Tag Archives: Law

Monica Tennberg, Else Grete Broderstad, Hans-Kristian Hernes (eds.), Indigenous Peoples, Natural Resources and Governance: Agencies and Interactions (London: Routledge, 2021)

As Indigenous Peoples around the world face new and increasing forms of extractive pressure in their traditional territories, what opportunities do they have to exercise agency and protect their interests in local resource governance processes? In Indigenous Peoples, Natural Resources and Governance: Agencies and Interactions, editors Tennberg, Broderstad and Hernes seek to broaden their readers’ understanding of Indigenous resource governance dynamics by showcasing a wide range of case studies from settler States in the circumpolar Arctic (Norway, Sweden, Russia, Canada) and Oceania (New Zealand, Australia). Throughout this interdisciplinary collection, the editors’ and contributors’ focus is on the diverse and evolving interactions between Indigenous Peoples, State actors, and extractive industry players, which are shown to vary significantly across geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts.

Political scientists Hernes, Broderstad and Tennberg open the collection by summarizing core Indigenous rights and governance concepts and introducing their chosen theoretical framework: a ‘governance triangle’ highlighting the respective roles of State, industry, and Indigenous actors, as well as the governance mechanisms that mediate their interactions. In Chapter 2, Broderstad examines a rare Sámi victory against a proposed wind development in Kalvvatnan, wherein the Norwegian government took a precautionary approach and withdrew a permit that would have violated reindeer herders’ right to cultural protection by exacerbating pre-existing development impacts. This victory stands in sharp contrast to Chapter 3’s discussion of unsuccessful Sámi court challenges to the Norrbäck and Pauträsk wind projects. Through their joint analysis, legal scholars Cambou and Borg and expert witnesses Sandström and Skarin reveal how the proponents’ minimal efforts to mitigate anticipated project impacts facilitated the Swedish appeal court’s willingness to prioritize national green energy goals over Indigenous rights. In Chapter 4, Broderstad, Sámi scholar Brattland, and political economy scholar Howlett highlight how Norway’s and New Zealand’s differing “discursive, legal and institutional realities” (59) both enable and constrain Sámi and Māori efforts to influence or benefit from aquaculture licensing processes in their respective marine territories. The fact that State-mediated processes constitute Indigenous Peoples’ main point of engagement with resource governance in all of these case studies lends support to the editors’ contention that the State remains the “most prominent actor” (14) in the governance triangle. However, the balance of the collection deals with mining, an area in which direct Indigenous-industry engagement and deal-making is becoming increasingly common.

In Chapter 5, sociologist Goloviznina explores how Russia’s apparent disinterest in protecting Indigenous rights or mediating Indigenous-industry interactions has left the Evens of Yakutia little choice but to engage directly with mining corporations and try to use moral and reputational arguments to safeguard their interests. Sociologist Sam-Aggrey’s examination of Tlicho resource governance in Chapter 6 suggests that while First Nations that have entered into modern treaties with the Canadian State exert far more regulatory influence than their Russian counterparts, the Indigenous-industry agreements that have simultaneously become a central feature of mining governance in northern Canada have proved to be a mixed blessing for Indigenous signatories. In Chapter 7, political scientist Slowey argues that First Nations whose relations with the Canadian State are not mediated by modern treaties have far less leverage in resource governance and remain vulnerable to the whims of State actors, as illustrated by the Ontario government’s willingness to use the COVID-19 emergency to dismantle procedural safeguards and expedite mining approvals in northern Ontario.

In Chapter 8, Howlett and political scientist Lawrence offer a trenchant critique of the neoliberal logics underlying Indigenous-industry agreements in Australia and beyond. They conclude that “in the absence of an Indigenous veto over resource developments, there is no such thing as a fair and just negotiated agreement” (154). Indigenous Studies scholar Gjelde-Bennett offers a complementary critique of Sámi-State relations in Chapter 9, which examines the long-standing Kallak mine dispute in northern Sweden through the lens of competing neoliberal and Indigenous paradigms. While working “within the neoliberal political system in order to gain legitimacy” (167) may be the most effective way for Sámi to resist such projects, Gjelde-Bennett cautions that “appealing to liberal and neoliberal values of universal human rights and international rule of law” (167) may also undermine Sámi interests by helping to “uphold the ultimate authority of the state” (174).

In their concluding chapter, Tennberg, Broderstad and Hernes return to the governance triangle and associated theoretical frameworks in order to draw conclusions from a synthesized view of the case studies. As a result of the contributors’ limited and often confusing attempts to engage with those theoretical frameworks in their respective chapters, the editors’ heavy reliance on those frameworks makes the concluding chapter feel somewhat disconnected from the rest of the collection, even as the editors reach insightful conclusions about the evolving state of resource governance. Certain elements of the editors’ findings could also benefit from more nuance, such as their suggestion that “states will still have a central role in leveling the playing field for Indigenous peoples” (187), which implies that the playing field can in fact be leveled and that States can be expected to facilitate this leveling. This aspiration seems unlikely to be fulfilled while Indigenous Peoples’ scope for self-determination remains constrained by States’ privileged legal positions at international law coupled with their self-interest in retaining the final say in resource governance decisions – a reality recognized more clearly by Howlett and Lawrence.

While the collection purports to foreground Indigenous Peoples’ interests and perspectives, the contributor biographies fail to address the authors’ positionality, making it difficult to determine whether any of them are writing from a position of lived Indigenous experience. Explicitly addressing questions of voice and ensuring that editors and contributors situate themselves in relation to the material under discussion would strengthen a collection of this kind and make it easier for readers to assess the text’s decolonial bona fides. If future work in this vein is to be published with limited Indigenous involvement, Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples (Brush Education 2018) may offer a useful starting point for editorial decision-making on certain issues.

Marjo Lindroth and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, The Colonial Politics of Hope: Critical Junctures of Indigenous-State Relations (London: Routledge, 2022)

The volume is edited by Routledge, the British publishing house founded in 1951 and now a safe haven for many publications on Arctic studies.

The authors are Marjo Lindroth and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, both affiliates of the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi and University of Lapland. As the title “The Colonial Politics of Hope” suggests, the volume deals with the relationship between Indigenous communities and the state, offering a comparative overview between Australia, Canada, Finland, and Greenland/Denmark.

The main theme is “hope“. The authors trace the sources of this concept to the colonial era in which the only “hope” for Indigenous peoples to survive was integration into Western society. The empirical and conceptual analysis of hope follows three thematic paths: the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights, the ratification of ILO Convention 169, and the creation of self-governments such as the one established in Greenland in 2009. The decolonization process by the Nations Unite began in 1960, when several declarations were stating that “natural heritage and political determination belong to all individuals”. These rights were not to be influenced by diplomatic relations between states and were to be respected in all member states. As the book points out, not all states adopt the new provisions easily. Since the declarations of the General Assembly are not legally binding, in the 1970s the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) came into force. Even today, these conventions play a role of absolute importance in disputes involving cases of inequality, discrimination, and racism.

In the 2000s, the Universal Declaration of Indigenous Rights (UNDRIP) sought to establish and enshrine the principles and prerogatives that Indigenous communities demanded that states respect them. However, some countries did not immediately acknowledge the value of this instrument, which was once again not legally binding, and did not accept the declaration. Among these was Canada which in the UNDRIP article on the FPIC (free, prior and informed consent) saw the possibility of granting the right of veto to the Indigenous communities on the exploitation of natural resources. In reality, the Declaration recognizes that international relations between states is also based on economic well-being and leaves ample room and priority to national economic initiative.

The United Nations monitoring system has revealed many situations where Indigenous peoples’ rights are not respected. The authors refer to the 2019 case, when the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination request Canada to respect the free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous people before the construction of a pipeline.

The second chapter is dedicated to how the concept of hope has been developed in the social sciences. In recent decades, academic literature has focused on the analysis of hope, especially in times of instability and crisis. The authors have chosen 4 channels of analysis of hope: philosophical (through Bloch’ theorisation), analytical, hope as an effect and how hope has become a political conduit. In the first philosophical approach, the authors build a theoretical bibliography in which hope and being hopeful are compared. The approach to utopian thinking in times of crisis as a weapon to be “hopeful” is interesting. The analytical approach is based on the anthropological work of Hirokazu Miyazaki. Miyazaki identified hope as a method of knowing. In his studies, Miyazaki referred to hope as a means of legal recognition of the land ownership of some Indigenous communities in the Fiji Islands. Another important contribution is that of Nauja Kleinst who associated hope with mobility referring to the phenomenon of great migrations. The third category underlines how many aspects of human life are the effect of emotions arising from hope. Anderson’s theory reconstructs the economic, political and social arrangements between actual and possible reality (which is possible to do) through the strong feeling of hope. The fourth category is represented by the hope and power connection. Also in this case, the authors have reconstructed a dense philosophical literature in which hope is analyzed in different positions of power and subjection.

The third chapter is entitled “Battlefields of recognition” and concerns the inclusion of Indigenous peoples within national policies (Australia, Finland, Greenland/Denmark). The analysis in this case retraces the events and the “empty and silent” moments that led to important amendments in the various national jurisdictions. The amendments mentioned in the volume concern the inclusion of Indigenous rights through the ratification of treaties and judicial amendments (cases that have led to the reformulation of some norms). Despite legislative efforts, even today it seems that Indigenous peoples still suffer from the problems presented decades ago. This phenomenon can be explained by the cautious national political will to recognize these rights, as dubious mechanisms of democracy and decision-making. What seems to emerge is that what is legal is not said to be right. Geographical areas clearly represent different political and social arrangements. For example, the issue of inclusion and recognition of Indigenous rights in Finland is advanced through the awaited ratification of ILO Convention No. 169, while the situation in Greenland through the timeline that saw the creation of a self-government in 2009. Despite the creation of a self-determined body, the dream, or rather the hope, for complete independence has never died out. To date, a form of administrative regionalism exists between Greenland and Denmark, in which some matters are the responsibility of the island and others of the central state. Some of these areas do not rise from the possibility of overlapping creating crises of competence. The largest is between natural resource management (Greenland) and foreign affairs (Denmark). The Greenlandic social fabric is quite homogeneous with some more remote communities in North and East Greenland. The question of Greenlandic indigeneity in the event of full independence is still unresolved. Finally, Australia has demonstrated a certain constitutional dynamism through a series of referendums related to the Indigenous situation on the territory.

The authors denounce that in all three countries there is the promise of a process and greater recognition of Indigenous rights. The authors criticize how such promises have always been broken due to lack of political will. Greenland appears to be the most virtuous having placed the protection of Indigenous rights as the cornerstone of internal politics. In the face of states’ reticence, Indigenous peoples instead lead decisive campaigns of awareness and legal change. An example reported in the volume concerns the declaration of intent that the Indigenous community of Torres Strait presented to the Australian Government. The declaration referred to the Government’s intervention requesting a new referendum and greater organization in the hearing processes.

The fourth chapter ” Fickle contractuality” is the most interesting. This part is about how the Western concept of “contractuality” emerged in the relations between Indigenous communities and the state. The contractual form of relationships is a crucial and common aspect in the Western mentality. Through various contracts it is possible to negotiate and agree many aspects of human life: from work, to property, to the more private aspects. The contract that includes two or more parties inspires division. And it is precisely the division that clashes with the community of Indigenous rights who often suffer from the disproportion of power with the state (which has the last word on the decision). Although the Indigenous populations find themselves in a political, negotiating, economic system very distant from their own, the states are still very reluctant to recognize their rights for fear that this will create a decrease in their sovereignty.

The fifth chapter is entitled “Colonialism in the grammar of hope” and reconnects the common thread between colonialism and hope. According to the authors, this correlation also exists with postcolonial theories, despite the protracted violations of Indigenous rights suggesting that we are actually in a “contemporary colonialism”. Despite the emphasis that the volume has dedicated to the analysis of the politics of hope, colonialism has resisted its power. However, this does not hide the fact that hope has not also brought benefits. The current policy has shown a certain “care” and attention to the Indigenous issue, adopting more inclusive initiatives. In various countries such as Canada and Finland work has begun on the Reconciliation and Truth Commissions. These commissions have the objective of “healing” relations between the state and Indigenous peoples. The major concern is that these Commissions have only a symbolic meaning without having any practical repercussions and compensatory initiatives for past mistakes. Another concern is related to the limitations of this state “cure”, especially if the recognition of Indigenous rights is still linked to Western political and legal systems. In fact, it appears that only legal recognition is the only way for Indigenous populations to feel “included”, affected signed and recognized. Despite these critical issues, Indigenous peoples still continue to fight for their rights, demonstrating an indomitable resilience in the face of marginalization and attempts at assimilation. Resilience has been the manifesto of recent times. This attitude recalls the individual’s ability to face and overcome a traumatic event in life. The authors also underline the difference between hope and resilience: the former is the sentiment with which we look confidently to the future; while the second is fortitude with which we overcome the traumas suffered. Indeed, hope operates on the present (violence, dispossession and marginalization notwithstanding), while resilience seems to be eternally tied to the past. Indigenous political hope is not only aimed at compensation or compensation for past traumas, but at the construction of a more equitable and inclusive political and legal system.

The analysis of hope as a driving factor in relations between the state and Indigenous peoples also branches out in economic matters. The authors reconstruct a vast bibliography on liberalism and on how the state, in the inclusive claim, has advanced economic agreements with Indigenous peoples in order to actually profit from them. Such agreements have often resulted in the legalization of land dispossession and monetary compensation as the only method of compensation. Has hope become the “currency” for economic relations between the state and Indigenous communities?

I would like to dedicate the last few lines to the final considerations on the volume. I think the topic is very interesting because it is little explored at an academic level. Hope usually exudes a poetic vein in literature, so a political technical examination was wholly unexpected. Especially, if that analysis has been applied to Indigenous peoples and their struggles for rights. The content of the volume is very rich, but the structure is not very intuitive if you don’t fully know the subject. What I appreciated most is the rich refinement of the bibliography. Hope is analyzed from many points of view and the argumentation is never trivial. The analysis seems to suggest a negative and compliant note of Indigenous affairs with respect to state policy and priorities. At the same time, I don’t think the authors wanted to leave the reader with certain answers or results, but rather to invite him/her to reflect on hope from both an academic and an introspective point of view. The project lends itself to greater developments in the future, considering the growing interest in environmental issues and increasing inclusiveness of Indigenous people in climate litigations. Due to the quality and complexity of the contents, I suggest reading this text to both experts in the field and students in Philosophy, Comparative Law, Political Sciences, especially if they include a focus on the Arctic and Nordic diplomacy.

Frédéric Lassere, Anne Choquet, and Camille Escudé-Joffres, Géopolitique des Pôles. Vers une appropriation des espaces polaires ? (Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu, 2021)

The book “Géopolitique des Pôles.” subtitled “Vers une appropriation des espaces polaires?” (“Polar geopolitics. Towards an appropriation of polar spaces?”, author’s translation) written by Frédéric Lasserre, Anne Choquet and Camille Escudé-Joffres is a general public book describing geopolitical polar dynamics, responding notably to the “Arctic Scramble” narratives and similar discourses of a war on resources at the poles. The book states very clearly and from the beginning that the authors consider the risk of conflict to be over-exaggerated, and even unrealistic. Drawing on the academic background of the authors, the book presents a geographical, political and legal overview of both the Arctic and Antarctic regimes of governance in layman’s language.

The book has a very clear focus, a very clear goal: to demonstrate that there is no “cold rush” or “Polar scramble” in either the Arctic or Antarctica. Five chapters support this demonstration: first, an outlining of what makes polar regions attractive to stakeholders today, covering climate change, scientific interests, existing and potential resources as well as common (Southern) polar imaginaries. A second chapter on the political and legal reality of polar space appropriation covers in a very pedagogical manner the basics of the Law of the Sea, the Antarctica land claims and the processes relevant to Arctic maritime territorial claims. Follows a chapter focused on regional governance regimes, covering the Antarctic Treaty System from a practical approach, Arctic governance through the Arctic Council, environmental protection in Antarctica and environmental protection in the Arctic. Then comes a chapter on the regulation of key activities, which has a section reminding the legal and practical frameworks discussed previously applied to mining and fishing, and then a section on maritime traffic, a section on tourism. The last chapter focuses on the potential sources of tension in the Arctic, starting with a section on existing tensions in the Arctic, insisting on their low intensity, nonetheless, followed by a section on dispute solving mechanisms in Antarctica, and lastly a section covering Asian Polar interests. Lastly, a final chapter wraps up the original question with the optimistic conclusion that the climatic and environmental challenges burdening the Polar regions call for cooperation rather than for conflict.

The authors present an optimist view of the state of Arctic cooperation today. Because of the clear focus it is easy to follow, and every subsection relates clearly to the main point made. However, that comes to the price of sometimes being repetitive, including in the chapter structure itself with some frequent overlap. Besides, it mainly presents State-focused issues that are also relevant to non-Arctic stakeholders, glossing over or simplifying certain issues, which can be seen in the overly optimistic portrait of Indigenous inclusion in the Arctic governance regime that is presented, for example. However, keeping in mind that the book is not an encyclopedic endeavour but intended for the general French-speaking audiences, this is a coherent editorial choice and prevents it from becoming too information-heavy.

Moreover, the text is very pedagogic and shows the benefits brought by the interdisciplinary background of the authors: every legal mechanism mentioned is carefully detailed in an accessible language, completed later by an overview of the practices. Another consistent theme is the worry about climate change and its consequences, which is weaved through the entire book beyond the original subsection dedicated to it. It also contains a relative abundance of maps and tables which ease comprehension.

The vast majority of the book is focused on governance mechanisms, both legal and customary, and thanks to the clear focus the topic is explored in depth, especially on the Arctic side, which is much more developed. Despite covering both Polar ends, the book underlines on several occasions the fundamental difference between the two that is the Arctic organic, permanent population of 4 million people. However, the “Arctic” itself is never explicitly defined: due to the attention given to maritime claims since we are mostly talking about the political Arctic, one would expect the authors to follow the political definition of the Arctic Council. However, one notices some surprising omissions, such as the absence of mention of Iceland in the section dedicated to tourism for example – while it is mentioned in fishing related sections, or the absence of any map giving one or several definitions of the geographical Arctic. This seems to indicate a somewhat confusing understanding of the Arctic: some clarification would have been welcome.

As it is not a scientific publication but a mainstream audience work, there is no reference in the text, but there are two bibliographies at the end. The first one, the list of references for the text itself is a bit short, and the large share of French speaking references is surprising, but it is recent and up to date. The second one, a bit longer, is a selected bibliographies of work from the authors, which presents no overlap with the first one while providing other sources relevant to the topic as well.

To conclude, this book gets its point across in a simple but effective manner, through very clear even though somewhat repetitive demonstrations. As a text directed towards French mainstream audiences, it definitely achieves its goal by providing pedagogical explanations on a wide array of topics that often arise in the general media. It is a valuable introduction to polar geopolitics, that could potentially be used as a starting point for higher education students as well.

Tina Soliman Hunter, Jørnn Øyrehagen Sunde and Ernst Nordtveit (eds.), The Character of Petroleum Licences – A Legal Culture Analysis (Cheltenham: E. Elgar, 2020)

The Character of Petroleum Licences – A Legal Culture Analysis is the sixth book in the Edward Elgar’s “New Horizons in Environmental and Energy Law” series. It revisits the original study into the legal character of petroleum licenses in the relation between the licensor and licensee as of Daintith’s 1981 monograph The Legal Character of Petroleum Licences: A Comparative Study (University of Dundee, Centre for Petroleum and Mineral Law Studies, ISBN: 0906343089), and it looks at how it has been developed since then. The book incorporates not only the original jurisdictions – Australia, Canada, Norway and the UK – but also those of USA, the Netherlands, Uganda, Russia, Mexico and China. The introduction chapter pays attention to the fact that although the term “legal character” has been used in the 1981 monograph, little attention has been paid to its difference with regard to “legal culture”, which considers that politics, economy and law are intertwined, and displays the characteristics and internal relationships of the reviewed petroleum regimes.

Each chapter is self-standing and, if one has the particular task of comparing some of the petroleum laws, this may prove to be very hard or even impossible, due to the different approaches of the authors, associated with the peculiarities of each of the States.

Chapters 2 to 11 consider the petroleum licensing systems of the above-mentioned countries. The general model of presentation is the following: legal system, types of ownership of petroleum and the process of licensing. Thus, the reader may obtain knowledge and understanding on the step-by-step process of licensing and State participation in petroleum production. In addition, the chapters look extensively at who owns the natural resources; whether and when ownership passes to the licensee; what rights the petroleum licences grant – administrative, contract,  property or hybrid; the stages of petroleum production and the types of licences for the particular stage; revocation and change of the terms of the petroleum contract.

With the exception of Uganda, which is land-locked, the other nine jurisdictions are coastal States and, thus, they also refer to the seabed exploration and production, albeit focusing on either to a different degree. In other words, some of the authors concentrate on the offshore, others on land-based activities, and the third group on the two types concurrently. The reasons are grounded in the fact that seabed petroleum development has started later in time, while in some jurisdictions it is not sufficiently developed, or that the land-based petroleum resources have already been exhausted. That is why, it is important for one to pay attention to the historical development of the industry in order to comprehend the peculiarities of the legislation in the States under consideration.

The final chapter includes the concluding remarks by Terence Daintith, the editor of the 1981 predecessor of this book. He agrees that petroleum law, similar to the other bodies of law, is not static but develops to be in line with the current tendencies in terms of environmental issues as well as the protection of the interests of all stakeholders. In addition, States do not follow the same trajectory in developing their petroleum laws, which leads to the impossibility of putting them under a common denominator. But it does not mean that the industry has reached its peak and that future developments are impossible.

The book is written in an easy-to-comprehend language. And although there is no link among the chapters with the exception of the introductory and concluding parts, the reader may obtain a synthetic understanding of the various approaches used in governing the different stages of petroleum law. The only criticism is that the introduction of some chapters does not describe their structure and it may take some time for the reader to understand that it would be better to skip it and focus on the main part instead. But having in mind that the potential audience of the book encompasses a broader category of people than only those engaged in researching petroleum law, it is not of major concern. And the reason for this conclusion is that the book may serve a good starting point for the researchers in constitutional law to get a general understanding of the way the different States function as well as the historical links among them in this particular field.

Sustainable Development of Arctic Oil and Gas: Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Benefit-Sharing.

How would you feel if foreigners encroached on your natural resources for commercial exploitation without your consent and had no agreement with you regarding the sharing of benefits generated from its use? This is the case for vulnerable Arctic populations and Indigenous peoples. The Arctic is known as a vast storehouse of potential resources. Oil seeps have been recognized and used for commercial purposes in Northern Alaska, Canada, and Russia since the 1920s (Huntington & Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, 2007). They will continue to be a significant economic force in the Arctic, spreading through many areas and environments and impacting many individuals and communities. Additionally, the melting of Arctic glaciers caused by climate change provides opportunities to exploit new Arctic oil and gas deposits (Casper, 2009). In the Arctic, extractive factories invade indigenous and local populations’ land and water, posing a danger to their resources. These activities are, therefore, likely to affect the delicate and fragile Arctic ecosystem and endanger already vulnerable Arctic populations and Indigenous peoples, while at the same time improving economic growth (Casper, 2009).

Benefit-sharing can be described as a fair and equal distribution of the monetary and non- monetary benefits produced by resource extraction activities. Rewards include the allocation of taxes and royalties, business, and equity ownership, employment creation, negotiated arrangements, and community development (Wilson, 2019). Globally, benefit-sharing offers mean that indigenous/local populations and extractive industries cooperate peacefully to turn the resource “curse” into a developmental advantage (Petrov & Tysiachniouk, 2019). In remote areas in the Arctic, oil and natural gas production offers growth opportunities and also raises costs for residents, indigenous communities, and cultures. It affects the economy’s survival and reduces the traditional resource utilization of land (Tysiachniouk & Petrov, 2018). Benefit-sharing is a legal requirement and a component of corporate social responsibility that can promote sustainable development in the remote Arctic regions if adequately structured. In the Arctic, sustainable development can be defined as development that enhances the well-being, health, and protection of Arctic populations and inhabitants, while maintaining the institutions, roles, and resources of ecosystems (Petrov & Tysiachniouk, 2019). On the other hand, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a management principle in which organizations combine fiscal, social, and environmental issues in their business practices and the relationship with their stakeholder (“What Is CSR? | UNIDO,” n.d.).

