George Radics

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Título de la publicaciónInvestment State Dispute Settlement: Institutionalising ‘Corporate Exceptionality’
Fecha de publicación1 de dic. de 2018  Descripción de la publicaciónOñati Socio-Legal Series

Descripción de la publicaciónThis paper scrutinises the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows foreign investors to sue host governments for any regulations that might directly or indirectly affect private investments. It gives investors rights over host- states – and local populations – in international arbitration tribunals. The focus of this article is a critical examination of how the ISDS institutionalises a framework of exceptionality that is characteristic of neoliberal capitalism; one that centres upon the institutionalisation of subjecting public regulation to the rationality of the market. We argue that this privatised quasi-legal arena is incompatible with the rule of law, human rights and socially emancipatory practices. What this reveals is that the political and economic dynamics that mobilise and shape international investment law are characterised by capitalist class relations. The article concludes with some reflections upon the marketization of public regulation through the ISDS, where profitability and cost-reduction are prioritised over human and environmental rights.

Otro autor
Stefanie Khoury
Ver publicación: Investment State Dispute Settlement: Institutionalising ‘Corporate Exceptionality’Ver publicación
Título de la publicaciónIntroduction: Continuities and Ruptures in Global North Legal Pressures on Global South Societies
Fecha de publicación28 de sept. de 2018  Descripción de la publicaciónAsian Journal of Social Sciences

Descripción de la publicaciónSince Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society (1893), the sociological discipline
has treated the law as a privileged object of study. And to this day, the
law maintains this privileged position in contemporary sociological theories
(see Bourdieu, 1986; Latour, 2009; Luhmann 2014). At the same time, however,
laws schools tend to train lawyers exclusively in the technical skills necessary
to practice law, many times ignoring the very important social ramifications
of the law, or the deeply embedded meanings or biases in the laws themselves
(Abel, 1995). Furthermore, many sociology departments do not have courses
on law and society, and the study of law is even less common in history, philosophy
and anthropology, except perhaps at the graduate level (Friedman,
1986). Finally, when studying the law, from any disciplinary perspective, the
ideas, concepts and values embedded within it become studied from the lens of
the “West”, given the dominant impression that modern, democratic and progressive
values originate in the works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant, or
that contemporary human rights are a product of Eleanor Roosevelt and Rene
Cassin’s active role in the drafting of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. Whether or not other individuals from outside of the West
can help us understand the meaning of rights in a different way, or what are the
manifold conceptualisations of what constitutes “human rights” outside of the
West, are questions that have only recently begun to be examined. It is the hope
of the editors that this special issue contributes to this very important project.

This Article examines the tension between freedom of speech and laws restricting the defamation of religion, using the case study of Singapore and the Amos Yee case. In 2015, four days after the death of revered former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Amos Yee, a sixteen-year-old blogger, posted a video called “Lee Kuan Yew is finally dead!” and, one day later, an image on his blog entitled “Lee Kuan Yew buttfucking Margaret Thatcher.” As part of Yee’s eight-minute-long video, Yee spent forty seconds criticizing Lee by drawing an unfavorable analogy between Lee and Jesus. As a result, Yee was charged under section 298 of the Penal Code, the law prohibiting the “uttering of words with the deliberate intent to wound the religious or racial feelings.” While international news highlighted Yee’s prosecution as a blatant attempt to silence criticism of the former Prime Minister, the courts held steadfast in their belief that Yee’s words were hurtful towards Christians, and that offending the religious sentiments of any community would not be tolerated in Singapore. This Article will review the facts of the case, the history of the law, and its application. It will also attempt to situate the law in the larger Defamation of Religions resolution debate in the United Nations from 1999–2010 and review legal restrictions on free speech in the United States and Europe.

In the Philippines, transitional justice is plagued by questions about whether and how to deal with the past as well as whether and what kind of justice is possible in the present situation. In 2014, the Philippine government formally ended its armed conflict with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front by enacting a peace deal with transitional justice provisions. This article critically explores transitional justice in the Bangsamoro. It first offers a reading of the 'dealing with the past' framework of transitional justice endorsed by Swiss donors as largely reflecting a conventional approach that assumes that justice entails overcoming the past and transitioning to democracy. It then highlights continuing Moro experiences of land dispossession and human rights abuses, underscoring the limits of the 'dealing with the past' framework's recommendations on reparation and impunity. In doing so, it shows how transitional justice approaches can come with uncertainty about what it means to "move forward," competing strategic elite decisions about what "past" to overcome, and how the past is related to "justice." Finally, it argues that, as the country veers further towards authoritarian rule, conventional applications of transitional justice are further impeded. This article explores how federalism, in this context, receives enthusiastic support from elite and civil society actors in Mindanao for addressing the questions above more so than the transitional justice provisions of the peace agreement under the Duterte administration. Without offering measures for individual accountability for past violations, the government and supporters present federalism as a vision of historic justice, promising development and 'moving forward'.