Global Campus Human Rights Journal: new issue is now online

The third issue of the Global Campus Human Rights Journal is now online; it consists of five articles of a general nature and five reviews of regional developments in human rights and democracy in 2017.

 

The articles in the first part of the issue deal with:

 

• freedom of religion following terrorist attacks;
• the role of legal and policy frameworks in more effectively addressing food insecurity;
• increasing populism and new democratic leadership models in Latin America;
• the forced displacement of indigenous peoples in Colombia;
• the right to fair trial within developments in the Ugandan military justice system.

 

The second part of the issue analyses regional developments related to human rights and democracy in the Arab world, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Asia Pacific and the countries making up the Eastern Partnership (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine).

 

According to the Editors, “It emerges that human rights are under threat in all five regions that are covered, and that elected governments all too often are not upholding the rights of those under their jurisdiction. General trends include the failure to protect minorities, such as religious and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, women, children and refugees; the curtailing of freedom of expression though internet shutdowns and the criminalisation of free expression; the targeting of human rights defenders and journalists; and impunity for human rights violations.”

 

These setbacks notwithstanding, there are a number of positive developments worth highlighting such as the fact that In Angola and Liberia elections concluded with a peaceful transfer of power, with new leadership being installed, or that in a number of important instances the judiciary emerged as a counterweight to legislative and executive neglect or excesses. Good news are also relate to gender-based violence: at the domestic level Tunisia adopted legislation criminalising violence against women, including marital rape, while Lebanon repealed ‘rape-marriage laws’, which had enabled rapists to escape prosecution upon marrying the victim. At the regional level, new soft law standards related to the prohibition of child marriage and gender-based violence were put in place with the African regional human rights system.

 

By reporting on recent developments and encouraging comparative approaches, the Global Campus Human Rights Journal continues to offer a distinct forum for a critical analysis of the most pressing human rights issues of our time.

 

GCHRJ is supported financially by the European Union Commission and is an open-access journal available on the Global Campus Open Knowledge Repository. Submissions - in English, French or Spanish - are welcome at any time and should be sent to Isabeau de Meyer at idemeyer1@gmail.com. The Guidelines for Authors can be found here. The official hashtag is #GCJournal.