Meanwhile, according to Wilson, for efficient control of industrial production’s environmental and social impacts, indigenous and local populations are pressing for fairer benefit-sharing by the extractive industries. International principles refer to Indigenous peoples’ rights to benefit from creating resources, engaging in decision making, and establishing development planning goals that specifically impact them. Although international standard procedure on indigenous rights for Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) exists for equitable distribution of benefit sharing with Indigenous peoples in resource development, there are currently no prospects for Indigenous peoples to play a significant role in strategic planning. Lack of meaningful engagement and participation of indigenous communities in decision- making during the life cycle of resource extraction activities undermines the FPIC principles in violation of Indigenous peoples’ rights. The disagreements over the benefits and negative effects of resource extraction have intensified due to structural changes triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The fall in market prices for gasoline due to a decrease in demand has impacted productivity and profitability (Bernauer & Slowey, 2020). It has resulted in exposing the failure of extractive corporations’ failure to incorporate Triple Bottom Line (TBL) initiatives that focus on the 3 Ps: (Planet, People, and Profit) into their business operations. Due to limited data on the ongoing economic, social, and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a gap in this research paper on the full impacts of the pandemic that will have to be addressed by future research.

This paper aims to address benefit-sharing in extractive industries and how Indigenous people can participate in community development decisions by answering how benefit-sharing would promote sustainability and access to decision-making in the era of Covid-19. The paper’s approach is based on a review of the literature to establish the principles underlying the study. The paper is divided into three (3) parts: a) benefit-sharing instruments and corporate social responsibility; it explains benefit-sharing principle, formation, purpose, and the relationship between benefit sharing and CSR to promote sustainable development in the Arctic, b) discuss indigenous control and implementation of international standards in respect of indigenous rights through the effective implementation of FPIC and its achievement strategies, and c) the impacts of COVID-19 on benefit-sharing agreements concerning the TBL initiative.

Fair and Equitable Benefit Sharing Principle, Formation, Purpose

In international environmental law, the debate regarding control and ownership of natural and biogenetic resources has been ongoing for the past several decades (Stellina, 2015).

Natural and marine genetic resources have traditionally been regarded and accepted as part of the common heritage of mankind. Nevertheless, the developed nations have been too concerned with the extraction of biological and genetic resources with the advancement of technology and the increased north-south divide over sovereign rights for natural resources (Stellina, 2015). To bring equity between the needs of developed and developing nations and how to protect and conserve marine and natural resources. Access to Benefit Sharing (ABS) was seen as a solution.

Since the 1990s, benefit arrangements have been a growing interest in regions with sound indigenous regulations, such as North America and Australia. (Sulvandziga, 2019). The principle arises from various international instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the “Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing to the CBD” (Sulvandziga, 2019, p.64). Access and benefit-sharing from an international legal perspective refer to how benefits resulting from the natural resources utilization, the protection of the environment, and the use of traditional knowledge would be shared between the communities granting access to the resources and the users of the resources (Unit, 2020 “The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing”).

James Anaya, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, drew unprecedented attention to the role of benefit-sharing concerning Indigenous people’s rights to land and natural resources (Morgera, 2014). According to Anaya, Indigenous people’s rights to benefit-sharing implies “the broad international recognition of the right to indigenous communal ownership, which includes recognition of rights relating to the use, administration and conservation of the natural resources existing in indigenous territories, independent of private or State ownership of those resources.” (Sulyandziga, 2019, p. 67). He stated that “Aside from their entitlement to compensation for damages, Indigenous peoples have the right to share in the benefits arising from activities taking place on their traditional territories, especially in relation to natural resource exploitation” as a reference to benefit-sharing in Article 15(2) of ILO Convention No. 169 and appropriate to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) Articles 25 and 26 respectively (Morgera, 2014, p. 1-2). In this regard, Anaya also stressed that the only clear international standard applicable to benefit- sharing is that it must be “fair and equitable” for such sharing. The benefits to be shared include tax revenue, information, scientific and commercial cooperation, joint management of natural resources, and technical support, which have been identified as monetary and non-monetary (Morgera, 2016).
James Anaya also argued that benefit sharing is seen as “one of a set of inter-linked safeguards for the realization of substantive rights of Indigenous peoples” (Sulyandziga, 2019, p.67). Sharing of benefits explicitly reflects a particular relationship among governments, commercial businesses, and indigenous groups. It is known that benefit sharing is part of the social license to operate, thus, the public approval of the operations of the industry plus the completion of mandatory mineral extraction licensing and permit requirements (Tysiachniouk & Petrov, 2018).

In a nutshell, the benefit-sharing aim is to ensure indigenous communities’ involvement in decision-making by improving their well-being and offering local communities’ control over their future as well as protecting Indigenous peoples’ human rights by promoting community development projects in remote areas in the Arctic.

Benefit-Sharing and CSR for Sustainable Development

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a principle whereby corporations willingly decide to commit to a healthier community and a safer world. CSR is defined by the Commission of European Communities in 2001 as “a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and their interaction with their stakeholders on voluntary basis.” CSR initiatives for international oil firms include developing risk control policies such as steps to avoid oil spills; focusing on energy conservation and green energy; establishing partnerships with the local communities where they operate; enhancing the quality of life of workers; and contributing to society as a whole (Cao, 2018). Thus, CSR initiatives enable businesses to move beyond regulatory standards to add to their competitiveness by engaging more in human capital, the community, and stakeholder partnerships.

Sometimes, companies engage in corporate social responsibility benefit-sharing schemes to satisfy investors and shareholders and to meet the needs of local communities only to the degree required to receive the ‘social license’ to operate (Tysiachniouk & Petrov, 2018). The commitment of an organization to localities often takes the form of compensation or targeted investments. However, the corporation holds the leadership role in the decision-making power of benefit sharing, making its preference prevail in several ways over community needs and desires (Petrov & Tysiachniouk, 2019).

According to Johnstone & Hansen 2020, the socio-economic and environmental effects of the exploration and production of oil have led to political and civil society problems that have caused social damage by companies in violation of human rights laws of the local populations and workers. This includes the right to land, culture, rights at work, an acceptable standard of living, and the right to engage in decision-making processes relevant to projects involving land and communities (Johnstone & Hansen, 2020). For this reason, it is therefore crucial for businesses practicing CSR to follow the TBL 3P’s (Profit, People, and Planet) approach as a measure for financial reporting on their business activities. The TBL concept, proposed in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, is the basis of most CSR theories. In 1994, the phrase was coined by John Elkington, often known as 3Ps or three pillars. It notes that a corporation should be accountable for three characteristics: profit, people, and the planet, i.e., economic, social, and environmental responsibility.

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) also argues that, as a method for assessing and reporting organizational success toward economic, social, and environmental performance, the TBL methodology is used. It is an effort to connect private businesses to sustainable global development by giving them a complete set of working priorities than just profit alone. The view held is that an organization must be financially stable, eliminate its adverse environmental effects, and function in compliance with community norms in order for it to be sustainable. Therefore, businesses can be considered profitable only if it takes care of all three components of the TBL, and all of them are incredibly closely related (Księżak & FischBach, 2017). Thus, one element cannot be adopted in isolation from the others.

Meanwhile, one accepted definition of sustainable development in Brundtland’s 1987 report defines it as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”(Fonseca, Domingues, & Dima, 2020, p.1). Sustainable development aims to resolve the societal desires to live best under the limits placed by nature. Development is a multidisciplinary process for all persons to reach a better quality of life. The interdependent and mutually reinforcing elements of sustainable growth are economic growth, social development, and environmental conservation (Fonseca et al., 2020, p.2). It indicates that, there is a relationship between CSR, TBL, and sustainable development as they all aim to address the same core elements.

Non-Governmental Organizations and the general population have a great deal of influence on CSR initiatives. According to Sustainable Development Working Groups Report, 2013 on “CSR in the Arctic-way forward,” the primary universal standards which drive CSR in the Arctic that were approved by the Arctic Council in the first workshop on CSR held in Stockholm from 26-27 January 2012 are the OECD Guidelines, the United Nations Global Compact, and the Global Reporting Initiative Reporting Standard. These guidelines are considered strong and adequate instruments that warrant more focus, follow-up, and enforcement by Arctic business operators (Group (SDWG), 2013).

The United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) of Human Rights promote that all states are responsible to uphold human rights and prevent violation by corporations and organizations of all kinds and sizes. The obligation allows enterprises to comply with appropriate national laws and self-regulate to fill policy differences between national and international law. Both government and non-states players must ensure that victims are entitled to remedies (Johnstone & Hansen, 2020). The UNGPs also stress that businesses should dialogue on stakeholder engagement, particularly in terms of “meaningful” consultation and engagement with communities and stakeholders (Wilson, 2020). Mineral extraction and mining ventures in the Arctic can not only add to the economic circulation of natural resources, produce revenue, and provide new employment for the local population, but can also be followed by negative effects on the ecosystem, traditional land, climate, and the health of local people ((Novoselov, Potravny, Novoselova, & Gassiy, 2020).

For that matter, Novoselov, Andrey, et al., 2020 argue that industrial projects in the Arctic are highlighted and influenced by many Arctic stakeholders’ interests through social, environmental, anthological, and cultural practices. Therefore, the achievement of benefits for resource extraction projects on conventional lands in the Arctic should also mention:

  • Protection of the environment needed to lead the traditional Indigenous peoples’ commercial activities;
  • Cultural heritage preservation and traditional knowledge;
  • Reduction of social conflict induced by project implications awareness;
  • Employment development;
  • Health care improvement;
  • Providing infrastructure
  • Providing educational accessibility;
  • Increasing living standards and empowering the indigenous community with requirements for socio-demographic reproduction.

The compensation process must meet all parties’ needs, which can only be accomplished by including all stakeholders in the execution of strategic planning. For this reason, the fair and equitable benefit-sharing arrangement in the Arctic regions is critical, and it must facilitate both procedural and distributional equity. The principle of benefit-sharing encompasses several instruments, such as the negotiation of partnership agreements, the purchase of traditional products, the creation of indigenous jobs, the funding of transport, and social infrastructure development (Tysiachniouk, Henry, Tulaeva, & Horowitz, 2020). This scheme encourages indigenous communities to make better use of these financial opportunities to achieve future sustainable growth.
Consequently, community engagement is an essential aspect of international human rights law in the decision-making process on matters concerning one’s own life and the society in which one lives. However, Agenda 21 also acknowledges, among other things, that strong public involvement in decision-making, including the need for individuals, groups, and organizations to engage in decisions, especially those concerning the communities in which they live, is one of the essential prerequisites for achieving sustainable development. The mining industry in the Arctic affects the environment, the safety of the water supply, and the local people’s welfare. It then takes the form of compensation and corporate social benefit to cater to the harm suffered. In the meantime, a win-win outcome will only be accomplished if all parties are engaged in the decision-making process to disclose their specific needs regarding the benefit of enhancing the indigenous livelihood towards community development.

Indigenous Control and Implementation of International Standards

Various international partners have been discussing international standards on human rights and Indigenous peoples’ protection for the sustainability of the environment. As a result, resource production’s social and cultural issues are of significance, and the lack of community participation in the early stage of resource development and active engagement of indigenous communities in decision-making strategies violates the FPIC rights of Indigenous peoples.

The precise interpretation of the theory can be determined by breaking down the meaning of the terms that make up the FPIC principle. The UN Guidelines on FPIC describe “free” as a system that is not subject to externally imposed deadlines. As a result, aboriginal peoples should not be forced, intimidated, or threatened into consent (Hughes, 2018). According to (Pillay, 2020), “prior” means that approval should be obtained sufficiently in advance of any permission or start of operations, and that indigenous consultation or consensus procedures should be respected in terms of time constraints. Thus, the engagement must take place well ahead of planned events to give Indigenous peoples and communities enough time to establish and create relationships, consider all key information, and make decisions with the aim of successful relations (Hughes, 2018).

(Pillay, 2013) further explain that “informed” implies that information is provided on a variety of topics, such as the nature, size, pace, reversibility, and scope of any proposed project or activity; the project’s purpose as well as its duration; the locality and areas affected; a preliminary assessment of the likely economic, social, cultural, and environmental impact, including potential risks; personnel likely to be involved; and the locality and areas affected. The possibility of refusing consent may be included in this procedure. The approval process must include consultation and participation.

Therefore, a fragile Arctic environment is of concern because of the adverse consequences of extractive practices, which are now turned into industrial “green movements,” resulting in the invasion of indigenous lands (Wilson, 2020) and causes danger to their ways of life, such as herding, fishing, and farming. The focus on indigenous rights is on FPIC principles. FPIC may take many forms but is an important sustainable development corporate governance framework. It is a right set out for Indigenous peoples in international treaties and declarations, especially ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and some national legislation (Buxton & Wilson, 2013).

The interpretation and implementation of international norms and values will enhance shared understanding and meaningful stakeholder participation. In recent years the call for respecting indigenous privileges concerning a set of criteria in resource development has grown stronger and stronger. According to Wilson (2019), the lack of respect for Indigenous peoples’ control, rights, and consents in resource exploration has urged local communities in the Arctic regions to encourage governments and companies to allow them to take greater control and do more in adhering to international norms/standards. To achieve these objectives, there exist the calls for FPIC to create fairness/equity, in addition to guiding and applying the spirit of FPIC in industry projects through existing laws/international standards around the world.

However, (Buxton & Wilson, 2013) argue that, for effective implementation of FPIC, first, it must be enforced by deliberative mechanisms in which fair viewpoints based on shared data are weighed through gathering information from all parties. Second, the procedure must be structured in a flexible way for societies concerned in order to fulfill customary practices, human rights, and to reach joint decisions. Finally, the process must enable local citizens to participate on equitable footing and make responsible decisions constructively. Indigenous control, in many ways, has been pointed out by Wilson. She further explains as the ability a) to ascertain how organizations envision their future about extractive industries and whether they want resource development to occur on their lands and b) to ensure appropriate decision-making powers and fair benefit sharing if products appear as stated (Wilson, 2019).

As Wilson explains, these demands are indicated in the ILO Conventions on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which suggest, among other things, it is the right of Indigenous peoples to decide their priorities and to exercise control over their development; yet, as the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, agrees, this particular indigenous right is rarely respected in practice (Wilson, 2019).

Strategies for Achieving Control through Free, Prior, and Informed Consent

As noted earlier, there are some debates on the right methods to address the lack of control in achieving fairness and equity: the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, identified a ‘preferred’ model, based on greater levels of indigenous control over the nature of the development and the sharing of the benefits, emphasizing, in particular, the indigenous right to determine priorities and strategies for the product or use of their lands and territories. Also, elsewhere, the ‘prevailing’ model of resource development has been termed by some as ‘extractivist’ which in turn means indigenous relations with the natural environment should be based more on the partnership, respect, and entitlement through ‘knowing’ rather than ‘owning’ the resources (Wilson, 2019).

Anaya’s ‘preferred’ model adds more voice and corresponds to Tysiachniouk and Petrov’s ‘shareholder’ model that envision greater indigenous control over decision-making, including strategic planning (Wilson, 2019). The notion of ‘indigenous control’ also extends to decision- making about whether a project goes ahead. However, in cases where Indigenous peoples do not own the mineral resources in question, this requires a process of FPIC before critical development decisions get formulated in these communities (Wilson, 2019). Therefore, for the standard of good practice in stakeholder participation, the FPIC must be established from discovery to completion over the project life cycle in line with obtaining the social license to operate for a transparent and timely procedural process.

The Impacts of Covid-19 on Benefit-Sharing Agreements Concerning the TBL 3 Ps Initiative

The Covid-19 global crisis is worrying and poses a threat to health care for all, including to Indigenous peoples worldwide. Indigenous populations are still facing inadequate access to hospitals, a substantially higher incidence of infectious and non-infectious diseases, lack of access to necessary facilities, hygiene, and other main prevention steps, such as drinking water, soap, and disinfectants. Vulnerable populations may suffer discrimination and stigma in accessing healthcare and may only be considered if programs and amenities are offered in indigenous languages. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples’ cultural lifestyles are a pillar of their resilience as most indigenous groups frequently hold large traditional meetings to mark special occasions, which can pose a danger at this moment in preventing the spread of the virus.

As stated in (“COVID-19 and Indigenous Peoples | United Nations for Indigenous Peoples,” n.d.) the number of COVID-19 infections worldwide grows, with high mortality rates in some vulnerable communities with underlying health conditions. However, statistics on the prevalence of infection in indigenous populations are not yet available (even where ethnicity records and tests are available) or are not reported. It is also not available in indigenous languages for important information on infectious diseases and prevention steps. This means that aboriginal communities became incredibly fragile during the global pandemic since they face a high degree of socioeconomic neglect and are at excessive risk of public health crises. The Arctic indigenous communities are not left out of these devastating issues. In contrast, “A report from the Centers for Disease Control found that non-Hispanic American Indians and Alaska Natives (AIAN) account for 0.7 percent of the U.S. population, but 1.3 percent of COVID-19 cases”(“Vulnerable Communities,” 2020).

Meanwhile, industrial resource activities are ongoing in their territories. It means that the benefits provided by extractive industries are not meeting the need and desires of the local communities. Infrastructure such as adequate and modern health facilities is not available. Corporations must adhere to the benefit-sharing mechanism that can promote community development. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic is also creating chaos in extractive economies worldwide because of decline in the selling price of oil. This is due to the decrease in demand and decrease in production and profitability caused by running physical distancing protocols, all of which has resulted in a substantial decrease in the share price of many large mining firms (Bernauer & Slowey, 2020).

As claimed by Bernauer & Slowey, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought conflicts over the benefits and harmful effects of extraction activities in Canada. Three conflict issues include:

Community Health (People)
As a result of chemical pollution by extractive industries, physical and mental health conditions have been an issue for Indigenous peoples in the communities. Additionally, new diseases can be contracted from immigrant workers, local lifestyle changes, and disturbances in relationships with the community. Such migrants, however, are agents by whom the coronavirus could spread to remote communities.

However, the reaction from mining firms initially varied as the COVID-19 pandemic hit Canada. Although some companies responded by shutting down, some, such as in British Columbia, continue to operate. Criticism from some Indigenous elders and activists is that this is because the companies still operating value corporate revenues more than the people’s health and safety, condemning their decisions to keep operating during the pandemic as not thinking of the well-being of their workers and the community at large. Nevertheless, in Nunavut, the Baffin Land Iron Mines-operated Mary River iron mine drastically reduced activities and sent all Nunavut workers home with pay as a benefit to help deter the transmission of the disease to Inuit communities.

Environmental Protection
Environmental impact mitigation is the concern of Indigenous peoples regarding activities of extractive industries. More tension is likely to develop since the pandemic interrupts production and impact global commodity prices. For instance, the oil price is affecting the exploration of Russian Arctic oil compared to competitor producers. In the sense that demand for February – June of a particular form of oil supply was seen to have traded below zero at about $40 per barrel (/bbl_.28) in May (“Isolation and Resilience of Arctic Oil Exploration during COVID-19,” 2020). Besides, this is not a complete reflection of global demand. Meaning, the extreme conditions, and instability indicate the effect the pandemic is having on the oil markets. As a result, enterprises may call on the Indigenous people for environmental sacrifice to give them more space to adjust and return to profitability for the share of the benefit.

Economic Benefit (Profit)
The income generated by oil and gas industries would continue to bypass indigenous communities, including revenues, royalties, company contracts, and employee salaries. Benefit- sharing arrangements incorporated in new agreements and Indigenous Industrial Agreements are essential tools for capturing Indigenous peoples’ local economic benefits. In the post-Covid-19 world, the businesses may request not sharing benefits for the communities’ development. They will propose reducing rentals for resources and salaries for employees regarding the global economic recession and incentives. Indigenous groups have embraced extractive industries as an engine of community development and as a way of promoting self-determination goals. These economic developments are also impacting industry-indigenous relations (Bernauer & Slowey, 2020), resulting in many others getting trapped in their territories with extractive schemes that continued either with or without their consent. Therefore, to negotiate agreements that will support community development, Indigenous peoples must pursue consultation (Wanvik & Caine, 2017) regarding equity in distributing the benefits sharing to address the needs and desires of the people, the communities, and for future generations.

Conclusion and Recommendation

Benefit-sharing is a useful tool for community development and demands high indigenous participation throughout extractive industries negotiation. Fair benefit-sharing is a legal requirement and part of good governance and corporate social responsibility, which encourages sustainability in the environment if managed properly. Benefit-sharing arrangements enhance human well-being and preserve or compensate for ecosystem degradation. Meanwhile, the broadest benefit-sharing mode and mechanism in the Arctic may not ensure sustainable development in the communities (Petrov & Tysiachniouk, 2019).

Therefore, the absence of Indigenous peoples’ representation in policy decisions on creating the extractive sector in their territories, including decisions on the allocation of land for extractive industry operations and the awarding of exploration licenses, threatens the possibilities for fair development results. It is advised that there should be an informed decision to monitor the benefit-sharing scheme, and total community control of benefit-sharing and management must exist to eliminate any controversy. As a result, companies and the state must collaborate with indigenous and other impacted populations to develop local institutional capacity and human resources as part of benefit-sharing obligations. This will ensure that the policies that share benefits are transparent, sensitive, empowering, and lead in a just and equitable way to Arctic populations’ sustainable development. Thus, corporate social responsibility and Triple Bottom Line initiatives should be monitored and enforced in every Arctic state’s soft laws. Every mining and oil industry player operating in the Arctic must report companies’ financial, social, and environmental performance over time by protecting businesses amid future uncertainty.

References

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Buxton, A., & Wilson, E. (2013). FPIC and the extractive industries: A guide to applying the spirit of free, prior and informed consent in industrial projects. International Institute for Environment and Development. Pdf. 36-42.
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Fonseca, L. M., Domingues, J. P., & Dima, A. M. (2020). Mapping the sustainable development goals relationships. Sustainability, 12(8), 3359. Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, P. 1-2.
Huntington, H. P., & Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme. (2007). Arctic oil and gas 2007. Oslo: AMAP. P.1.
Hughes, L. (2018). Relationships with Arctic indigenous peoples: To what extent has prior informed consent become a norm? Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law, 27(1), 19-20.
Isolation and Resilience of Arctic Oil Exploration during COVID-19: Business as usual or Structural Shift? (2020, December 22). Retrieved January 25, 2021, from The Arctic Institute website: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/isolation-resilience-arctic-oil- exploration-covid-19-business-structural-shift.
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Novoselov, A., Potravny, I., Novoselova, I., & Gassiy, V. (2020). Compensation fund as a tool for sustainable development of the Arctic indigenous communities. Polar Science, 100609. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polar.2020.100609. P. 2-3.
Novoselov, A., Potravny, I., Novoselova, I., & Gassiy, V. (2020). Sustainable Development of the Arctic Indigenous Communities: The Approach to Projects Optimization of Mining Company. Sustainability, 12(19), 7963. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12197963.
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Petrov, A. N., & Tysiachniouk, M. S. (2019). Benefit Sharing in the Arctic: A Systematic View. Resources, 8(3), 155. https://doi.org/10.3390/resources8030155. P. 1, 13
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Tysiachniouk, M. S., Henry, L. A., Tulaeva, S. A., & Horowitz, L. S. (2020). Who Benefits? How Interest-Convergence Shapes Benefit-Sharing and Indigenous Rights to Sustainable Livelihoods in Russia. Sustainability, 12(21), 9025. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219025.
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Introduction to the papers from the June 2017 conference “The Sick Action”

The papers in this collection deal with the theme of evil, interpreted according to various points of view: psychoanalytic, anthropological, philosophical, religious, mythological and legal. Indeed, the authors themselves have diverse professional and geographic origins: they are Italians and Icelanders, and they include university professors, psychoanalysts, philosophers, judges, and anthropologists. The discussion of these works occurred in Palermo, Italy, 9–10 June 2017, and was organized by the Sneffels Psychoanalytic Circle of Palermo, headed by Dr Roberto Buccola, an Italian psychoanalyst who, among his various papers, led two seminars at the University of Akureyri, Iceland, in 2016. The presentation of the articles occurred, with few exceptions, in Italian, so in some of these articles the reader can encounter peculiar Italian expressive forms translated into English.

The issues dealt with in this volume resonate with contemporary incidents of international terrorism in Europe, as these articles examine possible causes and ways of confronting them.

Palermo, 17 February 2018

Gaetano Roberto Buccola

Interpretation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by Human Rights Bodies in Times of Economic Distress. The case of Greece

Introduction

Economic, social and cultural rights have borne the brunt of the recent economic crisis and the austerity measures adopted to counter it. Due to their gradual implementation and the need of positive measures to implement them, they were the first to be attacked especially in developed countries where certain achievements in the field of labour rights and social security had attained quite a high standard. The proposals to amend the labour law in France and the fierce reaction of the people are indicative of this trend[1]. Given that these achievements were the result of the progressive implementation of economic, social and cultural rights, as stipulated by international human rights treaties, most of the initiatives to restrict them result in prohibited retrogressive measures.

