual state discretion and extraordinary measures. The New York Declaration, also affirmed the relevance of fundamental international and human rights norms relating to the movement of people across borders (while recognizing the sovereign right of States to control their borders). The right of Sovereign states, however, expands at the times of emergency. Yet again, the state-centric approach of international governance is unable to respond to the ‘global’. The refugee and the homeless remain the true test of ‘humanity’ at the same time when non-human agents such as coronavirus also expose the weaknesses of the current frame of governance. At a time when governments are enforcing lockdowns, hostility towards the stateless, homeless, forcibly displaced, has increased.
Here are some of the suggested topics:
Emergencies and contemporary governance
Gender and sexuality in the state of emergency
State of Exception in 2020
Constitutional Change (e.g. Russia) and elections
Climate change and global governance
Border restrictions, old and new
Human Rights and Humanitarian Crises
Arbitrary deprivation of life in the context of mixed migration
Anthropocene and agency (animal rights, non-human agency, rights of nature, pandemic, etc.)
If you are interested to contribute, get in touch as soon as you have an idea. It is an open call for contributions.
For submissions, please contact Dr. Elena Cirkovic (elena.cirkovic@helsinki.fi) or Prof. Marianna Muravyeva (marianna.muravyeva@helsinki.fi).
Given the recent Constitutional developments in the Russian Federation, we would like to share an interesting article published recently by the Russian Law Journal (RLJ):
“On Modifications to the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 2020”
Authors: Anna Shashkova, Michel Verlaine, Ekaterina Kudryashova
https://doi.org/10.17589/2309-8678-2020-8-1-60-83
Happy Reading!
COURSE OFFERED
Gender and Law
1 Mar 2021 to 12 Mar 2021
Kondakov, Alexander – University of Dublin (Ireland)
Muravyeva, Marianna – University of Helsinki (Finland)
‘Gender and Law’ asks how gendered power relations impact the law and how the law impacts gender. Over the past decades, a rich and exciting scholarship in feminist legal theory has presented convincing arguments on the gendered character of legal norms and challenged neutrality of the law. Thus, this approach poses a significant challenge to traditional ways of thinking about law, questioning some of the basic premises of what constitutes justice and equality in various societies. This module addresses the main tenets, methodologies, and controversies in gender theories of law, including the notion of equality, intersectionality in law, the public/private divide, the regulation of family relationships and so on. Using feminist methodologies, we examine a number of areas of law including equality protections, reproductive rights, sexual citizenship, work-family issues, and violence.
Dr. Nadia E. Brown is an Associate Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University, US. She comes to Purdue from St. Louis University where she specialized in American politics with a distinct focus on Black politics as well as Women and politics. She is the author of a forthcoming book entitled Sisters in the Statehouse: Black women and Legislative Decision Making (under contract with Oxford University press) and she is the author of numerous articles focusing on Black women’s politics.
Professor Brown received her PhD in Political Science in 2010 from Rutgers University, with major fields in Women and Politics and American Politics. She also holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her BA, also in political science, is from Howard University in 2004.
Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women’s studies. Current research projects address the politics of appearance for Black women candidates for public office.
Dr. Brown enjoys teaching courses in the fields of African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Political Science.
BFA (Sarajevo), BDes (Sarajevo), LLM (Nottingham), PhD (London)
https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff86662.php
Vanja Hamzić is a Senior Lecturer in Legal History and Legal Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. He holds two First Class Honours degrees from the University of Sarajevo, an LLM with Distinction from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from King’s College London. He has worked as an activist and researcher with various international and civil society organisations in South and South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and West and South Africa. Before coming to SOAS, Dr Hamzić held academic posts at City, University of London and King’s College London.