States falsely consider that it is easier to limit economic and social rights instead of civil and political rights for various reasons. First of all there is much discussion regarding the real justiciability of social rights. Secondly, social rights are interpreted by international human rights bodies mainly through an expansive interpretation of civil and political rights. Thirdly, the dire situation of economic, social and cultural rights in most developing countries renders the discussion of their limitation in developed countries somewhat inappropriate or at least awkward. Finally, certain researchers maintain that sometimes social rights are given lower status as a matter of ideological choice[2], while their real protection is difficult due to inequalities especially within the urban centres. After discussing the possible ways of applying economic, social and cultural rights in the first part of the essay, I will then examine their application during economic crises with a special reference to Greece focusing mainly on two fields, labour rights and social security rights, and the case-law produced by international human rights bodies in that respect.

The rise and current protective framework of economic, social and cultural rights in international human rights law

I. The global normative framework: indivisibility of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights

1.  At the international level

References to human rights in general and economic, social and cultural progress and development in particular are already included in the UN Charter[3]. The first international instrument – albeit not legally binding[4] – that refers both to civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[5]. Civil and political rights – the so-called “first generation” rights – were distinguished from economic, social and cultural rights or “second generation” rights in that they required no positive action by the state in order to be safeguarded. The latter had only to refrain from interfering with the right. To the contrary, it was deemed that economic, social and cultural rights required the allocation of resources and public expenditure. Therefore, they were not of immediate implementation but could be achieved only progressively. During the Cold War, Western states considered civil and political rights to be the only enforceable rights. There is also a “third generation” of rights that comprises the rights to development, self-determination, healthy environment, natural resources, collective rights etc.[6].

One can easily draw the conclusion that this is an obsolete argument that cannot firmly support a human rights separation theory, since it has already been established in international human rights jurisprudence that abstention is not enough for the protection of civil and political rights but these require positive measures as well[7], while the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action[8] reaffirmed that: “All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis”[9]. Even before that, the Proclamation of Teheran in 1968, stressed that “human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible, the full realization of civil and political rights without the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights is impossible”[10]. Moreover, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has repeatedly reaffirmed that human rights are “interdependent and indivisible”[11].

While most international human rights treaties of special protection contain provisions both for the protection of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, verifying thus their interconnected character[12], this approach was not followed by the UN Economic and Social Council when the issue of adoption of a universal covenant arose. At that time, the delegates considered that civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social and cultural rights, on the other, could not be implemented in the same way[13]. The former required that states refrain from certain harmful action, while the latter could be implemented only progressively, by means of positive measures and appropriate legislative action.

Hence, the UN General Assembly took the policy decision to request the drafting and eventual adoption of two separate covenants, one dedicated to civil and political rights and the other to economic, social and cultural rights[14]. Both were submitted simultaneously for consideration to the General Assembly so that their unity could be emphasized; it was the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). They were adopted on the same day by the same UN General Assembly resolution[15]. However, the two moved hence on separate tracks.

The competent organ to control implementation of the ICCPR, through the consideration of periodic reports submitted by states-parties, is the Human Rights Committee[16]. On the contrary, monitoring of the ICESCR was entrusted initially to the ECOSOC, which had the duty to receive – through the intermediary of the UN Secretary General – and consider reports on the measures that states have adopted and the progress made in achieving the observance of the rights recognized in the ICESCR[17]. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights was established only in 1985 under resolution 1985/17 (28 May 1985) of ECOSOC and was mandated to carry out henceforth the monitoring functions assigned to ECOSOC in Part IV of the ICESCR[18].

Furthermore, the ICCPR was equipped from the very beginning with an Optional Protocol which empowered the Human Rights Committee to receive and consider individual communications on alleged violations of the rights of the Covenant. Through the mechanism of individual communications the Human Rights Committee has accumulated a remarkable case-law, which is referred to very often by other international judicial and quasi-judicial human rights bodies. The Optional Protocol to the ICESCR, which established a similar individual complaints procedure regarding economic, social and cultural rights was adopted only in 2008 and entered into force on 5 May 2013. This lack of individual complaints mechanism constituted a major practical obstacle for those that supported the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights.

2. At the European level

The same separation is prevalent within the European continent, where this differentiation of first and second generation rights was reflected in the adoption of two instruments having a different control mechanism. The main instrument of general human rights protection, the European Convention on Human Rights adopted in 1950 and binding on all Council of Europe member states[19], and its Additional Protocols recognise only civil and political rights (and the right to education from second generation rights by virtue of article 2 Protocol no 1). What is more, the instrument is vested with a unique implementation mechanism. A European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is entrusted with considering individual applications on human rights violations, issuing judgments that are binding upon the respondent state, while a political organ, the Committee of Ministers, is responsible for monitoring the compliance of the member state involved, whenever a violation is found by the ECtHR, through the proposal of individual and general measures to remedy the violations. While the ECtHR protects mainly civil and political rights, it also guarantees indirectly economic, social and cultural rights by interpreting them under the prism of civil and political rights[20].

Economic and social rights as such are guaranteed by the European Social Charter (1961) and the Revised European Social Charter (1996), ratified by 27 and 34 states respectively[21]. The instrument is equipped with an Additional Protocol providing for a system of collective complaints (1995). The monitoring organ in this case is not a court but rather a Committee, the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR), which is composed of independent experts. The latter monitors the compliance of the contracting states through two procedures: the reporting procedure, according to which states are bound to submit national reports regarding the implementation of the provisions of the Charter, and the collective complaints procedure which allows for the lodging of complaints. The ESCR examines the reports and adopts conclusions, while in respect of collective complaints it adopts decisions. Neither of them is binding.

Finally, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, adopted in the framework of the EU and having the same legal value as the founding treaties by virtue of the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty[22], translates in a binding document the indivisibility of human rights as it was officially recognised in the Vienna Plan of Action: human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated[23]. Therefore, the Charter includes all three sets of rights: a) classical first generation rights (civil liberties, political rights, judicial protection), b) second generation (economic, cultural and social rights), 3) third-generation rights e.g. protection of the environment. And rights that do not fit in any of the abovementioned categories, e.g. data protection, consumer protection. There is however a gap as to which social rights are declared as principles and which as justifiable rights.

II. The justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights[24]

Formerly there was much discussion on whether economic, social and cultural rights could be considered justiciable. The prevalent opinion was that civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights remain in two different legal instruments and the latter have not attained the same degree of justiciability and enforceability as civil and political rights. The main arguments against are the following[25].

The “policy argument”

  • First of all it was considered that the implementation of economic, social and cultural rights was clearly a matter of policy. According to this point of view, courts are an inappropriate forum to adjudicate and pronounce on issues of social policy. And in case they are called to adjudicate, they should accord a considerable margin of appreciation to the state authorities[26].

The “limited resources argument”

  • Moreover, since their effective protection required resources, it rested solely on the state to realize them progressively. Accordingly, states argue that they do not have adequate resources to provide even the most elementary socio-economic rights to their populations. Therefore, courts could not play an active role in this procedure, because otherwise they would have to meddle in the legislative and executive function by making the law rather than applying it. It would be, in other words, an impermissible form of judicial activism. The partisans of the progressive realization approach had an unexpected ally: article 22 UDHR which stated that “Everyone, as a member of society … is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality”.

The “effective remedy argument”

  • Another argument raised by those maintaining the non-justiciability of socio-economic rights is the fact that the ICESCR does not contain any provision on the duty of states to provide an effective remedy in the national legal order to individuals whose socio-economic rights have been violated. Indeed, the right to an effective remedy is a cornerstone provision in all human rights treaties protecting civil and political rights[27].

Those arguments representing a rather traditional view on the matter have thence been rebutted by the following[28].

The “violations approach”

  • One alternative, maintained by A. Chapman is the “violations approach”[29]. According to this, one should set aside the progressive realization of economic, social and cultural rights, which does not allow for their monitoring, and rather focus on the state conduct that violates these rights. Thus, violations could result from governmental measures that actually contravene the provisions of relevant international instruments or from the creation of conditions that do not foster or permit the realization of these rights and, last but not least, from policies and legislations that fail to fulfill minimum core obligations. For example, a state in which a significant number of individuals are deprived of essential foodstuffs, of primary health care, of basic shelter and housing or of basic education is failing to discharge its obligations under the ICESCR[30]. In that context, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has also stressed that vulnerable members of society must be protected, even in times of severe resources constraints, caused by adjustment programmes, economic recession or other factors[31].

The evolving role of courts in a democratic society

  • Another argument in favour of the justiciability of socio-economic rights relates to the role of courts in general in a democratic society. Indeed, a constant disagreement among lawyers is the difference between “legal” and “political” matters. One could seize the courts for the former but not the latter. For a long time it was suggested that matters involving the allocation of resources should be left to the political authorities rather than the courts. It is an invalid argument, if we take into account that a great range of matters have always political implications. This should not impede the courts from adjudicating on them. Likewise, courts are already involved in cases which have considerable resource implications. This approach has been also adopted by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has pointed out that the active involvement of courts in questions implicating socio-economic rights is imperative, in order to protect the rights of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society[32].

Economic, social and cultural rights that can be enforced immediately

  • Furthermore, one could distinguish between those socio-economic rights that could be enforced immediately and others that are by definition subject to progressive realization. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in its General Comment no.3[33], asked for the provision of judicial remedies with respect to rights which may be considered justiciable. It also enumerated a non-exhaustive list of rights that “would seem capable of immediate application by judicial and other organs in many national legal systems”. These include the equal right of men and women to the enjoyment of all economic, social and cultural rights (article 3), the right of everyone to the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work (article 7a)i), the right of everyone to form trade unions and the right to strike (article 8), the rights of children (article 10 §3), the right of free and compulsory primary education (article 13 §2a), of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to choose for their children schools (article 13 §3), the right of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions (article 13 §4), freedom indispensable for scientific research and creative activity (article 15 §3). As the Committee stated, “the fact that realization over time is foreseen under the Covenant, should not be misinterpreted as depriving the obligation of all meaningful content”[34].

Domestic application of the Covenant

  • Fourthly, the absence of a provision on effective remedies does not constitute per se an obstacle to the justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights. Although the ICESCR does not contain a counterpart to article 2 §3b ICCPR, it does stipulate that: “Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures” (article 2 §1). Pursuant to General Comment No. 9 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural rights the phrase “appropriate means” also includes domestic legal remedies, which reinforce every other initiative[35]. According to the Committee: “Where the means used to give effect to the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights differ significantly from those used in relation to other human rights treaties, there should be a compelling justification for this, taking account of the fact that the formulations used in the Covenant are, to a considerable extent, comparable to those used in treaties dealing with civil and political rights”[36]. In the same vein, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has used article 25 ACHR to request effective remedies for the demarcation and titling of indigenous land in cases where civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights intersect[37].

The “permeability principle”

  • Another way to address the question of justiciability is through the “permeability principle”[38]. According to this, civil and political rights are used as a basis for admitting complaints concerning economic, social and cultural rights. For instance, allegations regarding the violation of the right to adequate housing could be treated though the right to property or violations of the right to health could be admitted as a possible infringement of the right to life or the right to humane treatment. The contribution of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights case-law to this discussion is priceless. Indeed, the IACtHR cuts the Gordian Knot of the justiciability of socio-economic rights, by protecting them through the dynamic and broad interpretation of civil and political rights. In that way, the indivisibility and interconnected character of the two generations is reinforced, since economic, social and cultural rights are inherent in civil and political rights.

The impact of austerity measures on economic and social rights. Issues of effective protection

I. The position of the Committee on economic, social and cultural rights

The centrepiece of the ICESCR is the obligation on States parties to respect, protect and fulfil economic, social and cultural rights progressively, using their maximum available resources[39]. Moreover, states parties to the ICESCR have an immediate obligation to ensure the implementation of a minimum essential level of all economic, social and cultural rights. This minimum core[40] covers for instance all obligations that ensure an adequate standard of living such as essential health care, basic shelter and housing, basic forms of education etc. In order to achieve this goal, available resources have to be allocated proportionately. Thus, for instance, a budget that relies heavily on military expenditure will save little for education or health care. Even if available resources are totally inadequate, the state bears the burden of proof to demonstrate that it has used all its resources in a proper manner so as to cover the minimum core[41].

However, states enjoy a wide margin of appreciation (to borrow the phrase inaugurated by the ECtHR)[42] regarding the implementation of socio-economic rights. The obligation of progressive realization carries naturally the prohibition – albeit not absolute – of retrogression. According to General Comment no 3, any deliberate retrogressive measure, if not prohibited, requires “the most careful consideration and would need to be fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the Covenant and in the context of the full use of the maximum available resources”[43]. This obligation remains the same even in times of economic distress or adjustment programmes.

Hence, unlike the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, derogations are not allowed from the ICESCR even during times of economic emergency[44]. According to the Maastricht Guidelines on violations of economic, social and cultural rights, states are obliged to respect, protect and fulfil economic, social and cultural rights through appropriate legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial and other measures and failure to observe this obligation may result in violation of said rights[45]. For instance, arbitrary or sweeping forced evictions, which are frequent in situations of economic crises[46], violate the right to housing. Withdrawal of basic labour standards protecting private employees may amount to a violation of the right to work. Last but not least, denial of basic health care may result to a violation of the right to health in extreme circumstances even of the right to life or the prohibition of degrading treatment.

Despite the fact that full realization of economic, social and cultural rights is achieved progressively, this does not alter the legal obligation of states to adopt measures immediately or as soon as possible to that direction. States are obliged to demonstrate that they are actually taking such measures and that they are making progress for the full realization of these rights. Thus, the notion of “progressive realization” cannot be used as a pretext to avoid full execution of the Covenant’s provisions. Furthermore, certain minimum core obligations such as essential foodstuffs, essential primary health care, basic shelter and housing, or the most basic forms of education have to be satisfied, irrespective of the economic distress or the availability of resources[47]. In a letter[48] addressed by the Chairperson Pillay to all states parties it is stressed that even though states are allowed to adopt austerity measures in order to overcome severe financial crises, however these decisions should not lead to the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights, especially if this results in negative impacts on vulnerable and marginalized individuals such as the poor, women, children, persons with disabilities, older persons, people with HIV/AIDS, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees. Hence, while adjustments in the implementation of economic and social rights are inevitable, these should not lead to regression. It is interesting that the Chairperson referred to “the pressure that is exercised on many States parties” without clarifying where this pressure comes from: the overall economic necessity or third parties?

In her letter the Chairperson also identifies four requirements that have to be met by adjustment programmes: a) they must be a temporary measure, b) they must be necessary and proportionate, c) they must not be discriminatory but they must strive to mitigate inequalities especially with regard to the disadvantaged, d) the minimum core content of economic and social rights, as developed by the International Labour Organization, must be ensured at all times. Strangely enough, these requirements are identical to those applied for derogation measures from civil and political rights during states of emergency[49].

II. The case-law of the European Court of Human Rights

Even before the current economic crisis, the ECtHR had rendered judgments that included an economic dimension: violation of the right to life regarding the death of fifteen children in a home for children with severe mental disabilities due to lack of food, heating and basic care[50], inadequate access to health care for detainees or asylum-seekers raising issues under articles 2 and 3 ECHR[51], health rights of prisoners[52], violation of article 8 ECHR due to the planned eviction of Roma from an unlawful settlement without proposals for rehousing[53], total deprivation of a social pension[54], qualification of all social benefits as possessions even if they are non-contributory, so as to be covered by article 1 of Protocol No. 1 ECHR[55] etc. Of particular interest was a case regarding insufficient amounts of pension and the allegation of the applicant that this amounted to inhuman treatment, although the Court did not find a violation[56].

With regard to austerity measures adopted by states embroiled in budgetary crises and adjustment programmes, the European Court of Human Rights has already set a clear legal precedent. In Da Silva Carvalho Rico/Portugal the outcome was quite predictable: the ECtHR has dismissed the case applying the “proviso of the possible” doctrine[57]. According to this theory, borrowed by German constitutional law and applied by the Portuguese Constitutional Court as well, the state cannot be forced to comply with its obligations in the framework of social rights if it does not possess the economic means to do so[58]. Thus, budgetary constraints on the implementation of social rights can be accepted provided that they are proportionate to the public aim sought and they do not deprive the right of its substance. With a similar reasoning, the Court declared manifestly ill-founded applications against pension reductions for civil servants in Portugal[59] or the temporary reduction in the pensions of judges in Lithuania[60] which had their origin in austerity measures as a response to the economic crisis.

Against this background, we are waiting with extreme anticipation the judgment of the Grand Chamber that will reconsider the case Béláné Nagy/Hungary. The Chamber has already found that the removal of a disability pension through consecutive amendments to the eligibility criteria was considered excessive and disproportionate, thus constituting a violation of article 1 of Protocol No. 1[61].

The global economic crisis of 2007-2008 and its impact on Greece

I. The beginning of the crisis

The causes of the global economic crisis of 2008 have already been extensively discussed and will certainly continue to preoccupy political economists in the years to come, especially insofar as no safe exit from the overall crisis is yet envisaged. Consequently, we will not purport to delve into the multifaceted causes of the financial crisis, but rather to offer an overview of it and most importantly the way it has impacted on Greece and how it prompted the relevant austerity measures.

The financial crisis traces its roots in the USA back in 2007. The crisis hit initially a small segment of the financial markets, namely subprime mortgages, but soon it resulted in global recession[62]. Shortly after the initial blow, many financial institutions mostly in developed countries have been affected. National governments were required to bailout banks; the housing market was affected resulting in evictions, while prolonged unemployment became a quasi-permanent feature of contemporary societies. The crisis has had an adverse impact both in developed and developing countries, the latter mainly through the trade channel or through workers’ falling remittances[63]. According to reports, the losses of gross domestic product amounted to 10% of global output in 2008-2010, while the loss in values of assets and the loss of personal income precipitated by the austerity measures cannot still be calculated with certainty[64].

II. The immediate aftermath: the European sovereign debt crisis

The global financial crisis resulted in a European sovereign debt crisis in the end of 2008-2009 which affected primarily Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus. The affected countries were unable to repay government debt or to bail out over-indebted banks without the assistance of third parties. Given the particularities of the European integration – the eurozone is only a currency union and not a fiscal union thus member states maintain different tax, remuneration and pension rules – the options available to political leaders to react were limited. In fact, EU and the eurozone in particular had no contingency plan to counter the effects of an economic crisis of such a magnitude.

The first mechanism that was put in place was the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). The EFSF was established in June 2010 as a “société anonyme” under Luxembourgish law and has provided financial assistance to Ireland, Portugal and Greece, through the issuance of bonds and other debt instruments on capital markets. It has 17 shareholders, namely the eurozone member states. Since 1.7.2013 the EFSF is not allowed to engage in new financing programmes or enter into new loan facility agreements. The EFSF assistance programme for Greece expired on 30 June 2015[65].

It was replaced by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a permanent international financial institution, established by an intergovernmental treaty signed by the euro area member states on 2 February 2012[66]. ESM is a crisis resolution mechanism, providing stability support to eurozone countries threatened by severe financing problems. Its financial assistance is not funded with taxpayer money; the funds are rather acquired by issuing capital market instruments and engaging in money market transactions. ESM has 19 shareholders – the euro area member states – and is open for membership to all EU member states that will adopt the euro as their sole currency in the future. Since 1 July 2013 it is the sole mechanism for responding to new requests for financial assistance and has thus far assisted Greece, Cyprus and Spain, the first two through loans subject to macroeconomic adjustment programmes and the latter through a loan to government for bank recapitalization. Greece is the sole eurozone member state that has received support from both institutions and the only one to remain in the ESM stability programme. Cyprus has exited successfully the programme on 31.3.2016, while the financial assistance programme for Spain expired on 31.12.2013[67].

Participation in these financial stability mechanisms entails as a short- and long-term consequence the adoption of austerity measures and far-reaching privatization programmes. In fact, austerity measures were the primary political choice of governments in their effort to stem the effects of the economic crisis and reduce deficit and public debt[68]. Even when applied with restraint, austerity measures have an adverse impact on the enjoyment of acquired economic and social rights and thus on our ordinary and everyday life. This approach was inaugurated by the International Monetary Fund that implemented the Structural Adjustment Facility in 1986 and the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility one year later, making financial assistance conditional on the implementation of neoliberal structural adjustment programmes impacting adversely on human rights[69].

III. The impact of the economic crisis on Greece

1. The financial assistance provided to Greece

Due to its macroeconomic imbalances[70] and the lack of flexibility resulting from its status as a eurozone member state, Greece was the first eurozone country affected by the global economic crisis. Overcoming the “no bail-out” clause of article 125 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which prohibits the Union and individual member states from assuming the commitments of governments and other public authorities[71], the first financial assistance package for Greece was agreed in April 2010 and consisted of bilateral loans from eurozone member states and the International Monetary Fund (the so-called Greek Loan Facility).

However, the Greek Loan Facility was inadequate to counter a more or less systemic crisis. Therefore, in March 2012 the Eurogroup approved a second support programme for Greece, provided again by the Eurozone member states and the IMF. This time, the Eurozone assistance was not provided though bilateral loans but through the EFSF. Furthermore, the Eurozone member states decided to apply the procedure of the Private Sector Involvement (PSI) in the restructuring of the public debt. Thus, in May 2012 about 97% of privately held bonds took a 53,5% cut of the face value of the bond, corresponding to an approximately 107 billion euro reduction in Greece’s debt.

Overall political instability and reluctance of the Greek governments to adopt and implement measures and reforms requested by its lenders led to another impasse in the summer of 2015 when Greece, unable to repay its debts, arrived very close to official insolvency. Controls were imposed on Greek banks to avoid a massive flow of capital and the Greek government decided to submit a request for financial assistance to the ESM. After laborious negotiations of 17 hours the parties reached an agreement (the Financial Assistance Facility Agreement) on 13 July 2015. The agreement was approved by national parliaments and on 19 August 2015 by the ESM Board of Governors. The precise amount of ESM financial assistance will depend on the IMF’s decision regarding its participation in financing the programme, and on the success of reform measures by Greece, including the privatisation of state assets[72].

2. The measures adopted

In order to receive the financial support packages, Greece was requested to adopt a series of specific measures of adjustment the implementation of which was monitored in the first two phases (Greek Loan Facility and EFSF) by officials from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF, the so-called “Troika”, a unique institution of an ad hoc nature whose establishment lacked an appropriate legal basis in primary EU law. For this purpose a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the member state concerned and the “Troika”, whereby the member state – in our case Greece – undertook to carry out a number of actions in exchange for financial assistance. The assistance was provided on the basis of strict conditionality; thus the successive Greek governments enjoyed limited leeway in the adoption of the measures required to overcome the crisis[73]. The same stands for the ESM: a set of prior actions were requested urgently in order to enter into negotiations for the reform agenda as it was set out in the most recent Memorandum of Understanding which was approved by the ESM Board of Governors on 19 August 2015 following its endorsement by ESM members according to their national procedures. The MoU of August 2015 focuses on four key areas: restoring fiscal sustainability; safeguarding financial stability; boosting growth, competitiveness and investment; and reforming the public administration.

Given the urgency of the situation, the measures adopted at the national level in the course of the three successive financial assistance packages were not carefully balanced leading to restrictions on economic and social rights. A series of laws, presidential decrees and ministerial decisions form the backbone of the austerity legislation. Due to their high number and lengthy content a detailed analysis of the said legal documents is beyond the scope of the present article. We will provide a selection of the most representative legislations adopted and we will focus on the ones that are detrimental on the social rights selected for analysis in the present article: social security and labour rights.

The first set of social rights attacked by austerity measures were labour rights and social security rights. A set of laws[74] introduced tectonic changes, amongst which figure the following[75]:

  • modifications to both public and private pension schemes;
  • reduction of public sector wages by 12% and later a further reduction of 3%.;
  • remuneration of special apprenticeships for people between 15-18 years old with 70% of the general minimum wage, while new entrants in the labour market under the age of 25 would be remunerated with 84% of the general minimum wage;
  • establishment of the wage setting system by law, whereas the minimum wage would be determined by a government decision, after consultation with the social partners;
  • reduction of the general minimum wage by 22% for workers older than 25 years old and by 32% for younger workers;
  • precedence of the company level CEAs over sectoral or occupational ones even if the latter contained more favourable provisions, provided that the safety net of the National General Collective Agreement is observed;
  • arbitration procedures could be initiated only upon mutual consent of the parties, while the arbiter shall take into consideration the economic distress and the requirements of the adjustment programme;

 

Austerity legislation and effective protection of economic, social and cultural rights[76] in Greece

I. Social security rights

Article 12 of the European Social Charter guarantees the right to social security. Pensions are a principal branch of social security[77]. Both the European Court of Human Rights and the European Committee of Social Rights examined cases related to pension cuts, reaching totally different conclusions.

In Koufaki and ADEDY/Greece, the ECtHR found no violation of article 1 Protocol 1 ECHR, guaranteeing the right to property. The Strasbourg court reaffirmed the wide margin of appreciation that states enjoy with regard to their social policy and concluded that the reductions pursued a legitimate aim and were not disproportionate[78]. Moreover, there was no evidence that the applicant run the risk of falling below the subsistence threshold, while the removal of the thirteenth and fourteenth months’ pensions had been offset by a one-off bonus.