The bulk of Dr Hamzić’s legal, anthropological and historical research addresses issues in human subjectivity formation—especially those related to gender, sexual, class, linguistic and religious difference—with the principal fieldwork sites in Pakistan, Indonesia, Senegal and Louisiana. While the focus of Dr Hamzić’s work has been, for quite some time, the Islamic legal tradition, both in its historical and present-day diversity, he is also interested in how some of its strands have influenced (and, in some cases, moulded into) other South Asian, South East Asian, West African and circum-Atlantic traditions. Dr Hamzić’s work to date has particularly sought to shed new light on how gender-variant individuals and communities—such as khwajasara in Pakistan, waria and others in Indonesia as well as numerous historical identitary formations across West Africa—have braved the turbulent tides of colonialism, slavery and other legally-sanctioned oppression and how, in turn, they have developed and abided by multiple formations of insurrectionary vernacular knowledge (about themselves and the world at large). It is this knowledge and being-in-the-world—often preserved in oral traditions, rites of passage and rituals of the everyday—that has survived not only the epistemic and literal violence of the nation-state and its legal institutions, but the sustained ‘will to disappear’ in the colonial and post-colonial archive, too.
Dr Hamzić is also interested in, and has contributed to, current transnational debates on legal and social theory, human rights, Marxist and postcolonial studies, the Cold War, feminist legal theory, global law/governance studies, social anthropology and philosophy. In this context, he has written about alegality, legal violence, Third World feminisms, homeliness, touch, Muslim Marxism, the unknowable, the Lacanian Real and other critical concepts.
Dr Hamzić’s current book-length project addresses gender variance and cosmological and legal pluralism in eighteenth-century Senegambia as well as the ways the enslaved gender-variant West Africans have survived the Middle Passage and ‘New World’ gender regimes, in particular that of colonial (i.e. first French and then Spanish) Louisiana. The project seeks to develop an interruptive approach to circum-Atlantic colonial and post-colonial history-making and to critically address the question of archival silences.
Dr Hamzić is a co-founder and former Co-Chair of the Centre for Ottoman Studies at SOAS and a member of a number of other SOAS research centres. He is a Faculty Member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and a Researcher of the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Hamzić is also an Academic Fellow (2016-19) of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. In the academic year 2016-17, he was a residential Member of the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Professor Brenda Cossman (University of Toronto)
Professor & Director, Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
Brenda Cossman is Professor of Law and the Director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She joined the Faculty of Law in 1999, and became a full professor in 2000. She holds degrees in law from Harvard and the University of Toronto, and an undergraduate degree from Queen’s. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she was Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University.
In 2012, Professor Cossman was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2009, she was awarded the Mundell Medal for contributions to letters and law. In 2002 and 2003, she was a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Professor Cossman’s teaching and scholarly interests include family law, law and sexuality, and freedom of expression. Her most recent book on Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging was published by Stanford University Press in 2007. Her publications include the co-authored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision (University of Toronto Press) and Censorship and the Arts (published by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries).
The Faculty of Law in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki is pleased to announce the annual conference under the Development of Russian Law research project, which will take place in Helsinki on October 19-20, 2020. This conference continues the series of workshops, seminars, and conferences originating in legal scholarship on Russian law, organized by the Faculty of Law since 2008. Our confirmed keynote speakers are: Dr. Nadia E. Brown (Purdue), Dr. Vanja Hamzic (SOAS), and Professor Brenda Cossman (University of Toronto).
Current debates surrounding legal pluralism focus on a variety of legal issues. The nexus of international, transnational, regional, domestic, or local levels of legal regulation questions the clearly defined spaces of law. The conception of domestic law or international law as a single realm has long been challenged in legal and transdisciplinary scholarship due to multiple and constantly incoming and outcoming influences. Law becomes a mixture of many things; it becomes a fluid institution that counter-intuitively changes as it is being practiced and rarely remains set in stone.