To the contrary, the European Committee of Social Rights, concluded in five decisions on collective complaints against Greece that the cumulative effect of the modifications of the pensioners’ social protection were a violation of the right to social security under Article 12 ESC[79]. In particular, the Committee ruled that certain restrictions such as those related to holiday bonuses, restrictions of pension rights in cases where the level of pension benefits is a sufficiently high one and in cases where people are of such a low age that it is legitimate for the state to conclude that it is in the public interest for such persons to be encouraged to remain part of the work-force than to be retired, did not in themselves constitute a violation of the ESC. However, the cumulative effect of the restrictions would bring about an overall degradation in the standard of living of the pensioners concerned.

It is interesting that the Greek Government tried to conform to the decision of the European Committee of Social Rights by notifying to the Committee of Ministers the measures it had taken to remedy the violations. The measures had a twofold approach: firstly the protection of vulnerable groups and secondly the improvement of the social security system. As to the first pillar, the government asserted that the pensions below 1000 euros would be guaranteed, the Benefit of Social Solidarity (EKAS) which is a non-retributive benefit for the protection of the elderly with low pensions would continue to be granted, a pension of 360 euros would be granted for the non-insured elderly based on certain conditions, while according to Law 4052/2012, the programme “Pensioner’s homecare” had been established. It had also introduced favourable regulations regarding the payment of the Extraordinary Special Property Tax, tax exemptions for certain types of pensions, as those granted to war victims, war invalids, blind persons or invalids and beneficiaries of EKAS, while cuts on pensions were not made if the beneficiary or members of his family receive small pensions, or are invalids[80]. As to the improvement of the social security system, the government tried to counter problems of fraud in social security and incidents of “contribution evasion”

While the measures notified are in themselves welcome, it is doubtful whether they are going to last, especially as there is no sign of overcoming the crisis and Greece is supposed to introduce further measures in view of the ESM assistance package she is going to receive.

Contrary to the hesitant approach of the ECtHR regarding the right to social security in economic emergencies, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has consistently applied a different approach. In case “Five Pensioners”/Peru[81] the problem was the reduction by 78% of the pensions of the public sector workers while by law and Constitutional Court judgments their pension was planned to gradually equalize the salary they used to receive. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights claimed the violation of articles 21 (right to property), 25 (right to judicial protection) and 26 (progressive development) of the Convention. The respondent state, for its part, invoked the argument of the state of emergency due to the economic crisis that it faced at that time.

The Court dwelt upon two questions: a) whether the right to a pension could be considered an acquired right, and b) what parameters should be taken into consideration to quantify the right to a pension, and whether it is possible to cap a pension[82].

Although the first question has been answered in the negative by the ECtHR in Koufaki and ADEDY/Greece[83], the IACtHR followed its own path of reasoning, assisted in part by the Constitution of the country and the jurisprudence of its Constitutional Court. Indeed, the former stipulated in its provisions that the “social regimes established for the pensions of public sector employees do not affect legally acquired rights, particularly the right corresponding to the regimes of Decree Laws 19990 and 20530”[84] (these decrees constitute the legal basis for the granting of the pensions in question). Furthermore, the Constitutional Court indicated that, once the requirements for granting a pension set forth in Decree Law No. 20530 have been fulfilled, the employee: “[…] incorporates into his patrimony, by virtue of the express authority of law, a right that is not subject to recognition by the Administration, that is not something that the law grants in some way, that, as has been recalled, arises from compliance with the requirements established by law. Thus, those who were subject to the regime of Decree Law 20530 and who, until the entry into force of Legislative Decree 817 had already complied with the requirements indicated in the norm, that is, they had worked for twenty years or more, have the right to an equalized pension, in accordance with the provisions of Decree Law 20530 and its modifying provisions”[85]. Bearing into consideration the foregoing, the IACtHR concluded that the right to property, stipulated in the ACHR, protects also the right of the applicants to receive an equalized retirement pension in the sense that it is an acquired right[86]. The Court referred also to the limitation clause of the San Salvador Protocol (article 5), holding that, although states may restrict the enjoyment of socio-economic rights in order to preserve the general welfare in a democratic society, and consequently the right to property, such restriction should take place only through the appropriate legal procedure[87]. However, in the instant case no legal process has been applied.

What is most important in the Court’s reasoning is indeed its approach of the right to property in conjunction with the right to a pension. The Court emphasized that from the time that a pensioner pays his contributions to the pension fund, ceases to work for the institution in question and opts for the retirement regime set forth in the law, such pensioner acquires the right to have his pension governed by the terms and conditions established in such law. It is a very important statement, especially if we take into account the adjustments brought about to pension systems all over the world due to the current economic crisis[88]. The Court applied the same reasoning in another case brought before it by the Commission against Peru[89].

Of particular interest is the dictum of the Court regarding the violation of article 26 of the American Convention on Human Rights. The Court did not deny its violation. Instead, it refused to pronounce upon it, stressing that the progressive development of economic, social and cultural rights should be measured in relation to the growing coverage of the right to social security and to a pension of the entire population and not in the circumstances of a very limited group of pensioners[90]. In any case, it did not preclude a prospective violation of the article in the factual and legal framework of another case[91].

 II. Labour rights

The right to a decent remuneration which is enshrined in article 4 of the European Social Charter[92] was examined thoroughly by the ECSR in complaint no. 66/2011. The Committee examined the differentiated reduction of the minimum wage of people under 25 and it concluded that it constituted a violation of the right to fair remuneration[93]. The Committee held that although in certain circumstances it is acceptable to pay a lower minimum wage to young workers, this wage must under no circumstances fall under the poverty level of the country. In the same set of decisions (no 65/2011), the Committee has found further violations of article 4 ESC, in particular para. 4. More specifically, the Greek state by equating the first twelve months of employment in an open-ended contract with a trial period, made dismissal without notice or compensation possible during this period, thus violating directly article 4 para. 4 ESC.

Unlike the decisions on violations of the right to social security, where the Greek Government has introduced measures of remedy, here the Greek delegation before the Committee of Ministers, while accepting the conclusions of the ECSR, it pointed out that the measures were of a provisional nature and that the Greek Government had the firm intention to revoke these measures as soon as the economic situation of the country would allow. However, due to the political and economic constraints, “it was not possible to envisage a set timeframe, although it was unlikely that tangible results in Greece would be apparent before 2015”[94].

In this respect we should also cast an eye on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The right to salary was central in case Abrill Alosilla et al./Peru[95], regarding the retroactive application of decrees that between 1991 and 1992 eliminated the salary scale system that was in effect. Although the state acknowledged its international responsibility before the Commission (in relation to the right of “amparo” – article 25 ACHR – and not the right to property – article 21 ACHR), the failure to conclude promptly a friendly settlement brought the case before the IACtHR.

In this case, the Court did not make any specific reference to economic, social and cultural rights or the San Salvador Protocol. Nevertheless, the national legal documents examined by the Court (judgments of the Constitutional and Social Law Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice) and the facts of the case imply the violation of socio-economic rights and in particular the right to receive remuneration.

The issue in question was the repeal, by virtue of decrees with retroactive effect, of the salary adjustment system known as “salary scales”.  This system was not subject to collective bargaining and consisted of the automatic adjustment of monthly remuneration for the personnel at that time denominated as Functionaries and Senior Management, taking as its basis a) the remuneration of the unskilled laborer or lowest position at the company and b) the Salary Scales or Indexes, or Variation Coefficients previously established and assigned to each position. In effect, each time the company increased the salary of the lowest positions as a consequence of a collective bargaining process, by necessity it also resulted in increases for the other positions in the company that could not benefit from that process[96]. The suppression of the “salary scales” system had as a result not only the reduction of salaries but also the retroactive collection of payments[97].

The Court reminded that it has developed a broad concept of property and that it has, through article 21 ACHR, protected vested rights, which are understood as “rights that have become part on an individual’s wealth”[98]. It also emphasized that the principle of non-retroactivity of the law meant that the new law does not have the authority to regulate juridical situations that have been duly consolidated. In this respect the IACtHR observed that the “salary scales” system had generated an increase in wages that had become part of the wealth of the victims, i.e. a vested right. The Court differentiated between the system of salary adjustments, which was not a right of the victims per se, and the salary increases already received that had already become part of the workers’ wealth. In effect, the latter constituted a vested right that was affected by the retroactive application of the law, resulting in violation of the right to property[99].

One should note the “human face” shown once more from the Court, regarding the personal situation of the applicants. In effect, the IACtHR paid particular attention to the fact that all workers had organized their finances based on their salaries and that the salary reduction compromised their opportunity to provide, for instance, economic support to sick family members, while some of them were obliged to sell possessions. It is a human approach that we rarely observe in an international tribunal, even a human rights one[100].

Concluding remarks

Even though international bodies reaffirm in every occasion that retrogression in the protection of economic, social and cultural rights is prohibited and despite the reassurances of the Greek government in one set of complaints before the ECSR that it is doing everything possible to guarantee the protection of vulnerable groups, the situation in Greece is far from stabilising or improving. The new request of assistance before the ESM brings along a new series of measures affecting socio-economic rights (Laws 4389/2016 and 4387/2016) and a great array of privatisations in public assets and organisations that touch upon the minimum core of social rights. A salient example is the announced privatisation of the Athens and Thessaloniki Water and Sewerage Company against the ruling of the Greek Council of State[101] that such a move could put public health at risk due to the uncertainty regarding the quality and affordability of the services[102]. We have a long way ahead until we can declare with certainty that socio-economic rights in Greece enjoy the level of protection they did before the economic crisis.

Notes

[1] Loi travail : 17 % de grévistes à la SNCF pour la première journée de grève illimitée, Le Monde.fr avec AFP, 01.06.2016, http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/06/01/loi-travail-debut-d-un-mouvement-de-greve-illimitee-a-la-sncf_4929935_3234.html

[2] Garcia Pedraza P., Crisis and social rights in Europe. Retrogressive measures versus protection mechanisms, Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University, 2014, p. 18.

[3] See articles 1, 55, 56, 61, 62, 68.

[4] There is a general consensus that most of the human rights norms enumerated in the UDHR have acquired a status of customary law, see in particular, Henkin L., The age of rights, Columbia University, New York, 1990; Meron T., Human rights and humanitarian norms as customary law, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989. This argument is further corroborated by the fact that the UN Human Rights Council in its Universal Periodic Review mechanism (established in 2006 by virtue of UNGA res. 60/251) is using as a reference instrument not only the human rights treaties binding upon states and the UN Charter but also the UDHR.

[5] UNGA res. 217 A/10.12.1948.

[6] For this categorization see Karel V. Human rights: A thirty year struggle. The sustained efforts to give force of law to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. UNESCO Courier, 30:11, Paris, November 1977. Contemporary scholars have overridden this conceptualization (see infra).

[7] Mowbray A., The development of positive obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Law in Perspective, vol. 2, Hart Publ., Oxford-Portland Oregon, 2004.

[8] Adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna on 25 June 1993.

[9] ibid. Part. I, §5.

[10] Proclamation of Teheran, Final Act of the International Conference on Human Rights, Teheran, 22 April to 13 May 1968, U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 32/41 at 3 (1968).

[11] See for instance, General Comment no 9 “The domestic application of the Covenant”, UN doc. E/C.12/1998/24, 3.12.1998: “The adoption of a rigid classification of economic, social and cultural rights which puts them, by definition, beyond the reach of the courts would thus be arbitrary and incompatible with the principle that the two sets of human rights are indivisible and interdependent”, §10.

[12] International Convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, UNGA res. 2106 (XX), 21.12.1965; Convention on the Elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, A/RES/34/180, 18.12.1979; Convention on the rights of the child, A/RES/44/25, 20.11.1989; International Convention on the protection of the rights of all migrant workers and members of their families, A/RES/45/158, 18.12.1990; Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, A/RES/61/106, 24.1.2007.

[13] See for an account of the relevant discussion, Craven M., The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: a perspective on its development, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995; Eide A., Economic, social and cultural rights as human rights, in Falk R., Human rights: critical concepts in political science, Routledge, London, 2008, p. 299-318.

[14] See A/RES/6/543, 4.2.1952.

[15] A/RES/2200(XXI) A, 16.12.1966. ICCPR has 167 ratifications, whereas ICESCR 160.

[16] Arts 28 et seq. ICCPR. Similar committees of independent experts have been set up by all core human rights treaties.

[17] Art. 16 ICESCR. The procedure of examination is described in arts 16-23 ICESCR.

[18] “Review of the composition, organization and administrative arrangements of the Sessional Working Group of Governmental Experts on the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”, Economic and Social Council resolution 1985/17.

[19] Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (as amended by Protocols no 11 and 14), Rome 4 XI 1950, ETS 005.

[20] The Council of Europe promotes the indivisibility of human rights and the ECtHR has emphasised already in its very early jurisprudence that “there is no water-tight division” between social and economic rights and civil and political rights, Airey/Ireland, appl. no. 6289/73, judgment 9.10.1979, para. 26. The regional court that has an extensive jurisprudence on economic, social and cultural rights through an expansive interpretation of civil and political rights is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, see in that respect Saranti V., Economic, social and cultural rights in the Western Hemisphere under the prism of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights case-law, Annuaire International des Droits de l’Homme, VII/2012-2013, p. 515-553.

[21] Greece ratified the European Social Charter on 6 June 1984 by virtue of Law 1426/1984 accepting 67 of the Charter’s 72 articles. The Revised European Social Charter has been ratified on 18 March 2016. Greece has also ratified the Additional Protocol and has accepted the system of collective complaints on 18 June 1998. However, it has not made the declaration that would allow non-governmental organisations to submit collective complaints.

[22] In 2000 the European Parliament approved the Charter which was given legally binding force in 2010 when it was incorporated into the consolidated version of the TEU, by virtue of article 6 TEU that declared that the Charter shall have the same legal value as the Treaties. However, UK and Poland have chosen for a special status through the Protocol on the Application of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU to Poland and to the United Kingdom. Pursuant to this instrument, the ability of the Court of Justice of the EU or any other court or tribunal of Poland or of the United Kingdom is not extended to find that the laws, regulations or administrative provisions, practices or action of Poland or of the United Kingdom are inconsistent with the fundamental rights, freedoms and principles that are reaffirmed by the Charter. Thus the Charter does not create justiciable rights applicable to Poland or the United Kingdom except in so far as Poland or the United Kingdom have provided for such rights in their national law. See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2007:306:0156:0157:EN:PDF

[23] Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, Adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna on 25 June 1993, §5,  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/Vienna.aspx

[24] See for a general discussion Coomans F. (ed.), Justiciability of economic and social rights. Experiences of domestic systems, Intersentia, Antwerp, 2006; de Schutter O., International human rights law, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 740-771; Langford M. (ed.), Social rights jurisprudence: emerging trends in international and comparative law, CUP, 2009; Liebenberg S., The protection of economic and social rights in domestic legal systems, in Eide A., Krause C., Rosas A. (eds.), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A textbook, 2nd ed., Martinus Nijhoff Publ., 2001, p. 55-84; Matscher F. (ed.), The implementation of economic and social rights: national, international and comparative aspects, N. P. Engel, Kehl am Rhein, 1991; Ramcharan B.G. (ed.), Judicial protection of economic, social and cultural rights, Martinus Nijhoff Publ., Leiden, 2005; Scheinin M., Economic, social and cultural rights as legal rights in Eide A., Krause C., Rosas A. (eds.), Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A textbook, 2nd ed., Martinus Nijhoff Publ., 2001, p. 29-54.

[25] Dennis M.J., Stewart D.P., Justiciability of economic, social and cultural rights: should there be an international complaints mechanism to adjudicate the rights to food, water, housing and health? 98 AJIL, 2004, p. 462-515 ; Bossuyt M., La distinction juridique entre les droits civils et politiques et les droits economiques, sociaux et culturels, 8 Revue des Droits de l’Homme, 1975, p. 783-820; Vierdag E.W., The legal nature of the rights granted by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 9 Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, 1978, p. 69-105.

[26] For instance, the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly reaffirmed that states parties enjoy a wide margin of appreciation, when they determine their social policy, especially if their resources are limited and they have to set priorities, see Koufaki and ADEDY/Greece, nos. 57665/12 and 57657/12, decision 7.5.2013, §31 ; Terazzi S.r.l./ Italy, no 27265/95, 17.10.2002 ; Wieczorek/Poland, no 18176/05, 8.12.2009 ; Jahn et al./Germany, nos 46720/99, 72203/01 and 72552/01; Mihaieş and Senteş/ Romania, nos 44232/11 and 44605/11, decision 6.12.2011 ; Frimu and 4 other applications/Romania, nos 45312/11, 45581/11, 45583/11, 45587/11 and 45588/11, decision 7.2.2012, §§40, 42 ; OReilly et al./Ireland, no 54725/00, decision 28.2.2002 ; Pentiacova et al./Moldova, no 14462/03, decision 4.1.2005 ; Huc/Romania and Germany, no 7269/05, decision 1.12.2009, § 64.

[27] See art. 2 §3 ICCPR, art. 13 ECHR, 25 ACHR. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights does not contain an equivalent provision. However, article 26 of that instrument stipulates that: “States parties to the present Charter shall have the duty to guarantee the independence of the Courts and shall allow the establishment and improvement of appropriate national institutions entrusted with the promotion and protection of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the present Charter”.

[28] See, van Hoof G.J.H., The legal nature of economic, social and cultural rights: a rebuttal of some traditional views, in Alston P., Tomasevski K. (eds.), The right to food, Martinus Nijhoff Publ., 1984, p. 97-110.

[29] Chapman A., “Violations approach” for monitoring the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 18 Human Rights Quarterly, 1996, p. 23-66. Also, Chapman A., Russell S. (eds.), Core obligations: building a framework for economic, social and cultural rights, Intersentia, Antwerp, 2002.

[30] Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment no. 3, “The nature of states parties’ obligations (art. 2 §1 of the Covenant)”, UN doc. E/1991/23-E/C.12/1990/8, Annex III, §10.

[31] ibid. §12.

[32] General Comment no. 9, “The domestic application of the Covenant”, UN doc. E/1999/22, §10. See also decisions of national courts that give effect to socio-economic rights such as the right to housing, the right to education and the right to food, Government of the Republic of South Africa/Grootboom and others, Constitutional Court of South Africa, judgment of 4.10.2000; Yated – Non – Profit Organization for Parents of Children with Down Syndrome and 54 Parents/Ministry of Education, Supreme Court of Israel, judgment of 14.8.2002 (HCJ 2599/00); People’s Union for Civil Liberties and another/Union of India and others, Supreme Court of India, judgment of 2.5.2003. Relevant excerpts are quoted in de Schutter O., International human rights law, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 751 et seq.

[33] “The nature of states parties’ obligations (art. 2 §1 of the Covenant)”, UN doc. E/1991/23-E/C.12/1990/8, Annex III, §5.

[34] ibid. §9. See also the Limburg Principles on the Implementation of the ICESCR, UN doc. E/CN.4/1987/17, “Although the full realization of the rights recognized in the Covenant is to be attained progressively, the application of some rights can be made justiciable immediately while other rights can become justiciable over time” (principle no 8).

[35] Similarly, despite the absence of a clause on effective remedies in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the respective Committee has emphasized that effective national remedies must be available to redress violations, underlining that “economic, social and cultural rights, as well as civil and political rights, must be regarded as justiciable”, see General Comment no. 5 “Implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, arts 4, 42 and 44 §6, UN doc. CRC/GC/2003/5, 27.11.2003.

[36] General Comment no. 9, “The domestic application of the Covenant”, UN doc. E/1999/22, §7.

[37] See, for instance, Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni/Nicaragua, 31.8.2001.

[38] Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Handbook for National Human Rights Institutions, New York and Geneva, 2005, p. 50.

[39] Art. 2 para. 1 ICESCR.

[40] See General Comment no 3 The nature of States parties’ obligations (art. 2, para. 1, of the Covenant), §10,  “a minimum core obligation to ensure the satisfaction of, at the very least, minimum essential levels of each of the rights is incumbent upon every State party. Thus, for example, a State party in which any significant number of individuals is deprived of essential foodstuffs, of essential primary health care, of basic shelter and housing, or of the most basic forms of education is, prima facie, failing to discharge its obligations under the Covenant”.

[41] Sepúlveda Carmona M., Alternatives to austerity: a human rights framework for economic recovery, in Nolan A. (ed.), Economic and social rights after the global financial crisis, CUP, 2014, pp. 25-27.

[42] In the “Maastricht Guidelines” it is described as “margin of discretion”, Masstricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Maastricht, January 22-26, 1997, para. 8.[43] General comment No. 3:  The nature of States parties’ obligations (art. 2, para. 1, of the Covenant), Fifth session (1990), UN doc. E/1991/23, para. 9.

[44] See, Press Release no 71/16, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Expresses its Concern Regarding the Declaration of a “State of Exception and Economic Emergency” in Venezuela, June 1, 2016.

[45] January 22-26, 1997, para. 6. “On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Limburg Principles on the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (hereinafter ‘the Limburg Principles’), a group of more than thirty experts met in Maastricht from 22-26 January 1997 at the invitation of the International Commission of Jurists (Geneva, Switzerland), the Urban Morgan Institute on Human Rights (Cincinnati, Ohio, USA) and the Centre for Human Rights of the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University (the Netherlands). The objective of this meeting was to elaborate on the Limburg Principles as regards the nature and scope of violations of economic, social and cultural rights and appropriate responses and remedies”, Maastricht Guidelines, Introduction. See, https://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/Maastrichtguidelines_.html

[46] Almost 100 families evicted daily in Spain – statistics, Published time: 6 Mar, 2015, https://www.rt.com/news/238349-spain-families-lose-homes/

[47] “Maastricht Guidelines”, para. 9.

[48] CESCR/48th/SP/MAB/SW, 16.5.2012, http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/LetterCESCRtoSP16.05.12.pdf

[49] Human Rights Committee, General Comment no 29, States of emergency (article 4 ICCPR), UN doc. CCPR/C/21/Rev.1/Add.11.

[50] Nencheva and others/Bulgaria, appl. no. 48609/06, judgment 18.6.2013, paras. 117 et seq.

[51] Nitecki/Poland, appl. no. 65653/01, judgment 21.3.2002.

[52] Alexsanyan v. Russia, appl. no. 46468/06, judgment 22.12.2008

[53] Yordanova and others/Bulgaria, appl. no. 25446/06, judgment 24.4.2012. See also Winterstein/France, appl. no. 27013/07, judgment 17.10.2013.

[54] Kjartan Ásmundsson/Iceland, appl. no. 60669/00, judgment 12.10.2004; Moskal/Poland, appl. no. 10373/05, judgment 15.9.2009, Larioshina/Russia, appl. no. 56869/00, decision 23.4.2002; Kutepov and Anikeyenko/Russia, appl. no. 68029/01, decision 25.10.2005; Budina/Russia, appl. no. 45603/05, decision 18.6.2009.

[55] Stec and others/ the United Kingdom, appl. nos. 65731/01 and 65900/01, decision 6.7.2005.

[56] Larioshina/Russia, op.cit. See, in general, ECtHR, Seminar Background Paper, 25 January 2013, Implementing the European Convention on Human Rights in times of economic crisis, http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Seminar_background_paper_2013_ENG.pdf; Steering Committee for Human Rights (CDDH), The impact of the economic crisis and austerity measures on human rights in Europe, Feasibility study, 84th meeting 7 – 11 December 2015, CDDH(2015)R84 Addendum IV, http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/cddh/CDDH-DOCUMENTS/CDDH%282015%29R84%20Addendum%20IV_EN.pdf

[57] “Vorbehalt des Möglichen”. See, for this doctrine in constitutional law Perlingeiro R., Does the precondition of the possible (Vorbehalt des Möglichen) limit judicial intervention in social public policies? NLUO Law Journal, vol. II, issue I, August 2015, pp. 20-45.

[58] Da Silva Carvalho Rico/Portugal, appl. no 13341/14, decision 1.9.2015, par. 44.

[59] Da Conceiçã Mateus and Santos Januário/Portugal, appl. nos. 62235/12 and 57725/12, decision 8.10.2013

[60] Savickas and Others/ Lithuania, appl. nos. 66365/09 et al., decision of 15.10.2013.

[61] The dissenting judges contented that the majority has expanded the scope of the right to property, since article 1 of Protocol No. 1 has never been interpreted “by this Court as obliging member States to provide persons with the right to social security benefits, in the form of disability pensions, independently of their having an assertable right to such a pension under domestic law”, Béláné Nagy/Hungary,appl. no 53080/13, judgment 10.2.2015, joint dissenting opinion of judges Keller, Spano and Kjølbro, para. 1.

[62] Priewe J., What went wrong? Alternative interpretations of the global financial crisis, in UN Conference on Trade and Development – Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, The financial and economic crisis of 2008-2009 and developing countries, 2010, p. 17-18.

[63] Dullien S., Kotte D., Márquez A., Priewe J., Introduction, in UN Conference on Trade and Development – Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, The financial and economic crisis of 2008-2009 and developing countries, 2010, p. 1.

[64] Priewe J., What went wrong? Alternative interpretations of the global financial crisis, op.cit.

[65] See for further details and legal documents, http://www.efsf.europa.eu/about/index.htm

[66] T/ESM 2012-LT/en.

[67] See for relevant information and legal documents, http://www.esm.europa.eu/index.htm

[68] Garcia Pedraza P., Crisis and social rights in Europe. Retrogressive measures versus protection mechanisms, Institute for Human Rights, Åbo Akademi University, 2014, p. 7.

[69] Skogly S., The human rights obligations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Cavendish Publ. Ltd, London/Sydney, 2001.

[70] In October 2009, the incumbent greek government discovered a high fiscal deficit amounting to 15,7% of GDP and a public debt amounting to 129,7% of GDP. These unexpected high numbers resulted in the downgrade of Greece’s sovereign debt by Fitsch, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s which had as a consequence the inability of the government to receive funding from the financial markets. See for a brief account of the facts, ELSA, International legal research group on social rights, Final report: austerity measures and their implications. The role of the European Social Charter in maintaining minimum social standards in countries undergoing austerity measures, July 2015, pp. 647-648.

[71] The assistance was finally provided on the basis of article 143 TFEU according to which when a member state is in difficulties regarding its balance of payments either as a result of an overall disequilibrium in its balance of payments or as a result of the type of currency at its disposal and where such difficulties are liable to jeopardize the functioning of the internal market or the implementation of the common commercial policy, the Commission shall recommend to the Council the grant of mutual assistance.

[72] ESM Programme for Greece, http://www.esm.europa.eu/assistance/Greece/index.htm.

[73] See in that respect P7_TA(2014)0239, Role and operations of the Troika with regard to the euro area programme countries, European Parliament resolution of 13 March 2014 on the enquiry on the role and operations of the Troika (ECB, Commission and IMF) with regard to the euro area programme countries (2013/2277(INI)).

[74] Law 3833 of 15 March 2010, Law 3845 of 6 May 2010, Law 3847 of 11 May 2010, Law 3863 of 15 July 2010, Law 3865 of 21 July 2010, Law 3866 of 26 May 2010, Law 3896 of 1 July 2011, Law 3986 of 1 July 2011, Law 4002 of 22 August 2011 and Law 4024 of 27 October 2011, Law 4046/2012, 4051 of 28 February 2012, Law 4093/2012 of 12 November 2012, Law 4172/2013. Joint Ministerial Decision 6/28.02.2012

[75] See for a detailed description of the measures adopted, ELSA, International Legal Research Group on Social Rights, Austerity measures and their implications. The role of the European Social Charter in maintaining minimum social standards in countries undergoing austerity measures, July 2015, pp. 646-754.

[76] See for a general reference to Europe, Poulou A., Austerity and European Social Rights: How Can Courts Protect Europe’s Lost Generation?, 15 German Law Journal, 2014, pp. 1145-1176; Jimena Quesada L., Adoption and rejection of austerity measures: current controversies under European law (focus on the role of the European Committee of Social Rights), Revista catalana de dret públic, núm 49, 2014, pp. 41-59.

[77] Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment No. 19,The right to social security (art. 9), E/C.12/GC/19, 4.2.2008, par. 15.

[78] Koufaki and Adedy/Greece, appl. no 57665/12 and 57657/12, Decision 7.5.2013, par. 31, 41, 44-46.

[79] Federation of employed pensioners of Greece (IKA-ETAM) v. Greece (no. 76/2012); Panhellenic Federation of public service pensioners v. Greece (no. 77/2012); Pensioner’s Union of the Athens-Piraeus Electric Railways (I.S.A.P.) v. Greece (no. 78/2012); Panhellenic Federation of pensioners of the public electricity corporation (POS-DEI) v. Greece (no. 79/2012); and Pensioner’s Union of the Agricultural Bank of Greece (ATE) v. Greece (no. 80/2012). All decisions on the merits were rendered on 7 December 2012.

[80] Resolution CM/ResChS(2014)7 et seq. adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 2 July 2014 at the 1204th meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies.

[81] C-98, 28.2.2003.

[82] ibid. §95.

[83] With regard to the right to property it stated that it should not be interpreted as giving right to a pension of a determined amount, §33 (with further references to the Court’s case-law).

[84] Five pensioners, op.cit. §97.

[85] ibid. §98.

[86] ibid. §102.

[87] ibid. §116.

[88] See in that respect the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Koufaki et ADEDY/Greece, op.cit.

[89] Acevedo Buendía et al. (“Discharged and Retired Employees of the Comptroller”)/Peru, C-198, 1.7.2009.

[90] ibid. §147. See, also the Reasoned Concurring Opinion of Judge Sergio García Ramírez.

[91] However, in case Acevedo Buendía (§106) that followed it did not find a violation of article 26 ACHR, stating that the issue under consideration was not a measure adopted by the State that hindered the progressive realization of the right to pension but it was rather the non-compliance of the state with the payment ordered by the domestic courts. Therefore, the violated rights were only the right to amparo and the right to property. This was a landmark judgment in that the Court, shortly after the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the ICESCR, emphasized the existence of the “principle of non regression” regarding the limitations in the exercise of a right, Burgorgue-Larsen L., Úbeda de Torres A., op.cit. p. 632-635.

[92] With a view to ensuring the effective exercise of the right to a fair remuneration, the Contracting Parties undertake: 1 to recognise the right of workers to a remuneration such as will give them and their families a decent standard of living; 2 to recognise the right of workers to an increased rate of remuneration for overtime work, subject to exceptions in particular cases; 3 to recognise the right of men and women workers to equal pay for work of equal value; 4 to recognise the right of all workers to a reasonable period of notice for termination of employment; 5 to permit deductions from wages only under conditions and to the extent prescribed by national laws or regulations or fixed by collective agreements or arbitration awards. The exercise of these rights shall be achieved by freely concluded collective agreements, by statutory wage fixing machinery, or by other means appropriate to national conditions.

[93] General Federation of Employees of the National Electric Power Corporation (GENOP-DEI) and Confederation of Greek Civil Servants’ Trade Unions (ADEDY) v. Greece (no. 65 and 66/2011), decision on the merits of 23 May 2012, “As such, the provisions of Section 74§8 of Act 3863/2010, and now Section 1§1 of Ministerial Council Act No 6 of 28-2-2012, are not in conformity with Article 4§1 in the light of the non-discrimination clause of the Preamble of the 1961 Charter”.

[94] Committee of Ministers, Resolution CM/ResChS(2013)3, Adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 5 February 2013 at the 1161st meeting of the Ministers’ Deputies.

[95] C-223, 4.3.2011.

[96] ibid. §53.

[97] ibid. §64.

[98] ibid. §82.

[99] ibid. §§84-85. The case was recently closed (21.6.2013), when the last payments were received. The remedies for material and moral damages, costs and expenses, as a whole, amounted to a total of nearly 3 million dollars, see Resolución de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, 22.5.2013, Caso Abrill Alosilla y otros vs. Perú, Supervisión de Cumplimiento de Sentencia.

[100] There is no doubt that the IACtHR case-law has been influenced a great deal by the enlightened long-year presidency of judge A.A. Cançado Trindade, who is a dedicated figure of the “human face” of international law, see in particular his book, “Le droit international pour la personne humaine”, Pedone, Paris, 2012.

[101] Judgment no 1906/2014, 28.5.2014.

[102] Realising the human rights to water and sanitation: A Handbook by the UN Special Rapporteur Catarina de Albuquerque, 2014, Book 6: Access to justice for violations of the human rights to water and sanitation, p. 9.

Donald R Rothwell & Tim Stephens, The International Law of the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 2nd ed.)

This second edition of The International Law of the Sea by Rothwell and Stephens replaces the original title from 2010. The law of the sea is one of the most ancient fields of international law and the basic principles can be traced to Grotius. Nevertheless, as is evident from this new edition, the law of the sea can also evolve very quickly, hence the need for a revised volume. Rothwell and Stephens update the original text with insights from recent judicial rulings and developments in State practice. These include the International Court of Justice judgment in Whaling in the Antarctic, advisory opinions of the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) on Responsibilities and obligations of States sponsoring persons and entities with respect to activities in the Area and on illegal, unreported and unregistered fishing (Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission request), ITLOS decisions on the Arctic Sunrise and Delimitation of the maritime boundary between Bangladesh and Myanmar in the Bay of Bengal, and the arbitral decision in the Bay of Bengal Arbitration (Bangladesh/India) case. Rothwell and Stephens also discuss other recent developments, for example, steps to manage biodiversity in the marine environment, through commitment at the Rio+20 meeting and the ongoing negotiations for a third implementing agreement under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond national jurisdiction.

The book is structured thematically beginning at the State baseline and moving gradually outwards before addressing, inter alia, the rights of landlocked States, rights of passage, resource management, marine scientific research, environmental protection, boundary delimitation, enforcement and dispute settlement. In short, the book covers all the main topics of a standard university law of the sea course. Most chapters take a chronological approach, beginning with the early developments in customary law, codification in the four Geneva Conventions on 1958, evolution of customary law in the period up to the 1980s, the provisions of UNCLOS and later developments.

Rothwell and Stephens are gifted communicators, writing fluently about even the most technical elements of law of the sea. Thus, even the notorious article 76 of UNCLOS on delineation of the limits of the outer continental shelf is presented in an accessible manner (115). The book is eminently readable, one of the clearest expositions of the principles of law of the sea, that one can read from cover to cover and get a holistic sense of the overall principles and structure of this enormous area of law. It is, therefore, an excellent introductory textbook. However, as a textbook, it unsurprisingly lacks the depth and level of critical analysis that one would find in a monograph devoted to specific issues in law of the sea (of which there are hundreds, some of which dealing with a single article of the UNCLOS).

As an instructor, I would recommend this textbook for an undergraduate law of the sea course but would expect students to supplement it with close reading of case law and academic analyses in journal articles. Students may balk at the sight of 500 pages (plus cases and journals!) but the quality of writing is so high that it takes a surprisingly short time to read the book. The law of the sea is simply an enormous branch of international law that cannot be condensed any further. I would also recommend this textbook to scholars from other disciplines seeking to get a basic grasp of law of the sea to support related research. This could include political scientists studying international relations pertaining to ocean governance, natural scientists working on fisheries, ocean geomorphology, climate change and other environmental issues, and business scholars examining marine resource management or shipping.

The main competitors to this book are The International Law of the Sea (Tanaka, 2012), Law of the Sea in a Nutshell (Soh, Juras, Noyes and Franckx, 2010) and the now rather dated The Law of the Sea (Churchill and Lowe, 1999) each of which has its own merits. For sheer readability, however, Rothwell and Stephens have the edge.

 

Douglas C Nord, The Arctic Council: Governance within the Far North (London: Routledge, 2016)

The Arctic Council: Governance within the Far North by the rather aptly named Douglas Nord is a succinct primer on the history and development of the leading intergovernmental forum in contemporary Arctic international relations. It is well-written and highly focused, making it an accessible read for students and an easy and quick read for busy academics.

Continue reading Douglas C Nord, The Arctic Council: Governance within the Far North (London: Routledge, 2016)

Ingvill Helland & Sören Koch (eds.), Nordic and Germanic Legal Methods (Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014)

This book on Nordic and Germanic legal methods includes contributions from a number of German, Swiss, and Nordic legal scholars and is a welcome contribution both to the national and the international debate on legal reasoning.

Continue reading Ingvill Helland & Sören Koch (eds.), Nordic and Germanic Legal Methods (Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2014)

Helle Prosdam and Thomas Elholm (eds.), Dialogues on Justice: European Perspectives on Law and Humanities (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012)

Each chapter yields fresh insights into the relationship between law, literature, and justice. It is not possible to deal with each chapter satisfactorily, but it is possible to discuss some of them briefly.

 

The themes open with Greta Olson’s arresting analysis of the deficiencies with the manner in which law and literature is being pursued. The argument is a reprint of the article to be found in the 2010 volume of Law and Literature, but includes a post-script wherein Olson notes further developments on her thinking since the original article was published.  

 

Mattias Kumm’s chapter on thick constitutional patriotism includes a call for a conceptualization of European history in a manner that provides an exegesis about the roots of European political development. It would focus on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, but understands that such a history is “to a significant extent the history of the fight against these ideals, their hypocritical abuse, or their complacent misunderstanding.” Kumm’s project is a refreshingly ambitious one and, to the author’s credit, he puts forward a template for how such a project might be developed in the field of legal history, with a thematic focus on the time frames between 1789 and 1919, 1919 to 1992, and the post-1992 legal sphere. There is much to be said for such a project, but it is not clear that the disparate national tendencies of the European continent allows such a history to be told convincingly. The temptation to focus solely on those parts of the history which conform to our current values may be insuperable. Kumm falls victim to this difficulty when dealing with the US Declaration of Independence, which he describes as follows:

 

A further characteristic [of the revolutionary tenets of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the US Declaration of Independence] is the absence of both God and religion (or any other perfectionist ideal) as a point of ultimate reference for legal and political life. Many will find it plausible that the ultimate roots of these rights lie in the fact that God has created persons in a certain way, and that rights are instrumental to human flourishing… But, when the authors of the Declaration of Independence declared the foundational principles of Political Liberalism as self-evident, it created the possibility of thinking of Political Liberalism as the focal point of a consensus that, for the purposes of organizing public life, avoided deeper questions of theological foundations and ultimate purpose.

 

This is an ahistorical treatment of the Declaration of Independence which appeals to the “Supreme Judge of the World”, “divine Providence”, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and, in the extract that Kumm directly refers to, man’s “Creator”. This was not a document that avoided deeper questions of ultimate purpose; it repeatedly referred to these questions. Moreover, the problem recurs if we read Kumm’s point in a more restrictive fashion; the US Declaration of Independence, insofar only as it referred to man being created equal, created the possibility for the future expression of political liberalism. This overlooks those elements of the document which do not conform to this reading, and makes the analysis of the document contingent on subsequent developments where it was used in a manner conducive to the development of the ideal of political liberalism.

 

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man, in contrast, can be read in the manner that Kumm proposes for the US Declaration, and suggests that such a project could enjoy some success. Kumm is to be applauded for his ambitious project, but the treatment of such material promises to be an arduous task.

 

Sven Erik Larsen’s chapter on the interrelationship between forgiveness and law is a masterly typology of forgiveness which ranges across examples as diverse as the return of Korean NGOs after capture by the Taliban and the removal of Inuit children from Greenland to Denmark. The typology is comprehensive and compelling.

 

Mia Rendix’s chapter on the return of the Icelandic sagas notes the distinction between the legal and political processes that characterized the relationship between Denmark and Iceland on the issue. Denmark’s perfect claim to legal title was undermined by statements such as Alexander Jóhannesson’s that the sagas were “like flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood”. Rendix’s analysis spans the legal and cultural spheres, and the local and universal art spheres, with commendable results. I disagree with Rendix’s conclusion that the current digitization projects can undercut the national insistence on exclusive rights. It seems to me that such projects will act as a supplement to national initiatives; the educational and cultural significance of an object in physical form should not be underestimated.

 

The volume as a whole marks a considerable addition to the field of law and literature and should be celebrated as such. The work will appeal to academic and general readers alike.

 

Christian Joerges and Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann (eds.), Constitutionalism: Multilevel Trade Governance and International Economic Law (Hart Publishing: Studies in International Trade Law, 2011)

The overarching approach, as pioneered by the two editors, Christian Joerges and Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, is to examine the practices of States and other international actors (principally the WTO) and explores these within the political and legal theory of constitutionalism. Where this work differs from much of the comparable scholarship on international economic law is the central place reserved for the individual as a key player (and beneficiary) of international economic relations. Much scholarship exists on international trade from States’ perspectives; and much has been devoted to exploring the contradictions and tensions between international economic law, individual rights and sustainable development. Recognizing that “human rights law and international trade law evolved as separate legal regimes” (p. 17) Constitutionalism, Multilevel Trade Governance and International Economic Law makes a positive case for interpreting international economic law and international human rights as complimentary systems that ought to be brought closer together; indeed, to form a single, coherent system of law. It is an implicit response to concerns about the fragmentation of international law and reflects the classical principle of interpretation of treaties as codified in the Vienna Convention in the Law of Treaties 1969 that: “There shall be taken into account, together with the context, any relevant rules of international law applicable in the relations between the parties” (article 31(3)(c)). With this in mind, international economic law is viewed as a tool to serve human interests, as opposed to the interests of States and multi-national corporations. Responding to the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ call for a “human-rights approach to trade,” (p. 22) the book provides both an account of the normative basis that would legitimise such an approach by the WTO and makes proposals for how that process might evolve.

The introductory chapter (Petersmann) provides a theoretical framework for what follows, examining different forms of constitutions and constitutional ideas (democratic constitutionalism, rights-based constitutions, national and international constitutionalism, international constitutional democracy and federal and con-federal constitutions) (p7-8). Petersmann also distinguishes process-based constitutional democracies (most common law models) and substantive rights-based constitutional democracies (the continental approach) which provides the setting for much of what follows (pp. 13, 16).

The later edition contains 4 new chapters exploring conflicts-law as constitutional forum and the role that various doctrines in international private law might play in dispute settlement in international economic law (Christian Joerges); the World Trade Organisation and global administrative law (Richard Stewart and Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin); the interrelationships between different layers of domestic and international governance as a “Five-Storey House” (Thomas Cottier); and a research agenda on the future developments of international economic law (Petersmann).

Petersmann concludes with four propositions based on the contributions as well as his own research. First, the legitimacy of international economic law pivots on its congruence with international human rights standards (p. 539). Second, there is a need for constitutional constraints on international institutions as there is within domestic States based upon “constitutional pluralism,” meaning that there is a range of acceptable constitutional arrangements and no single system that should be required of all players (p. 540). Third, in order to protect global public goods, such as the atmosphere and climate, a “paradigm shift” is required and this involves moving from a system of industry actors to the centralization of human subjects and Petersmann points to the European Union for leadership to this end (pp. 571-2). Fourth, international constitutionalism is necessary to guarantee global public goods in the same way that domestic constitutions have protected supply of public goods on a national scale. The international constitutional system must be rights-based, participatory and democratic (p. 575).

When the first edition of this text was published in 2006, mainstream commentators were not yet ready to question the bases of the international economic order and the priority of trade liberalism. Two years later, the rapid declines of the Nordic and Mediterranean economies of Iceland, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain were met with attacks on human rights and human security. Both the original crisis and the responses of international institutions to the same have led to much soul searching about the principles and priorities of international trade and this volume is a welcome contribution to that debate, sometimes controversial and always challenging. On the other hand, recent events within the Eurozone raise some questions regarding to the extent to which the European Union can be considered a model of international, constitutional, democratic, rights-based governance (compare p. 21) especially if one considers the means by which Iceland (outside of the European Union) has crawled back to economic growth while attempting to protect its most vulnerable residents compared with the demands placed on the Eurozone economies. Something more seems to be needed even within an international organization that positions fundamental individual rights at the heart of its formal constitution. Perhaps the answers are to be found in multilevel trade governance; perhaps they await further research, and one can only hope that the scholars involved in this project continue to devote their considerable talents to challenging the paradoxes and contradictions of the current international structures to develop a regime that remembers it is an instrument for human development, instead of viewing human beings as instruments for its own development.

Garrett Barden and Tim Murphy. Law and Justice in Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

The authors state at the beginning that they reject the idea that humans somehow are independent of each other and at some stage consent to becoming members of society; this is usually presented either as an actual historical fact or a conditional requirement on any public decision or as an idea of reason in Kant. The authors think of human beings as naturally social meaning that living in society comes naturally to humans and it is misleading or downright false to think that the primary fact about them is that they are separate individuals that at some stage decide to form a society. Society is part of human life from time immemorial and from the time that any human being is born she is a part of society; she would not stand a chance if she did not have a family to nurture her until she could provide for herself. A family is a social institution. From an evolutionary point of view many developed animals form groups where patterns of behaviour emerge from which human society may have developed. The point is that the question how or when human society was invented does not arise; human society was not invented, it is a basic, internal fact about human life.

One thing the authors discuss is the story behind Grágás (grey goose), the first written Icelandic law book. In 1117 the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi, decided that the law should be written down and published. Alþingi had been established in 930 and for nearly two centuries the laws were recited there during the weeks in late June when the parliament was sitting. It took three years to recite the laws in full so one third was recited every year; they were not all recited annually as it says on p. 1 in the book. Now the question is what is going on from the point of view of the law in this process from the settlement of Iceland in late ninth century AD, in 930 when the parliament was established, and the law recited until it was written down in the winter of 1117-1118? How should we account for this development of the law? The authors´ idea is that in any society there is something that might be called a living law which is not judge made law, positive law, in a sense state law, but the living law is the judgements and choices that people in any society make and become gradually accepted and approved in that society when they recur time and again. This process of gradually creating the living law is not formal in any sense, there is no formal debate or decree that establishes this law but it creates habits, practices, customs and mutual expectations that establish the jural relationships in that community. There is no sharp distinction between a legal realm and a moral realm. It is part of what the authors call “the communal law” or “the communal moral law” p. 3-4). So the living law is a moral tradition. Any moral tradition is such that some parts of it are implicit, others are explicit, and it is not possible to codify fully a moral tradition; there is no way that it is possible to write down all the moral rules and practices that make up a moral tradition. Historically the living law of any community is not written down, but it is a defining feature of the community and establishes entitlements which evolve through the interactions of people living together dealing with the jural demands that this imposes on them. Some of the entitlements may be written down when the communal sense of justice provides a basis for formulated law. Written laws can be either natural or conventional but according to these authors they are not understood as new laws imposed on the community, but are parts of the living law that emerges within the developing communal moral context. So the account to be given of Icelandic law until it was written down in 1117-18 is that at first it grew out of the concerns that the new environment in Iceland created, the judgements and choices of the inhabitants about their own lives and how they resolved their disputes, establishing mutual expectations, a sense of justice and jural relationships and social institutions like Alþingi. Ultimately this leads to the writing down of the law, but it does not mean that being written down created in any sense new laws, rather it was part of the living law of the community and had developed out of it.

This is a very interesting view of the origin of Grágás. I guess there may be differing opinions about how it squares with all the historical accounts that have been preserved about the development of Icelandic law until it was written down. But it is persuasive. This theory of the development of law is intended by the authors as a general account of how law develops and how various parts of the living law are related, so it should apply to any system of laws we care to examine at least in the European tradition. Their theory is also descriptive, it aims to explain law as a social phenomenon in terms of its function in human affairs. They avoid all normative assumptions in their theory. The third important feature of the theory argued for and applied in this book is a number of distinctions that are used throughout the book between the natural and the conventional, the internal and the external, the intrinsic and the extrinsic. I am not sure that the authors would be willing to call this a theory, but rather a method they use to figure out what is just.

The authors discuss many of the most important topics in modern jurisprudence such as justice, natural and conventional, ownership, law, force of law, natural law, justice and the trading order, to name some of them. There is no way in a short review to give the flavour of the analysis of these different issues but I want to mention one: justice and the trading order. This area is of great importance to modern societies and has been extensively analysed and theorised in various academic disciplines. One obvious question is whether there is anything to be gained from analysing the trading order from the Aristotelian perspective of the authors. The answer is yes; there is surprisingly much to be gained from doing so. The trading order is where reciprocal justice is the proper justice. The authors start by suggesting that “in the trading order free exchanges are reciprocally just.” (p. 91). They make another plausible assumption that it is only in the context of exchange and the trading order that reciprocal justice exists. The trading order exists only as a part of a wider, more complex social order and is constantly influenced by this wider order. Hence, there is no trading order governed only by reciprocal justice. The authors contend that if a trading order has developed one must first understand how it works to figure out what legislation is necessary. They also argue that it is a difficult question of fact whether the trading order can be centrally managed. It is the considered opinion of the authors that a trading order cannot be centrally managed. They are careful to point out that it does not follow from this that the trading order cannot cause all sorts of social problems that must be dealt with and that there are those who cannot sustain their lives by trading. The idea is that these are not problems of the trading order but must be dealt with by other means. The central idea of the trading order is that the two or more persons who want to trade must always be free not to for the exchange to be just. Any legislation and management, central or otherwise, of the trading order must respect this fact. It seems that any central management aiming to control correct the result of the innumerable exchanges of the trading order becomes problematic given these assumptions.