Legal diversity refers to the idea that in any one space of law there is more than one regulation or even more than just one legal system. The conference will explore legal pluralism by discussing factors that lead to legal diversity and plural sites of norm-production. It follows in the lengthy tradition of law/society relation and reconceptualization and examines several aspects of legal diversity focusing on the relationship between the empirical facts of pluralism and its conceptual foundations. Furthermore, we plan to define how international comparative experiences are relevant to legal-societal analysis and discuss in detail the multiple possible connections among different sites of law-making, practice, and experience.
A point of departure for this conference is its previous focus on Russia and the Russian law. As we intend to broaden the scope of the conference, we look at geographical location as one possible way to approach diversity. How does space define law? How does international community “view” certain spaces? What are the venues of legal diversity when we concentrate our attention on a geographical location? How does the very notion of space is also re-defined by diverse practices of law? In these endeavours we open the debates about legal pluralism beyond the geopolitical space of Russia and invite scholars who work in other regions across the Globe from South and Eastern Europe to the Americas, from South-East Asia to Africa.
Legal systems are constantly interacting with one another, and in so doing, re-defining each other. Various schools of thought on legal diversity have studied such interactions under the banner of legal anthropology, systems theory, global legal pluralism, and others. Their commonality is the identification of legal practice as a procedure shaped through interactions among multiple legal orders. In the current moment of increased populist tendencies and re-emergent nationalisms, it is even more important to revisit the question of legal diversity.
We encourage submissions of individual papers and full panels on the following themes and beyond:
We welcome legal researchers from across disciplines to join our discussions on current issues in legal studies. We especially encourage junior scholars and graduate students to apply.
The working language of the conference is English, including all presentations and discussions.
The conference fees are:
120 EUR for regular participants
60 EUR for PhD Students
The proposals (300 words) shall be submitted by 15 April 2020 via online submission system: https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/103572/lomake.html
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Elena Cirkovic (elena.cirkovic@helsinki.fi) or Prof. Marianna Muravyeva (marianna.muravyeva@helsinki.fi).
Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Bilibin_-_illustration-for-the-tale-of-prince-ivan-the-firebird-and-the-grey-wolf-1899-6.jpg
On Thursday 12 March at 10-12 in Porthania (P545, 5th floor), INEQ together with Associate Professor Marianna Murayeva at the Faculty of Law and Aleksanteri Institute will host a talk by Professor Janet Elise Johnson (CUNY) on gender equality, policymaking and domestic violence in non-democratic environments, including Russia.
Please find Professor Johnson’s profile here: https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/en/people/fellows/current-fellows/johnson
by Janet Elise Johnson
Over the last decade, non-democratic regimes have been passing legislation that at least superficially addresses gender inequality, especially targeting violence against women. The cross-national studies of gender equality policymaking, especially on issues such as violence against women which require significant change in policy and practice, show that strong, autonomous feminist movements are the decisive factor, while in non-democratic regimes, informal links between women’s movements and key actors also crucial. This presentation will explore these gender-related policy dynamics through the tracing of three policymaking processes on domestic violence over the last decade: a 2013-16 attempt to pass comprehensive domestic violence reform, the criminalization of domestic violence in 2016, and the partial de-criminalization in 2017. These insights will be used to consider the current attempt to pass yet another domestic violence law that began last fall.
Janet Elise Johnson is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA, and FRIAS Senior Fellow/Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany. Her books include The Gender of Informal Politics (2018), Gender Violence in Russia (2009), and Living Gender after Communism (2007), with The Routledge International Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (edited with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda) forthcoming in 2021.
Development of Russian Law scholars recently participated in a public science event discussing sexuality, gender, and law in Russia. Marianna Muravyeva gave a presentation titled “Do Women Need More Rights? – The Anti-Gender Movement in Russia” and Alexander Kondakov presented “Hate Crime against LGBTQ Populations in Russia.” These talks were given during the weekly event Uuden tiedon klubi (New science klub), hosted at the University of Helsinki Think Corner (Tiedekulma).
The entire event can be seen here on the Think Corner Uuden tiedon klubi webpage.