In modern political philosophy normative issues are contentious and important. Aristotelian political philosophy has not shied away from normative assumptions and issues. It is very informative to see the Aristotelian way of analysing political and jurisprudential problems working from different premises than is ordinarily done. This book is both radical and traditional and it is splendidly argued. It deserves to be widely read and to be influential.

Responses to the contributors

The papers were illuminating and, when they disagreed with the book, either rightly looked for further clarification or identified genuine shortcomings with some, but not all, of which I try to deal.

I am very grateful for Guðmundur Heidar Frímansson for his generous and accurate review and particularly for his correction of the assertion made on p.1 of LJC that the Law Speaker recited all the laws annually at the Althingi, when, in fact, only one third of the corpus was recited annually. I regret and apologise for this mistake.

 

Finally, I would express my thanks to our editor, Giorgio Baruchello, who has gone to much trouble to publish these essays. I shall respond to them in the order in which Giorgio received them and sent them to me

Hjördís Hákonardóttir: “Equality: A Principle of Human Interaction.”

For Hjördís [H] that people ought to be treated equally is a fundamental principle in her idea of human society; she argues “…that equality must have an even stronger, and in particular, a more fundamental role in a just and flourishing community in which ‘we can lead our lives together in peace and justice’.” [The internal quotation is from LJC.] There seems to be an omission in her written text; it is not said what equality must be stronger than. I understand her to have meant that equality must have an even stronger and more fundamental role than justice. Earlier in her paper she notes correctly that in LJC that a right is held to exist only when it is established. With that she disagrees: “I have to doubt that an entitlement to a fundamental right depends on its acceptance; that claim seems to go against the very essence of the nature of fundamental rights.”

I think that those disagreements are due to some extent, but perhaps not entirely, to the use of words, for there is nothing in LJC to support the idea the people are to be treated unequally when it is just to treat them equally. Indeed, both Aristotle’s and, centuries later, the Roman definition of the just includes the idea that equals are to be treated equally and unequals unequally. Furthermore, if one genuinely holds that two people are for present purposes in all relevant respects equal, it is impossible reasonably to treat them unequally, no reasonable discrimination would be possible and any discrimination between them would necessarily be based upon a criterion that one had claimed to be irrelevant. Bernard Williams, whom H quotes approvingly, does not claim that everyone is to be treated equally; his claim is that, qua human, people are to be treated equally and to discriminate between them requires the introduction of a relevant criterion. The most fundamental principle is not that one ought to treat all humans equally, for that principle inevitably evokes the question, Why? And the answer to that question is that humans, in important and fundamental respects, specifically but not exclusively qua human, are equal. Accordingly in the respects that they are equal, they ought to be treated equally. That principle evokes no further questions because, as I have said, it is impossible to distinguish between equals; that is simply the meaning of things being equal.[1] The crucial question then becomes how are humans qua human to be treated; to which question to say that they are to be treated equally is not a satisfactory answer. The answer that they are to be treated justly is a heuristic answer: a human qua human is to given what is due to him or her qua human. What that is is not yet known but is the work of justice to discover. However, there are situations in which one does not treat other simply qua human; in those situations humans are in very many important and relevant respects unequal and in those respects one ought to treat them unequally. There is, for example, a crucial difference between one accused of a crime, one acquitted of a crime and one convicted of a crime. To claim that the one accused, the one acquitted and the one convicted are to be thought of as in all respects equal and all three to be treated in the same way is unreasonable unless one holds that the manifest differences between them are irrelevant. Many manifest difference are, of course, in some circumstances irrelevant: to the judge on a refugee tribunal, “It is irrelevant whether the claimant is a man rather than a woman; whether he has brown hair; whether he is highly educated; whether he speaks the language of the state where he seeks refuge; and so on indefinitely” (LJC ,Ch.6.6. 159). Two manifestly different applicants to a refugee tribunal are taken to be relevantly equal and to be distinguished only on the grounds of fulfilling or not fulfilling the criteria of the Refugee Convention. But citizens, non-citizen residents, temporarily visiting workers, asylum seekers and tourists are usually treated differently because it is usually held – rightly or wrongly – that to discriminate between them on that set of criteria is just. The rights of citizens and non-citizen residents are not identical precisely because when they are being considered according to that difference they are not then being considered simply qua human.

Whatever one’s position on the matter of procured abortion, much debate has turned on whether a foetus at one stage of development is relevantly equal to one at a later stage and from a new born infant. The differences between them at the different stages cannot reasonably be denied; the question is whether or not those differences are sufficient for abortion to be morally good at one stage and morally bad at another. In the Twelve Tables, the first law on the fourth table requires that “A notably deformed child shall be killed instantly”. Clearly, the makers of that law considered the manifest difference between a well-formed and “a notably deformed child” to be a relevant criterion, and that the two kinds of children were relevantly unequal. In many modern states the manifest inequality between a foetus at one stage and one at another is taken to be a criterion permitting abortion at the earlier stage; none of those states, I think, accepts deformity as a criterion for infanticide. The more basic principle is, therefore, the ancient principle of justice: “treating equals equally and unequals unequally render to each what is due”. What constitutes relevant equality and inequality, what is due both in the general case and in the particular circumstances, remains to be settled and is the fundamental business of moral and jural argument. It was not the business of LJC whose two authors, Tim Murphy and I, could differ on such questions. From what is said of the argument about abortion and infanticide in this paragraph, nothing about my personal position on either question can be inferred.

H thinks the position taken in LJC to be a “down to earth relativistic view”. I think it is not; if I am wrong, the book is deeply and irretrievably incoherent. It would be relativistic if, and only if, it included the proposition that there could be no true moral conclusion, a proposition that is most explicitly argued against at pp. 175 -6 but which runs throughout. What is said, on the one hand, is that people have had, have and will continue, for various reasons, to have different and incompatible views, and, on the other hand, that the conclusions that humans reach can be no more than the best available in the light of present understanding and evidence; some are more tentative than others; and so physicists know that their present conclusions are not “absolutely certainly true”. As Victor Hugo wrote “La science est l’asymptote de la verité, elle approche toujours, elle ne touché jamais” The evidence for very everyday common sense judgements is often much stronger. No one now reading this essay can reasonably doubt that it is written in English; someone who knew no English whatsoever would simply not know.

The proposition that NN and AA are entitled to be treated equally rests on the underlying presupposition that the situation in which they are to be treated equally is one in which any differences – inequalities – between them are irrelevant and to be ignored. The evidence for the proposition that equals are to be treated equally is the discovered inability of human intelligence to distinguish between A and A, sometimes referred to as the principle of identity. The principle itself – not its theoretical discovery – is a natural and unavoidable characteristic of the human mind. To hold that men and women are to be treated equally is not to hold that men and women are in all respects equal, which manifestly they are not, but that the inequalities (or ‘natural differences’) between them are to be ignored in the some situations.[2] It is, of course, true and acknowledged in LJC , that unjust distinctions on foot of those inequalities have been, still are, and will continue to be made. That differences do not always justify distinctions is a very ancient discovery, for example, the discovery that in a court case the differences between the poor and the rich are not to count. The earliest written expressions of that discovery with which Westerners are familiar are in the Torah (Ex. 23.6; Dt.16.19); when or where it was discovered is unknown but before the rule was written it was already known in practice that it was just to conduct adjudication in that way. The inequality between the litigants was explicitly recognized but in that situation no account was to be taken of it. There are, however, situations in which some inequalities are relevant: e.g., who is entitled to the franchise and who is not depends on what are held to be relevant inequalities – the age at which a person is entitled to the franchise differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; but no one suggests that children of three years ought to be enfranchised. Foreigners entitled to residence in a state differ from citizens and whether or not they should be entitled to vote may be disputed. No-one I suspect finds it unacceptable to make those and similar distinctions. The adage – which does not settle how they are to be treated – “equals are to be treated equally, and unequals unequally” may be more clearly, if more pedantically, expressed: “those who are relevantly equal are to be treated equally; those who are relevantly unequal are to be treated unequally”. The question turns on determining who, and in general what kinds of people, and in what kinds of circumstance are relevantly equal or unequal, and about that there will be dispute. And what is the just equal or unequal treatment remains to be discovered.

Women and men are undeniably unequal in very many ways. The question is to determine in which situations some of their inequalities are to be taken into account and in which some or all of their inequalities are to be ignored. Neither H nor I think that the differences between women and men or between landowners and tenants is relevant to granting the franchise but, as everyone knows, that was not always, and even recently, the prevailing view throughout Europe. Did women in the Canton of St Gallen have the right to vote in 1956? The general rule governing the franchise is that in any particular state in which the franchise exists, if only a defined type or kind of person has the right to vote, then only if NN is that type or kind of person is NN entitled to vote. If two men dispute over the ownership of a piece of land, they are to be treated equally in that, for example, their political standing in the society, their physique, or their wealth is not to be taken into account, but when the court, having heard the opposing arguments with equal care, determines that land belongs to NN rather to AA they are no longer to be treated equally so that the land is not to be divided equally between them but be given to NN.[3] What is just is equality and inequality according to a criterion; when people are equal or unequal according to the relevant criterion they are to be treated equally or unequally.

With H, I agree that men and women were once generally thought of as unequal in ways that were mistaken but I find it odd that she quotes Kymlicka apparently approvingly when he writes that ‘women have been “associated with the merely animal functions of domestic labour” ‘. (The internal quotation is from Kymlicka.) Are people – both men and women – who work in the university restaurant engaged in ‘merely animal functions’? Preparing food, which in many cultures in the province of women, is a cardinal difference between humans and other animals, and when we eat we are not engaged in a merely animal function. Is feeding babies at the breast a merely animal function? Is the education of babies and small children, a task that has traditionally fallen to a greater extent to women, a merely animal function? In many hunting and gathering communities, women gathered (and, in many cases, what they gathered provided the main sustenance for the group) and men hunted? Is hunting cultural and gather a merely animal function? Universally, young children learn their language predominantly from women – not necessarily or often only from their mothers – and did they not learn to speak they could not become normal fully developed human adults and human society would not persist beyond one generation. Only if one restricts by arbitrary definition one’s notion of what constitutes a cultural goal to what some men rather than women or other men do, and thinking of every other work as the product of natural instinct is it the case that women’s activities do not achieve cultural goals.

A very good example of women being treated differently from women in ways that would nowadays be generally thought unjust is found in Perelman’s discussion of women’s claim to enter the legal profession as either barristers or solicitors in Belgium between 1889, when it was thought “ too evidently axiomatic to require explicit legislation that the administration of justice was reserved to men” and 1946 when “the reasons given by the Cour de Cassation in 1889 seemed to be so contrary to contemporary opinion that they had become ridiculous.”. [4]

If those who are relevantly equal are to be treated equally and those who are relevantly unequal to be treated unequally, is equality then no more fundamental than inequality? H agrees with Bernard Williams that, as she writes, “Any difference in the way men are treated must be justified …” I think that to be a crucially important and true statement with which I totally concur. I do not understand anything that I have written here or anything found in LJC goes against it. But equality too needs to be justified, for the moral question always is either the particular “What am I to do now?” or the general “What is to be done in this kind of situation?” In the domain of justice those question become “What is now to be rendered to whom? And “In this kind of situation, what is to be rendered to what kind of person?

In our everyday dealings with one another inequalities may be more apparent and the temptation great to take them inappropriately into account when it is to one’s profit to do so, as when another’s interest clashes with my own and I am tempted in bad faith and unquestioningly to prefer mine. The virtue of justice demands more of us; the other is a demand to go beyond ourselves. The admonition that the judge must not treat the poor and the rich differently is necessary, not simply because it is good which it is, but because the temptation to do otherwise may be great. The injunction to treat everyone with equality of concern and respect risks becoming vacuous precisely because it is apparently too exact and tends to evoke no further question. What does it mean to say that dictators guilty of genocide – of which in the last century there have been many – are to be treated with the same concern and respect as their victims or opponents? I cannot think of those who joined the Dutch Nazi Party, the NSB, and assisted the “Green Police” – German Police force that concentrated on rounding up Jews for deportation – with the same respect as I think of those Dutch non-Jews who tried to protect their Jewish compatriots; and I do not think that I should. Even when only thinking about other people, the question as to what is due to whom arises? Thus, the injunction to treat everyone justly at once evokes the question as to what in the particular circumstances is just? I do not for a moment think that Ronald Dworkin thinks otherwise; but the adage does not make that clear.

H contends that an entitlement to a fundamental right does not depend on its acceptance; she is, consequently, reluctant to accept the idea in LJC that a right exists only if it is acknowledged. Again, the disagreement is, I think, at least in part, a matter of how the words are used. The rules governing citizenship vary from state to state and, within the same state, may vary from time to time. In Ireland, by the Constitution of 1937 it was established that a person born in Ireland was entitled to Irish citizenship irrespective of the citizenship of the parents. By the 27th amendment to the Irish Constitution in 2004, that right was abolished, and the right to citizenship now depends on the citizenship of one’s parents – only if at least one parent is a citizen, is the child entitled to citizenship.  Those who voted against the amendment – as I did – may think that it was a great and sad mistake to revoke the former right and that the state is the worse for it. The majority was not of that view. But, however one thinks of the matter, in Ireland to be a citizen because one has been born in Ireland is not a right. It once was, I think that it ought still to be, but it is not. The question as to whether or not something is or is not a right or entitlement is a question about present jural fact; a question about what rights actually exist, not about what rights ought or ought not exist.

If one writer uses the word “right” to mean “an entitlement that ought to exist whether or not it does” while another uses the same word to mean “an entitlement that actually exists in a given jurisdiction” they are only apparently contradicting each other and are in fact writing of different things. I think that when H writes of fundamental rights: “I have to doubt that an entitlement to a fundamental right depends on its acceptance…” she is using the word to mean “an entitlement that ought to b”. She gives as examples of “natural” or “human” rights those set down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is true that the rights in that document are set down as they might have been enacted in particular states; for examples, in Article 9 it is asserted that “ “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”; in Article 21 (1) that “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly, or through freely chosen representatives.”; in Article 26 (1) “That everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. …”; and in Article 19 (1) “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”

It is also true that René Cassin and others involved in the composition of the Declaration hoped that it would become law in all states. The status of the Declaration and of the rights set down in it have been discussed at length, and the emergence of a Court of Human Rights and other international courts has established rights that were not until then rights. I shall ask only in what senses and to what extent did the rights in the Declaration exist at the time of its composition in 1948.

It is clear that those who composed the Declaration thought that the rights set down in it ought to exist in the kind of state or communities they had in mind. They were not thinking of those hunting and gathering or nomadic-pastoral societies that still existed in which some of the rights in the Declaration would make little or no sense. It does not make good sense to say that in a small hunting and gathering community education shall be free at least in the elementary stages, when what is meant in the Declaration is that the financial cost of a child’s education will not fall directly upon the parents but upon the state that will pay for it through its power of raising taxes or that (Article 24) “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure and periodic holidays with pay.” Such rights not alone do not, but cannot, exist in a hunting and gathering society. The Ngatatjara of Western Australia are not a state but, thinking of them as a society, the right to freedom of movement set out in Article 13(1) quite explicitly does not exist since parts of the land that they think of as theirs are forbidden to men and other parts to women. Such rights are simply not applicable to humans as humans but only to humans living in a certain kind of state and, in some cases, (eg Article 24) only to certain kinds of people, namely, paid employees.

The framers of the Declaration were trying to work out a set of rights that would enable the recovery of societies from the experienced but still hardly imaginable collapse of European civilization. The Second World War the European theatre was of two kinds: an imperial war similar to the First World War and other wars with which Europe had for centuries been familiar but it was also the extraordinary, horrifying and scarcely believable Nazi disease that had revealed, to the European self-satisfied moral sense of itself, an unsuspected or not clearly acknowledged evil at the heart of European civilization. Had that disease not been sufficiently widespread in the prevailing communal morality (the living law) of Germany and the countries that it occupied, Naziism would not have succeeded. The rights expressed in the Declaration had not in fact existed in Nazi Germany or in the states that it had overrun. Consider again Articles 9 and 13 (1): “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” and “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.” H’s doubt has led me to clarify my thinking. A right may be absent in several ways not only one. It may not exist in a community because it has never occurred to anyone to introduce it – I suspect it has never occurred seriously to anyone to give the right to vote to three year old children or to visitors who happened to be present on election day. It may not exist because, although it has been considered, it has been rejected, as the right to citizenship by birth in the state has been rejected in Ireland. It may not effectively exist because, although it is formally established, it is not honoured, as it is alleged that, during the war in Irak, the right of prisoners not to be tortured (Article 5) was not honoured by the UK, the US, the other states that allowed their aeroplanes carrying prisoners to land on their territory, and, obviously, the states, such as Libya, on whose territory and by whose servants the alleged torture occurred.

 What was the status of the right set down in Article 9 “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”? It may once have been, but in 1948 was not, a new and surprising thought. There had no doubt been in the past, and still were, states where arbitrary arrest, detention and exile at the whim of the ruler were commonplace and at least acquiesced in by those who could do little about them, but, for centuries, that the ruler’s authority was limited had been accepted in theory in Europe. Europeans had begun to assume, more or less confidently, that they enjoyed that right – it was part of the rule of law. Until Naziism and Stalinist Communism. There had been times when people had not the right to freedom or thought or religion [see Articles 18 and 19 of the Declaration] and to an extent that situation remained as in Francoist Spain. It had at times been forbidden to be Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Islamic or Atheist … but never, until Naziism, had it been the case that some people were forbidden not only not to be themselves but, quite simply, not to be. There had been massacres and various kinds of killing had been legal but never before had it been law that a particular race was to be eliminated. The Nazi state had removed, from a kind person, not because of what that person thought but because of what that person unchangeably was, the right to exist.  Here, perhaps, is the core of the ambiguity. Dutch Jews that were sent to the transit camp at Westerbork and thence to Auschwitz or other extermination camp were not treated with a concern and respect to which other Dutch citizens had a right; under Dutch law they had the right not to be exterminated; under Nazi law they ought to have had that right but had not. The verbal ambiguity arises because we can, somewhat confusingly, describe that situation in the sentence: “It was not right that the Jews had not that right”. Where Dworkin writes of “a natural right of all men and women to equality of concern and respect …simply as human beings…” I should write that when I deal with human beings simply as human beings I ought to treat them with equal concern and respect – although it is yet to be discovered what that concern and respect requires – and that at that level everyone ought to be so treated and to have that right acknowledged in the law, but when I think of Hitler, Goering, other dictators and their followers I think of them not “simply as human beings” but a men and women who did things for which I cannot respect them. Men and women arraigned before a war crimes tribunal are not simply human beings but are accused of crimes and ought, as accused not simply as human beings, to have the right to be properly judged and to be convicted only if the available evidence is sufficient. But once convicted they are no longer treated as accused; and the rights of the accused and the convicted are different. They remain human beings and what rights they have simply as human beings remain. Two people thought of simply as human beings are equal – just as Q and Z considered simply as letters are equal – and cannot be treated unequally for to treat them unequally is inevitably to introduce a distinguishing criterion.

This question remains: did Jews in Nazi Germany and in the occupied countries have the right to live? That they ought to have had that right is to me and, I suspect, to all readers, correct. But that is not the question. The question is one of fact: did they in fact have that right? The answer to that question is that they did not. They had had it; they no longer had. There is a further question: did many know that Jews ought to have retained that right? Certainly some did and for them a practical question – sometimes called a question of conscience – arose as to what they were to do about it. It was to a situation of that latter kind that Chaim Perelman referred when he wrote in the passage quoted in LJC (fn 53, p.158): “When clearly iniquitous legislation prevents him, for whatever reason, from carrying out his task in accord with his conscience, the judge is morally obliged to resign. He is not merely a calculating machine; and if by his participation he contributes to the functioning of an iniquitous order, he cannot hope to evade his personal responsibility.” That crux applied and applies to each one of us. Suppose another possibility. Suppose, which was not the case, that everyone – other than Jews – had been convinced that it was right to eliminate Jews and that the very idea that Jews might have the same right to live as others simply did not occur to anyone; what then is to be said of a Jew’s right? Not alone do they not then in fact have the right but now it occurs to no-one – except themselves – that they ought to have it. When, because of what they believed, Catholics were killed by Protestants, Protestants by Catholics, Cathars by Christians , Jews by Christians … it seems that few thought those actions wrong; people were thought not to have the right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion …” (Declaration Article 18 and see Article 10 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen”).  Those who thought that people ought not to have the right to freedom of thought … were wrong to think so but they did think so, and the right did not exist. Similarly, and this we all too easily forget, convinced Nazis thought that Jews did not have the right to live; they were wrong to think so, but they did think so. The great horror of the Shoah is not only that so many Jews (and others) were exterminated but also that many thought it was good (right) to exterminate them.

Unlike the physical, chemical, biological or zoological world in which we humans live, and the laws of which apply to us for we are animals, the properly human world is jural. It is the product of human feeling, thought and decision emergent on that animal base. It is in principle but never wholly in practice what it ought to be. Not alone are we fallible so that any time some of those things that we think ought to be we later discover ought not to be and, perhaps too, ought not to have been but we are also weakwilled – in an older and outmoded terminology “sinful”. We do what we ought not to do, and fail to do what we ought to do. Perelman’s judge may be “morally obliged to resign” – that is what he thinks that he ought to do – but he may fail, for whatever reason, to do so. A right that ought to exist and that people think ought to exist may not, and one that ought not to exist may prevail. A right that it is thought ought to be but is not, does not exist in practice, but it does nonetheless exist as what is thought ought to exist. It exists as an aspiration or a demand. Whenever anyone is convinced that they ought to do something, that conviction is present in the human world but what ought to be done but is not yet done does not in practice yet exist. There is a critical gap between the judgment that one ought to do something and the decision to do it. In that way, a right that ought to exist does not exist until it is acknowledged. What is demanded but not yet acknowledged is a claim. The seventeen articles in the French Declaration of 1789 were expressed in the indicative mood as rights; they were not yet rights but demands. The rights described in the Universal Declaration of 1948 were rights that its authors thought ought to exist in every state although they knew very well that in many states some at least they did not; it was perfectly evident then, as it still is, that the right expressed in Article 21 (1) “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives”, did not, and still does not, exist in many of the member states of the United Nations Organisation. The rebels in the present civil war in Libya intend to establish rights that do not yet exist.

One who holds that a particular arrangement ought to be the case may be mistaken, just as one who holds that a particular factual statement is true may be mistaken. And so, about what ought to be the case there will inevitably be both disagreement, agreement and dispute and in coming to their different conclusions humans may be not alone honestly mistaken, but corrupt.

H early in her paper makes what I found to be an extremely important point about the “living law” which seems to her not to “suffice to promote ‘a context in which …we can lives our lives together in peace and justice. ‘ ” (The internal quotation is from LJC, xv). She is completely correct and completely at one with what is put forward throughout LJC. Neither any living law nor any legislation will produce a perfect human social order because, to paraphrase what she writes, the darker elements at work in humans will influence the order that will always in part be the production of those in power and will almost inevitably illegitimately and to a greater or lesser extent serve their sectional interests: “…the living law is not necessarily right and not necessarily universally shared. No human institution is utterly without bias [that is, without disordered sectional interest] and the living law is not an exception. It is not an unbiased, unchangeable, infallible supervening law but it does express what is, or has been, generally accepted to be good.” (LCJ, 53-4) “No moral tradition will be in all respects good; it will inevitably be corrupted by individual and group bias. Some powerful individuals or groups of individuals will, given time and opportunity, favour traditions that enhance their power over others…” (LJC, 63 ) The “communal law is not necessarily in all respects good, for in every society there are the relatively more or less powerful, and the more powerful can, and do, to a greater or lesser extent impose their biased and selfish interests upon the less powerful. Societies are at all times and inevitably dialectical” (LJC, 261) I should add that development, as distinct from mere alteration, is possible only if the present is imperfect; decline is possible only if it possible to fall away from present true discoveries and present good decisions. If one opinion, one decision, or one state of affairs is a good as any other, neither development nor decline, but only alteration, is possible.

What is crucial is that the living law and customs of a society are not the product initially of legislation, although they may later be taken up in legislation; they are simply the way in which over time and interaction people in a community think that they ought to live; its contents are “those ancient customs that, having being accepted by those who use them resemble written law” (Justinian: Institutes, I.II.9 and cf. Digest 1.3.32 ff) But, as H correctly insists, “it does not, …suffice to promote “a context in which ….we can lead our lives together in peace and justice.” The entire page in which the internal quotation is the final paragraph (LJC, p.xv) is dedicated to the proposition that human societies are intrinsically corruptible and will always be to a greater or lesser extent corrupt. The proper function and goal of law is to promote peace and justice but that goal will never be completely attained; humans remain prone to stupidity, pride, covetousness, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth.

With the proper function of the social order, which is to allow humans to live together in harmony and justice, slavery does not sit well. Slave owners commonly knew that the role of slave was not one that slaves could be expected to enjoy or in which they could fully and freely achieve the human good. And yet slavery existed, by some defended, by others attacked. Already in Aristotle’s time the institution of slavery was controversial. Aristotle notoriously defended it and seems to have thought that at least some men and women were naturally slaves whereas others were naturally masters. (The discussion is more subtle than headline condemnation allows.) The Sophists , Thrasymachus, Antiphon, and Lychophron among others argued against it and are said to be those to whom Aristotle refers when he wrote (Pol. 1253b20ff) that some “consider that the power of the master over the slave is against nature because it is only by convention that one is a slave and another a master, and that by nature there is no difference between them; and so, because it rests on power, the institution of slavery is unjust.” In Justinian’s Institutes (I.III.2 Digest 1.5.4.1) slavery is said to be “an institution of the law of nations (contitutio juris gentium) by which one is out under the dominion of another contrary to nature.” That is one of the very few passage in Roman Law where the ius gentium is distinguished from what is natural. [5](Ulpian’s definition of the ius naturale (Inst. I.II.Preamble) is rarely used and the term is several times identified with the ius gentium.). In the book on friendship in the NE Aristotle wrote that the master cannot be friends with the slave qua slave but qua man he can. [6]

That is an appropriate place to end, for the discussion of slavery shows, I hope, how H’s insistence of the natural equality of humans as humans has urged me to clarify some aspects of the idea of relevant equality and inequality. For that urging I am most grateful.

 

 

Hafsteinn Thór Haukasson: A few words on authority

Hafsteinn Thór’s (HTh) paper discusses Hart and Raz and raises a matter that is central to their work and is discussed but perhaps not concentrated upon in LJC: the distinction between moral and legal obligation. In response to HTh I shall discuss this question: how are the propositions “NN is morally obliged to do X.” and “NN is legally obliged to do X.” related? It is one of the matters in Oran Doyle’s paper and I continue the discussion in the response to that paper.

Here, without argument, I take “law” to mean the command of one entitled to command another who is reciprocally obliged to obey. “Law” is not used exclusively in that way in LJC.

 If NN is commanded by a thief to hand over his money, he is not legally obliged to do so because, by hypothesis, the thief is not entitled to command NN to do so. If NN decides to hand over his money he may later say that he was obliged to do so because he believed that had he not done so he would have be attacked. The thief had threatened him and he had believed the thief. His reason for yielding to the thief’s demand was that he preferred to hand over his money than to endure the pain that the thief had threatened. Was he morally obliged to act in that way? The proper answer is that he was if he thought that, in the circumstances, it was the good thing to do, and was not if he thought that, in the circumstances, it was not the good thing to do. Most fundamentally, one obliges oneself; one is obliged by one’s moral judgment that X is the good thing for one to do in the present circumstances. A general moral

norm that a particular person accepts expresses what that person thinks that it is good to do either always or for the most part in a kind of circumstance, e.g. it is never good to rape someone; for the most part it is good not to deprive someone of his property.

[7]

Hart’s example of the bank robber and my slightly different example of the thief (My example gets over the complication that the bank teller may have instructions to hand over money if threatened.) both make the assumptions that the person demanding money is not alone not entitled to do so but also doing what is wrong. In both cases, the person asked to give the money is asked to give it to someone who is not entitled to have it, and by someone who is not entitled to demand it. The difference between the bank robber who wishes to withdraw money from the bank , and the account holder who wishes to do physically the same thing is that the robber is not entitled to withdraw money whereas the account holder, depending on the state of his account, is.

In the effort to eliminate confusion four cases are worth considering:

 [1] AA is not entitled to command NN but, nonetheless, commands NN to do something that NN ought to do whether or not AA commands him to do it.

[2] AA is in general entitled to command NN but commands NN to do what NN ought not to do.

 [3] AA is in general entitled to command NN, and commands him to do what NN, absent the command, ought nonetheless to do.

[4] AA is in general entitled to command NN and commands him to do what NN, absent the command from AA, is entitled to do or not do.

The question as to why AA is or is not entitled to command NN is set aside for the moment. If it is assumed that if AA is entitled to command NN, then NN is legally and/or morally obliged to obey and that if AA is not entitled to command NN, then NN is not in principle and in the general case obliged to obey. A command as, for example, in [1] below to return a stolen wallet may relate to a specific case or may be the general command that stolen property is to be returned to its owner.

I shall consider each case briefly.

[1] AA is not entitled to command NN but, nonetheless, commands NN to do something that NN ought to do whether or not AA commands him to do it.

AA commands NN return the wallet that NN has stolen from MM. NN ought to return the stolen wallet irrespective of AA’s command. AA is not entitled to command NN. NN returns or does not return the wallet. If he does not return it, he will have failed to do what he ought to have done, what, as the term is used in LJC, “he was morally obliged to do.” If NN thinks that he ought to return the wallet and yet fails to do so, then he has failed to do what he thinks he ought to have done – what he thinks he was morally obliged to do. If he does return the wallet he does what he ought to do; if he returns the wallet and thinks that is what he ought to do, then he does what he thinks he ought – is morally obliged – to do. If NN does return the wallet, we may yet ask why he did so. He may have done so simply because he regretted having stolen it, had become convinced that to have stolen it was wrong, and that now the right thing to do – what he ought now to do, what he is now morally obliged to do – is to return it. He may return the wallet for a very different reason. Although he knows that AA is not entitled to command him, NN may nonetheless return the wallet simply because AA has commanded him and he is afraid of what AA will do if he disobeys. In this case, NN ought to do what AA commands but it is not because AA commands it that he ought to do it, and yet it is because AA commands him that he does it. Although he is “morally obliged” to return the wallet he is not “legally obliged” by AA’s command simply because the relation of commander to commanded (ruler to subject) does not exist between AA and NN.

[2] AA is in general entitled to command NN but he commands him to do what NN ought not to do.

 AA is entitled to command NN, that is, the relation of ruler to subject exists between AA and NN. As I have said above, I do not ask here why that relation exists or whether or not it ought to exist. I prescind from those questions and consider only the case where it does exist, and when both AA and NN accept that it does.

In general, AA is entitled to command NN. NN is, therefore, legally obliged to obey AA. The legal character of the obligation is based on the reciprocal entitlement of ruler and subject. To be legally obliged to do what another commands is simply a way of saying that the person commanding is entitled to command the person to whom the command is given. If AA is entitled to command NN but not entitled to command MM, NN is legally obliged to obey AA’s commands, whereas MM is not. That is what the terms “legally obliged” and “legal obligation” mean.

The question raised in [2] is whether or not AA who is in general entitled to command NN is entitled to command him to do what he ought not do. A presupposition of the question is that it would be possible for AA to command NN to do what he ought not do. Another version of that presupposition is to say that what NN ought to do or not do is not defined by what AA may command him to do. Yet another version is that what NN is morally obliged to do is not defined by what he is legally obliged to do. Legal obligation has nothing to do with the moral character of the action commanded. Unless that is presupposed it will evidently be impossible for AA to command NN to do what NN ought not to do because, by hypothesis, NN ought to do whatsoever AA commands.

The matter, already discussed by Plato in Eutyphro and in Protagoras, became acute in the later middle ages in the dispute between Aquininans and Occamites when it was asked if what God commanded was commanded because good or good because commanded by Him. (LJC, pp. 194-5) On both sides of the debate, it was agreed that God was entitled to command whatever He willed. If a divinely commanded act was good only because commanded then what the person commanded ought to do was defined by what was commanded. The good, that which ought to be done, was identified with what was commanded by God, and could not be known otherwise than in the command. If that is translated from divine to human ruler, then what the ruler commands defines what is good. But even some who thought that God commanded an act because it was good were not wholly free of the sense that, even so, what was good could be known only because God’s command had been revealed; certainly, not to steal was commanded because not to steal was good, but was known to be good because God had commanded it to Moses on Sinai. One knew that one was obliged not to steal because God had revealed it in the Decalogue. The rhetoric of the five books of laws, the Torah, is a rhetoric of command: “These are the commandments that the Lord gave to Moses for the people of Israel on Sinai.”[8] Implicit in the Torah is that their Lord’s command obliges the people and is sufficient reason to obey. The Israelites are legally obliged; there is no further question; either there is no other kind of obligation or legal and moral obligation fuse into one. The story of Abraham who was commanded to sacrifice Isaac, his son, provided powerful support for one side of the debate, and an awkward difficulty for the other. The authority of the Lord, their God is absolute; there are no exceptions. The rhetoric of command in the Torah – with the specific statutes removed – is the rhetoric of a pure legal and moral positivism.[9]

God, as all the mediaeval theologians, although for different reasons, agreed, could not command evil. But in the entire history of European reflection – my ignorance confines me to the European tradition – few have suggested that the human ruler could not command evil. Few have unequivocally suggested that there is no difference between good and evil or that what the ruler commands is by definition, and so necessarily, good. St Augustine is thought to have held that a law that commanded evil was not a law, that a command that enjoined the person commanded to do evil was simply not a command. (I am not convinced that Augustine thought so, but it is a question in interpretation that I am incompetent to answer.) Cicero, Aquinas and others held that an unjust law – one that commanded evildoing – was a corruption of law but still a law: AA who is in general entitled to command NN is not entitled to command him to do evil. AA is not so entitled precisely because NN is, irrespective of the command, obliged not to do evil. When AA commands NN to do evil the more original obligation not to do so over-rides the command.

How, when a command conflicts with that original obligation, are we to speak of obligation? I think it is clearest to say that when AA commands NN to do evil, NN is legally obliged because the command is addressed to him by AA who is in general entitled to command him but not morally obliged to obey.  If AA is entitled to command NN, NN is legally obliged to obey – that means simply , that AA and NN are in the relation sovereign and subject. When AA commands NN to perform an act that is either now morally required independently of the command (viz. not to steal) or is now morally neutral independent of the command (viz. drive on the right rather than on the left side of the road) NN is not only legally but morally obliged to perform that act. When the act commanded is morally repugnant, then NN remains legally obliged but either not morally obliged to perform it simply because it is commanded (he may be morally obliged for some other reason as the bank clerk might well be) or morally obliged not to perform it. To say that NN is legally obliged to do X is to say that the injunction to do X is issued by one entitled to issue it and that it applies to him. To say that NN is morally obliged to do X is simply to say that NN is convinced that X is what he ought to do.

[3] AA is in general entitled to command NN and commands him to do what NN, absent the command, ought nonetheless to do.

If no-one in a particular society thought that, absent any command, X ought to be done, or not done, in Y circumstances, then there would be no obligation on anyone to do or not do X in those circumstances, for no-one is obliged to do what he does not think he ought to do or to refrain from what he does not think ought he ought not to do. If, on the other hand, NN is convinced that he ought to do or not do X, he is obliged to do or not do X, whether or not he is commanded by another, or whether or not it is generally accepted in his community that X ought or ought not be done. That is the meaning of “moral obligation” or “the primacy of conscience”.

Whether or not a particular proposition is true is independent of NN’s judgment – in other words, NN can be mistaken and hold that the proposition, P, is true when it is in fact false, or false when it is in fact true. But if NN is convinced that a proposition is true, then, whether or not it is true, he cannot fail to hold that it is true. Judgments about what ought or not be done – moral judgments or judgments within the moral domain – may be true or false (LJC, passim & esp. pp 175-6). Accordingly, when NN judges that he ought to do X he may be mistaken – in other words, that he is convinced of the truth of his judgment does not make the judgment true – but it is, nonetheless, his present judgment about what he ought to do or not do that binds.

Judgments about what ought to be done are of two kinds: judgments about what ought to be done now in these circumstances, and judgments about what ought to be done in kinds of circumstances. Laws, whether customary or legislated, state what ought to be done in kinds of circumstances; the law being, as Aristotle wrote in his discussion of equity “… universal …[and] takes the general case.” (NE, 1137b10 cf. LJC, p.138). For it to be generally accepted in a particular society that X ought to be done or not done in a particular case, it must be communally known and so becomes the law, customary or legislated, written or unwritten, natural or conventional, of the society. If there are actions that ought to be or ought not to be performed whether or not they are required or forbidden in the prevailing law, there seems to be no reason why at least some of them would not be found in that law. For example, the universal or general norm that promises are to be kept in principle obliges each one of us but that is not a reason for it not to be made explicit in a society’s laws. So, if AA commands NN to keep his promises, NN is legally obliged to do what he is already in principle morally obliged to do; on the other hand, if AA simply does not issue that command to NN, then NN remains in principle morally obliged but is not legally obliged by AA. Still, when we consider that the communally accepted moral norms are communally known moral norms and hence form the communal moral law, it will be possible, and almost inevitable in a complex modern society, that a particular person or set of persons will accept additional other laws. When more formal legislation emerges to complement the then prevailing communal law, it will often both include many of the provisions already present in that law, and add further detailed ordinances at least some of which may well be in tension with the prevailing communal law and practice. With the emergence of an increasing formal jural practice and legislation, the term “law” is often used to refer exclusively to that practice and the term “custom” increasingly used to refer to the prior law, as appears in Justinian’s Institutes and Digest (Inst. I.II.9; Dig.I.3.32). In those passages from Justinian the reference to the role of popular consent – Ex non scripto jus venit, quod usus comprobavit. Nam diuturni mores consensus utentium comprobati legum imitantur (Right that usage has settled comes from what is unwritten. For ancient customs approved by those who have used them are like laws.) – is significant and is fundamental to the account of both unwritten law – custom or living law – and legislation in LJC. That law is accepted is one of the pillars upon which the actual authority of law depends. Hobbes was mistaken to think, if in fact he did so think, that there had been an historical original agreement but he was right to suspect that in the longer period no authority can survive too much disagreement.

[4] The fourth case is when AA is in general entitled to command NN and commands him to do what NN, absent the command, is entitled to do or not do.

Many customs and state legislated ordinances require or forbid actions or establish rights that would otherwise be left to the choice of those to whom the set of customs or ordinances apply. These are often referred to as “conventional laws” and, by Aristotle in NE. 1134b19, as “tò ?è nomikón (variously translated as “conventional”, or “legal”), and roughly correspond to Gaius’ iura gentium. There is no suggestion in Aristotle or Gaius that such laws are randomly made or unintelligent; they are solutions established as reasonable answers to problems peculiar to the particular society at that time. It is utterly crucial to remember that the division into natural and conventional is a post-hoc theoretical distinction. Still, by whatever words one chooses to make a distinction between levels of laws, it is obvious that the detailed maritime rules governing the carrying of lights at night which, equally obviously, could have differed somewhat from what has been settled, are at a different level from the underlying rule that collisions are to be avoided.

The underlying rule that collisions are to be avoided – which I think of as a natural law of the sea so obvious to sailors that it is rarely expressly stated – is supported by the “practice of seafarers” and, in the United Kingdom since the Steam Navigation Act of 1846, by the detailed collision regulations including those concerning Lights to be shown by night and Shapes by day. One regulation requires the carrying of a sternlight: a white light showing at night between sunset and sunrise over an arc of 135° astern.[10] Before either the practice of seafarers or the Navigation Acts had introduced a rule, it was not a rule, and so no-one was legally obliged; it is an intelligent but detailed solution to a recognized problem. The purpose of the light is to show vessels whether another vessel is coming towards or going away from them. Perhaps, it would have been equally good to require the light to be carried on the bow, but what would not have served equally well would have been to permit a vessel to carry the light either on the bow or astern. If it be assumed that the 1846 Act is in the position of AA and masters of vessels in UK waters are in the position of NN, then NN is legally obliged to show a white light astern over the required arc at night. A master in such circumstances is morally obliged to do so because he is morally obliged to try to avoid collisions – thus taking the interest’s of others into account rather than endangering their lives and livelihoods – and morally obliged to follow the rules because a communally known and accepted way of doing so is needed and the rules state what that way is (the informational character of the law) and that it is to be followed (the command character of the law). Associated with the command is a sanction for breach of the rule (the coercive character of the law).

But if, as in the regulation about the carrying and position of lights, AA is entitled to command NN to do what, absent the command, NN would be legally entitled to do or not do, there might seem to be no limit to what AA is entitled to command except that AA is not entitled to command what is evil. HTh deals with this problem in the final pages of his paper when he discusses Himma’s criticism of Raz. That there are, and ought to be, other limits and what those limits are or ought to be, is the matter of the liberal tradition. (LJC, esp. Ch.7.5, pp. 183-8 & fn.29 on p.186) HTh in his footnote 30 remarks that “The value and extent of personal autonomy lies at the heart of the differences between competing political theories.” I agree and would add that it lies also at the heart of political practice; the setting of the limits is an argument within politics understood neither as an academic discipline, nor as a task to be left to politicians but as the responsibility of each of us in our different ways. On one end of the spectrum there are those who tend to the view that the law should prescribe all virtues and prohibit all vices, (which in practice cannot but mean to prescribe everything that is that the influential findvi rtuous and to prohibit all that the influential find vicious) and at the other end of the spectrum are those who hold that freedom or liberty ought to be the basic (or, in the technical language familiar from computing, the default) position from which to begin the argument so that the limitation of liberty not its extension is to be argued for. In LJC the focus is on the common good, that is the order in which people can live together in peace, but what that in its detail and in particular circumstances is must be the topic of perennial argument, or, as Isaiah Berlin wrote, the topic of perennial haggling. I should add only that the common good demands that argument be permitted, and that it occur.[11]

I have set down here some reflection occasioned by my reading of HTh’s paper. I am very grateful to him for his presentation in Reykjavík and for the paper published here.

Oran Doyle: The Significance of the Living Law.

Oran Doyle [O] in his reading of LJC asks several related and very important questions. I shall respond only to two, and leave others, no less important, to another day. The two questions are these: first, are the provisions of the communal or living law – O points out correctly that several terms are used interchangeably: “communal moral law”, “custom”, “moral tradition” – “merely obligations from the perspective of the community or true obligations, ie moral obligations that do truly apply to us?” and, secondly, does the set of customs, the prevailing living communal law, of a society have secondary rules in Hart’s sense of that term?

                                                                     I

First, then, are the rules of the living law, the communal moral law, obligations only from the perspective of the community or obligations that do truly apply to us. O stresses that it is “At this point in the book “ that the answer is unclear; I want to address the question itself because of its great importance. Later in the book it does I think become clear – as O accepts – that the provisions of a society’s living law will not be in all respects good and, therefore, do not impose true moral obligations: “This communal law is not necessarily in all respects good, for in every society there are the relatively more and less powerful and the more powerful can, and do, to a greater or lesser extent, impose their biased and selfish interests upon the less powerful. Societies are at all times, and inevitably dialectical.” (LJC, Conclusion, p. 260) My answer now, and the answer we gave in the book is, therefore, unequivocal: the living law imposes legal obligations on the members of the community but not all those obligations are in O’s sense true moral obligations, and some may be legal obligations that one may be morally obliged not to respect. It is, however, imperative to recognize that obligations that at any time and in any society that are taken to be true cannot but be obligations that are thought to be true, just as factual propositions that are taken to be true are propositions that are thought on the best available evidence to be true. Infallibility is not granted to humans and “ ‘Nothing is more unfair,’ as an English historian has well said, ‘than to judge the men of the past by the ideas of the present.’ “[12] That there are true and false judgments in a recurrent theme in LJC; that space was thought to be absolute in Newtonian physics was an historically understandable, almost inevitable, mistake but a mistake nonetheless; that slavery was once thought to be good, did not make it good.

A presupposition of O’s question is that there are true moral obligations. I, too, make that presupposition and it is one that runs through the book, but, as well as being a presupposition, it is a proposition in support of which some arguments are adduced. Of these the most fundamental is that for humans to live is a value; that they cannot live otherwise than socially,;that they cannot live socially otherwise than in a jural world in which the rules governing how to live in that world are known to them, and, if followed, allow them, more or less well, to live and realize their individual values in communal peace and harmony. Human societies are dialectical; some people – and all at least sometimes – will choose to realize individual values that cannot be realized without overriding the interests of others – the thief who chooses to steal another’s money realizes his individual value to have the money but does so only by overriding the owner’s value to keep what belongs to him. To say that one value is better than another, that, for instance, the owner’s value is better than, and ought to prevail over, the thief’s and that the thief ought to respect it is to say in O’s words, if I understand them correctly, that the law which forbids theft expresses a true moral value and requires behaviour that is a true moral obligation. One who would claim that there are in principle no true moral obligations is committed to the assertion that in principle no value is better or more worthwhile than any other. Because individuals and groups of individuals are biased they become morally myopic and, at some level of bad faith, see their own interests as paramount and to be realized irrespective of others; they will tend, if they are powerful enough to do so, to introduce customs and laws that favour the realization of those interests. They may even manage to convince themselves, at least for a time, and try to convince their subjects that they are “morally right”. The laws that they introduce and defend are imposed upon those that the laws oppress, and a rhetoric is devised to justify the laws. [13] Those to whom the laws apply are legally bound by those laws but not morally bound by them and whether or not to obey them is a different question from the question as to whether or not to obey laws that bind both legally and morally as I argued in the response to HTh’s paper.

For true values actually to exist in a society they must be known, just as for true factual propositions actually to exist in a society they must be known. For true values effectively to exist in communal life they must not only be known but be, sufficiently often, chosen. Thus, if in a society in which no-one knows that it is wrong to steal the true value that theft is wrong does not actually exist in that society; if in a society people know that it is wrong to steal but nonetheless steal whenever it suits them to do so, the true value that theft is wrong does not there effectively exist.

If, on the other hand, there are in principle no true values, no true moral obligations, or if, in one’s analysis, one prescinds from any discussion of true value, then the question that remains concerning a purported law or set of laws is whether or not it is a law or set of laws and, accordingly, legally binding. The question as to whether or not it is morally binding simply does not arise. However, even if there are neither true not false values, a law necessarily includes a value for to enact that X is to be done is to be done is to say that it is valuable to do X. The extermination of Jews was a Nazi value. If there are no true or false values, then that it was a value is all that is to be said about it.

                                         II

In about half an hour the untidy girl, not yet dressed for her evening labours, brought him his chop and potatoes, and Mr Harding begged for a pint of sherry. He was impressed with an idea, which was generally present a few years since, and is not yet generally removed from the minds of men, that to order a dinner at any kind of inn, without also ordering a pint of wine for the benefit of the landlord was a kind of fraud; not punishable, indeed, by law, but not the less abominable on that account.

Anthony Trollope, The Warden, (1855) Ch. XVI.partially

Whatever one’s position on the matter of true moral value, the question as to whether what purports to be a law is in fact a law properly arises. That I take to be the matter of Hart’s distinction between primary and secondary rules. I shall try to develop an answer in the light of what seems to me to be either explicit or implict in LJC.

The clearest discussion of the matter is in footnote 43 on page 257: “A bank clerk illegitimately commanded under threat of serious injury is not morally obliged, that is, not obligted , by the illegitimate command but he may well be morally obligated to hand over the money because he judges that the value of his staying alive or unharmed outweighs the value of giving the money. The crucial point is that he is not obligated by the command. Similarly, one living under a regime de facto in power but illegitimate may for his own reasons consider himself to be obligated to act in accord with, but not obligated by, its illegitimate commands.”

Whenever AA tells NN to do something, that is, whenever AA commands NN, the question as to whether or not AA is entitled to do so arises. And for the command to be recognized by NN as authoritative – that is, as a command properly addressed to NN and issued by one who is recognized by him as entitled to issue it – NN must recognize AA as entitled to command him. The difference, as Lichtenberg’s aphorism has it, between a prince and a lunatic is that other people recognize the prince. (There is an ambiguity there that I hope to go some way towards resolving but what seems clear is that NN must be able to distinguish between a command from an entitled or authoritative source and one from a non-entitled source. The crucial feature of the bank robber is not that he can support his command by threat of force but that, whether he can or not, he is not entitled to command the clerk. If NN does not accept that AA is in principle entitled to command him, then he thinks of AA as the bank clerk thinks of the robber.)

As children grow up they are told to do things by adults who, by giving their instructions, present themselves as entitled to do so. As they grow older the children may begin to distinguish between those adults (for example, their parents), whom they recognize as entitled to command them, and those whom they do not. My grandson when he was about four years of age once said to me when I had instructed him to do something: “You’re not the boss of me. My mum is the boss of me.” I took his response as a perfect example of a rule of recognition. The rule that his mother was entitled to give him instructions was a secondary rule in the light of which her specific instructions were primary rules. Between him and his mother a legal system had been established in which she was lawgiver and he the person to whom the laws were properly addressed. Within that small familial legal system as he understood it, there were no other legitimate lawgivers; within that familial system others, as Aquinas wrote in answer to the question as to whether or not anyone whomsoever could make law, were advisors whose advice did not have the force that law properly should have (non habet vim coactivam; quam debet habere lex, …Sum.Theol. I.II.90.3 ad 2). [14]

Hart sometimes contrasts the secondary rules of recognition, change and adjudication with the primary rules of obligation, which may give the impression that the secondary rules are not rules of obligation, which, in fact, they are. When I am told that parliament is entitled to make provisions that I am legally obliged to accept, what I am told, in effect, is that I am legally obliged to accept the terms of whatever provisions are made by that body and that apply to me. Similarly, if I am told that the law courts are entitled to determine what is just in case of dispute, I am in effect told that I must, in certain circumstances, submit to that institution and accept its determinations. Both primary and secondary rules of a given society may be communicated to someone who is merely enquiring about the society, as might an anthropologist, and to whom neither set of rules applies. If I correctly understand Hart, it seems that with his distinction he has shed considerable light on what a significant part of jurisprudence had for centuries been about. To state that custom is like law, or that the decision of the Emperor has the force of law, is to state a secondary rule, but, before the secondary rule that custom is like law is formally articulated, it is known in intelligent practice that custom is law.

Understood in that way, it would be impossible for there to be a law without secondary rules.

Without secondary rules the bank clerk would have been unable to distinguish between the command of the robber and any other command. If it is true that there must be secondary rules, it is true that they must be more or less explicitly known. To the extent that a command binds because it is a command, it must be that the person bound knows and accepts that the commander is entitled to command and that this particular injunction comes from the source, and for people in any society to know and accept that they are bound whether by the laws of Hammurabi, or the Torah, or Solon …they must know not only the detailed rules of, say, Hammurabi’s code, but also know and accept that they are bound by them. The many detailed statutes and ordinances in Leviticus are primary rules; they are recurrently prefaced by the refrain: “The Lord spoke to Moses saying: speak to the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: (then follows a statute or set of statutes)” and conclude with the refrain “I am the Lord, your God.” (Lev. 19.1-2 & 4 but found passim). The refrains are secondary rules stating why the statutes and ordinances bind. One of the functions of the secondary rules is to distinguish between commands that are simply sentences in the imperative mood addressed by one person to another and grammatically similar sentences in the category established by the secondary rules.

All societies are, and must be, governed by primary rules that have both an informative and a compelling function. The rule informs in as much as it tells what in a kind of situation is to be done, and compels in as much as the commander or those whose task it is to ensure that the rule is observed will compel those to whom it is addressed to act in that way in that kind of situation or mete out punishment if a person is found guilty of breach. All societies have secondary rules that tell both how the secondary rules are to be distinguished from commands that are no more than sentences in the imperative mood or commands given by parents to children, and why it is that the primary rules bind.

O writes that in LJC it is held that “…the living law is just at much at work” in what Hart thinks of as “[a system] that does not count as law at all”. O is correct. The question arises as to whether the difference between the position in LJC and the position in Hart’s The Concept of Law is more than verbal. O writes that Hart “imagines a society without a legislature, courts or officials of any kind” and “refers (without citation) to studies of primitive communities which depict in detail ‘the life of a society where the only means of social control is that general attitude of the group towards its own standards of behaviour in terms of which we have characterized rules of obligation.’ (CL.91)

I do not think that such communities exist but what is true is that in all communities there are expected standards of behaviour that are controlled to a large extent by “the general attitude of the group” that is, by the group that as a matter of social fact exerts some influence on the person tempted to act otherwise than in the approved manner. The rules of polite behaviour are enforced in that way. The example of the teenager who would in other circumstances prefer to pay his bus fare but decides not to in order to avoid his companions’ ‘scorn and derision’ is not quite the same. (LJC, p. 222) In that story, the teenager had a private preference for paying the bus fare and would in other circumstances have done so but knows that, in the group to which he wants to belong, to do so is disapproved on pain of a sanction that he would avoid. If he decides not to pay the fare, he is acting in accord with the prevailing law of the group, but reluctantly from fear of punishment which might be not only scorn but expulsion from the group – the ancient punishment of exile. What Aquinas wrote applies to him: “just as some are not interiorly disposed to do spontaneously and of their own accord what the law commands, they must be exteriorly constrained to bring about the just result that the law intends. That is what happens when the fear of punishment makes them act in accord with the law, in a servile manner not freely. “ (Sum.Con.Gent. III.128.7) It is likely that many readers will be inclined to say that the teenager would have been right to pay, and was wrong not to pay, the fare. The example is chosen in the hope of that response; the story is intended to show that a purely structural examination of law, sanction, and action is possible. The teenager is a member of a community which has, as do all communities, laws that express the values approved in the community – were the values not expressed they would not be known. A law that commands an action (Bus fares are not to be paid.) expresses a communally held value (It is good that bus fares not be paid.). Obedience to the law brings about that value (The bus fare is not paid.). Within the teenager’s community, that law is a primary rule. But he must know that it is a communal rule; he must be able to distinguish it from other expressions in the imperative mood that are not rules of his community and may, indeed, command precisely the opposite action (Bus fares are to be paid.) The rules that show him how to recognize the rules that apply to him as a member of the community are secondary rules; they may be more or less formally expressed but they must exist, they must be known, and to be known, they must be promulgated. Because over time, within the “same” community – there is no-one now living in Iceland who lived there 170 years ago and yet we talk of the Iceland community changing and not simply of one set of people being replaced by another entirely different set of people – and even when at least some members of the community at the later time were members at an earlier time, communal values change, the laws that express them change and so there is in every community some way, more or less formal, of bringing change about.[15] Disputes arise between people within the community. Someone accuses the teenager of having paid the fare. He claims that did not pay and is not guilty of the offense. In response to this problem there will at once arise a way of trying to ascertain the truth, for if he did not pay his fare it is unjust to sneer at him or to expel for having done so. “And therefore it is of the Law of Nature, That they that are at controversie, submit their Right to the judgement of an Arbitrator.” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 15, 213 [78]; LJC, 145, & fn. 27 ). As are Hobbes’ other “natural laws”, that one is simply the intelligent solution to a problem that is likely to arise. “for there may …arise questions concerning a man’s action; First, whether it were done or not done; Secondly, (if done) whether against the Law, or not against the Law.” (ibid., loc.cit.) Finally, there is the cardinal rule: The values of the community are to be realized and are expressed in The Law and the specific laws that intend their realization are to be obeyed.

The cardinal rule is both ambiguous and contestable: ambiguous because what in any specific case the community is, or can be, uncertain; contestable because there is always at least the possibility, and commonly the reality, of tension between some of the values expressed in the laws and some other values in the community. (Commonly flouted regulations are examples.) And so, the cardinal rule, Kelsen’s Grundnorm, becomes rather this: the values expressed in The Law is to be realized and the specific laws that intend their realization are to be obeyed. Values are always expressed by people, and so two questions arise; first, as to their goodness or badness; secondly, as to the legitimacy of the legislator. Those are not Hart’s question and I shall leave them aside; they are discussed in the eleventh chapter of LJC.

Hart discovered the important distinction between primary rules, that authoritatively guide the actions of those to whom they are addressed, and secondary rules that enable people to distinguish between those primary rules and other commands that may be addressed to them, that inform of them how disputes are to be settled, of the sanctions that may be imposed in case they break the rules, how rules are changed and who is entitled to change them. O suggests that Hart suppose that the existence of secondary rules in a particular social order distinguishes that order, from one from one that lacks secondary rules. What I have suggested here is that both kinds of rule are found in every society, for in every society it will be possible for AA to give a command to NN without being entitled to do so and correspondingly possible for both to know that.

 Hart distinguishes between legal systems on the criterion of the presence or absence of secondary rules; I incline to distinguish them according to the comparative complexity, explicitness and clarity of the prevailing secondary rules, and according to the importance and character of the distinction between relatively insignificant and significant rules. Everyday rules of polite behaviour exist in every society and breach of them incurs often only an everyday sanction such as disapproval but murder and theft, for example, are never dealt with only in that way. It can and does happen that actions that were once dealt with in a formal way no longer are but fall into the category of actions dealt with by more everyday sanctions; few Europeans now remember a time when adultery was a crime in most European jurisdictions, and many find it most odd that it in some non-European jurisdictions it remains one.[16]

A secondary rule that specifies who, or what institution, is entitled to make primary rules, is critical. From the secondary rule that the decision of the Emperor has the force of law follows that a particular decree of the Emperor legally binds those who are in principle legally bound by Roman law. But secondary rules need not be so formally expressed and, indeed, the formal expression of the secondary rule that the Emperor’s enactment was law followed already established and accepted practice. Similarly, the secondary rules that informs the members of a society that primary rules of a particular living law bind them is present in intelligent practice before it is formally expressed. A particular custom is customary law because the members of the community accept it as such even if they have only a hazy idea or none at all as to why some customs oblige and others, more transient, have some social influence but are perhaps merely fashion. Before Hart’s discovery the distinction and its importance was theoretically unnoticed.

So far, so good. As far as the analysis has gone the effort has been to distinguish law from not-law, and there has been no need to distinguish between good and bad law or to distinguish between laws that bind independently of the command and laws that bind only because properly commanded. Nor has there been any need to raise the question as to why someone or some institution who claims to be the legislator is entitled to be. Hart’s analysis is, as he said, sociological, a description of jural fact.

There are two questions: first, is AA the legitimate ruler? Secondly, does AA remain the legitimate ruler if he becomes a tyrant and enacts evil laws? In LJC (257) it is suggested that “The entitlement of legislators to legislate and the entitlement of judges to adjudicate are for the most part accepted, and in that acceptance they are established. That is ‘the social contract’. Legitimacy in the end rests on its being accepted.” In many – but not all – modern states, the legislator is parliament to which actual legislators are elected and adjudication of disputes whether civil or criminal is undertaken by a corps of judges, either elected or appointed, in a system of hierarchically ordered courts. That system is in fact either accepted or acquiesced in, by the vast majority of citizens, and it is on that acceptance or acquiescence that the legitimacy of the parliament and judiciary rests. When acceptance and acquiescence sufficiently diminish, the state tends towards collapse. There are and have been other systems of government and they too may be legitimate: a president for life to be succeeded by the nominated heir is not necessarily illegitimate. In the period of kingship in Europe the reigning king or queen was accepted as the legitimate ruler and there were rules governing the succession, sometimes more or less quietly accepted by those who had much interest in, and were affected by, the matter although many, often the majority, as Machiavelli knew, had often little interest in the storms on Olympus provided that they were left to carry on their lives in relative security. Nowadays the influence of rulers, of whatever kind, on the lives of all members of the society is much greater and correspondingly greater is the interest of the ruled.

Successful invaders, from Europe, North Africa and Asia sought, often very dubious, legitimating reasons that they hoped would sometimes genuinely, more often conveniently, convince those upon whom, in the longer term, the success of their invasion depended. William, Prince of Orange, could not have defeated James to become ruler of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland had not he been supported by a sufficiently powerful alliance of domestic nobles. In the end, the right of conquest, or the attainment of power, more or less admittedly, commonly and everywhere, underlay the claim to legitimacy. Castile and Aragon became the legitimate rulers of Andalus when, having defeated the equally legitimate Visigoth rulers who preceded them, they found sufficiently acceptance. The same is true of the Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman invasions of England and Wales, the Norse invasions of Western France and the later Norman invasion of Southern Italy and Sicily, the Ottoman Empire, the Manchu invasion of China … But, as civilizations became more advanced, rarely, and more rarely still as different ideas about legitimacy developed, was success given as the sole legitimating reason. Most present states have their origins in force and fraud.

In the tradition of practical politics the question of legitimacy in Europe increasingly concentrated on the legitimacy of the present incumbent often against the claims of a pretender supported by the incumbent’s opponents. Usually the pretender and supporters, who, to succeed, had to rely on force, provided reasons to show that the pretender, rather than the incumbent was the legitimate ruler. Might may well make right but tends to be accompanied by more or less good, more or less spurious, legitimating reasons; ragion di stato. Machiavelli and Giorgione are the great theorists – not necessarily the defenders – of this tradition

The practical dispute was between claimants: which one was the legitimate ruler? Theoretical discussion, as in Plato’s Statesman, was largely about what type of person the ruler ought to be, what knowledge and virtues the ruler ought to have. That there ought to be a ruler was for the most part taken for granted. Aquinas, in a set of questions that one might expect to have little to do with jurisprudence, asks in the first part of the Sum.Theol. (I.96.4) whether or not in the state of innocence – the state in which humans would have lived had not their first ancestors been expelled from the garden of Eden – there would have been one who ruled over others.[17] His answer is the in Eden humans would have been social animals; that social life is impossible unless one person who intends the common good presides, for many intend many things but one intends one thing. In that place he refers to Aristotle who “in the Politics says that when many are ordered to a single goal, one is always found who is principal and governs.” Aquinas’ background context is his own society and so he has in mind a single person as ruler, as, indeed, has Plato in Statesman whereas Aristotle writes of different types of rule (Pol. I.I.1252a10) but all three think of some type of governance as necessary for the wellbeing of the community “for every community is constituted with a view to some good” (Pol.I.I.1252a1). In LJC the good is the communal order in which everyone, each pursuing their own ends can live in peace and harmony and of which the sustaining virtue is justice. It is not a particular end to be achieved as the end to be achieved by group of walkers coming down a mountain in a fog might be to reach home safely or, to take Aquinas’ own example, as the end to be achieved by an army is victory. Those examples do not illustrate the common good of a society; a society is not an organisation with that kind of goal in view, although in extreme cases and temporarily, as when a city is attacked, the defeat of the enemy can become to an extent a goal of that kind.  As I write, in August 2011, there is civil war in Libya; the “common good” of Colonel Gadhaffi’s state – that is, the good shared by its supporters – is its survival; the “common good” of its opponents – the good shared by the rebels – is its overthrow. But the common good of whatever society survives the war is an order within which each person, while caring for the good of others, freely pursues his own goals. A society is an order that ideally is the just interaction between its members; its common good is the order in which that interaction can take place. To have confused and to continue to confuse, both theoretically and practically, these two very different senses of the single term, remains the bugbear of jurisprudence and political philosophy generally.

That order is in part given, and in part continually chosen. It is given in as much as we are animals and live in a given order as chimpanzees, gorillas and other animals do. That order is what Ulpian in his immensely illuminating and sadly neglected insight called the ius naturale. Human social orders are continually chosen by people living in a way that allows others to live; that is how I understand Hjördís’ insistence on the importance of equality. Human social orders will be in part common and in part peculiar to the particular order; the attempt to work out and communicate what is common resembles Gaius’ ius gentium; what is peculiar to a particular order is his ius civile.  Because, and to the extent that, the human order is subject to deliberation and choice, humans ask questions, share answers and make both individual and communal decisions and so continually choose the order within which they live. But they do so in two distinct ways. First, each single person and each smaller group, chooses how to live in the order in which they finds themselves. To the extent that it is an object of choice the human social order is a moral order. Secondly, each knows that order only by being educated into it; we learn our order as we learn our language. We learn the rules of the order before we learn that some are thought “conventional” and some “natural”. The Icelandic child does not learn that “takk fyrir” means “thanks” but how and when to use “takk fyrir” and only later that others make a different sound or word, and say “thanks”,“go raibh maith agat” or “grazie” in the same circumstances. Every language is rule governed and speakers follow those rules but they do not theoretically know them; somewhat similarly every human society is rule governed and its members follow or fail to follow them without necessarily knowing them abstractly and theoretically. A language and a society are orders that allow humans to become fully human.

It is evident that in a non-literate society none of the rules governing the prevailing order are written. It is equally evident that the specifically human rules – i.e. rules at the level of deliberation and choice and not those ‘natural practices’ of which Ulpian wrote – must be communicated whether or not they are properly of the ius gentium or of the ius civile. Certainly a child learns how to behave in part through language: “Give Etty back her toy; it is hers and you may not take it home “ but usually not by being told “Thou shalt not steal”. Thus, a child learns what property is, what it means to own something, how to use such words as “mine”, “yours”, ‘hers”, “his”, “ours”, “theirs”, and that it is wrong to steal. The child learns, sometimes in words, sometimes as a result of a parent’s response, that breach of the rule not to steal, if discovered, brings about disapproval and perhaps some further punishment.

The injuction against theft is only one of the many primary rules that the child learns. The secondary rule is the authoritative context within which the child learns them. That authoritative context is the relation between child and parents or other significant adults and which, in part, is the human transformation of the similar relation between parent and infant chimpanzee or gorilla. As the child grows that authoritative context is further transformed as the child learns how to think of the relation between him and his parents. He learns to feel about himself as one bound to obey parents and some other adults. He learns that and other primary rules as authoritative commands and gradually takes himself to be subject and the adult to be sovereign. As the child grows up he discovers in his practical intelligent everyday living that adults, too, are subject to a law that is sovereign. Only later, if ever, does he learn, and think explicitly think of, the rule as requiring reasonable behaviour. That the law binds, what the law enjoins, how it is known, how breaches are dealt with are secondary rules that are necessarily present and part of the law of every human society.

There is in some societies an explicitly identified lawgiver – not one who is thought only to tell the laws; a lawspeaker – but one from whom the laws are imagined to emanate. That image of the lawgiver dominates the European jurisprudential imagination from at least Plato’s Statesman. In societies where there is no clearly identifiable lawgiver from whom the laws emanate, and in which the prevailing laws are simply unquestionably present and binding, the laws, particularly those thought to be most imortant, are often imagined as mysteriously sovereign and often from a mysterious and superhuman source, as Antigone says in Sophocles: “For neither to-day nor yesterday, but from all eternity, these statutes live and no man knoweth whence they came.” (Antigone I.XIII.2) In Hammurabi and in the Torah, the laws emanate from God. Hávamál, although a compilation of wise sayings rather than laws, is from the high Norse god, Odin. In aboriginal Australia “the law” is from the ancestor human/animals in the original time when animals and humans were one, as they originally had been before the present fractured time; to keep the law is to bring to the present the sustaining power of the origin.

The idea of a legislator and the practice of legislation was already developed when Plato wrote. The tension in Antigone is between the laws that live “from all eternity …and no man knoweth whence they came” and the laws of the Creon, the legitimate lawgiver.  In Leviticus the tension is between the laws given by Yahweh to the people of Israel through Moses – who in the Torah is a lawspeaker only – and the abominable practices of their enemies: “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you. … Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgements. “ (Lev. 18. 24 & 26) The tensions are different but in both the idea of an authoritative lawgiver is present.

Plato in Statesman takes the presence of an identifiable lawgiver or legislator for granted but raises explicitly the question of the truth of the laws. Laws expressed as commands are neither true nor false. “A dead man shall not be buried or burned within the city” (Twelve Tables, X,1), understood as an imperative, is neither true nor false but underlying it is the unexpressed proposition: “It is good that a dead man be not buried or burned within the city”. That proposition is either true or false. One possibility is that its truth or falsity cannot be known or can be believed only in authoritative revelation. Plato thought that underlying commands were true or false propositions that could in principle, but with difficulty, be discovered to be true or false. If that is accepted, a new explicit criterion of legitimacy arises: a law based on a true proposition is good; one based on a false proposition is bad. The case of a law that commands what is, absent the command, more or less indifferent – a ‘conventional law’ in one of the senses of the adjective – is correctly understood differently; a conventional law in that sense is one that is a law only because it is enacted. (Aristotle, NE,1134b,18 & Rhet. 1373b, 2ff.)

It is important to notice that a true proposition upon which an expressed law rests is not yet a law for the assertion that “P is true” has this difficulty: if I assert that Archimedes’ law of the lever is true, I do not mean that it became true when I asserted it. But that is ambiguous. Was it true before anyone knew that it was? I think the clearest solution to what may seem to be an aporia is this: before anyone knew that Archimedes’ law was true, it was neither true nor false simply because the law expressed in a mathematical proposition did not yet exist; but it is true that the world was such that it was governed by the law that Archimedes later discovered. Levers were widespread and in common use before their principle or law was discovered.

A “conventional” law, as Aristotle used the term in both the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, is one that rests upon a proposition that it would be good to enact that X be done or that Y be done and to do both together would be unwise or, in the limit, impossible. What Aristotle, in those places, calls a “natural” law is one that rests upon the proposition that X is the nature or character of the case, as that in most circumstances contracts are to be honoured.

A good law or set of laws, whether communal or legislated, describes and establishes the good communal order. The presence of the legislator, whether supernatural or human, and the corresponding presence of the person ruled, pervades the European jurisprudential imagination as it pervaded its Middle Eastern influences. So, in Aquinas’ in the third article of his question, “Of the Essence of Law” (ST.Ia.IIae.90.3) thinks of legislation and the issuing of commands given by one entitled to command and backed by force – the vis coactiva; and Hobbes defines law as “…Command …of him, whose Command is addressed to one formerly obliged to obey him. And as for Civill Law, it addeth only the name of the person Commanding, which is Persona Civitas, the Person of the Commonwealth.” (Leviathan, XXVI, 312 [137]) Bentham and Austin retain that image although they tend to omit the idea of the legislator’s entitlement and so, as HTh remarks, “were unable to explain the difference between the law and the orders of a gunman…”. Part of Hart’s task is precisely to explain that difference and so to recover and develop what was at best and inchoate and ill worked out aspect of the tradition.

That image and idea of sovereign and subject is not absent from LJC but concentration on the living law and on the similarity between learning our language and our morals brings another image into sharper focus. Humans live in a physical, chemical, biological, zoological and jural world. To conclude this discussion of the authority of law I want to leave aside the question of the particular legislator’s authority to concentrate on the authority of the jural world.

When we learn our mother tongue we learn a rule governed communication system that allows us speak to one another, to understand ourselves and the non-human world, to become humanly responsible for ourselves, and to develop into the adults that, at the end of our lives, we eventually become. The rules of our language we take for granted. The rules govern but by what authority? In English, for example, the interrogative “Were you here yesterday? and the indicative “You were here yesterday” are formed by inverting pronoun and verb but the indicative “I saw the boat yesterday” and interrogative “Did you see the boat yesterday” are formed the by the addition of the interrogative form of the past tense of the verb ”to do” and a version of the infinitive of the verb “to see”. Only with great difficulty can the historical linguist trace the rise of that locution; the child who learns it is uninterested in that history and is content to know that that is what is done, for the child wants to learn how to speak. The proximate teaching authorities are the parents and other speakers, the remote authority is the language itself. Similarly, the jural world is learnt from those who already live within it; the proximate authorities are those who teach it, the remote authority is the jural world itself. The child, whose mother tongue is Icelandic or Italian and who later learns other languages discovers that the rules of other languages differ from those of his mother tongue while still remaining languages. Similarly, the child may learn in everyday experience, that human jural worlds differ from one another while still remaining jural worlds, Languages differ in many ways but there are, and must be, fundamental rules. No language can fail to distinguish between questions and answers, between affirmative and negative assertions …; similarly, as was argued throughout LJC, no human jural order can survive the lack of some fundamental rules “…dictating Peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes…” (Leviathan, XV,214 [78]). A language allows those who speak it to communicate humanly with one another; a jural order allows those who live within it to do so in peace. The cardinal differences between a language and a jural order, are that no-one in a linguistic community wants to be unable to communicate (the bank robber demanding money wants the clerk to understand the command) whereas in a jural order some are uninterested in whether others live well or badly (the thief or embezzler is uninterested in the plight of the victim) and will either refuse to act in accord with its rules or, if they can, will try tyrannically to impose rules that favour themselves to others’ detriment. When the dominant image of law is legislation enacted by the sovereign to bind the subject, inevitably the question of the sovereign’s authority and so the authority of law itself arises. If that image is replaced by the image of a jural order which, as expressed in rules, describes the order in which people actually live, then the focus of the question of the authority of law changes. When a parent tells the child who asks why that is how to say something (“I have made a cake” not “I have maked a cake”) that that is how we speak, or when a child asks why a toy is to be given back to its owner or why it is wrong to suck soup directly from the plate answers “Because it is his toy and that is what we do” or “that is how we eat” the parent is saying something quite profound. A language is authoritative because people speak it; a jural order is authoritative because people live within it.

As societies increase in size and complexity, as their jural orders becomes increasingly complicated, as legislation becomes increasingly formal and a distinction between actions within and without an adjudicative structure with attendant penalties becomes more institutionalized, as enacted laws become the dominant image of law, as the number of laws enacted increases almost exponentially to rule ordinary living in increasing detail, as laws are thought of almost exclusively as expressions of the commands of sovereign to subject, the question of legitimacy tends to be restricted to a question of the sovereign’s entitlement to issue commands to subjects bound to obey. Law begins to be felt and imagined by those who live within the jural order that it partially describes more as an external imposition than as the expression of an order outside which humans cannot live. Still, the idea that the law expresses or should express “ourselves” remains and becomes critical when a practice accepted and even required in one group offends the ideals of another, as has happened recently in France in the dispute over the wearing of the Muslim veil, or when a liberty is demanded by one section of the community and rejected by another as now in Poland concerning procured abortion or when an action is legally permitted that previously was not as in the recent Maltese decision to allow divorce. Below statute are communal attitudes that delay or hasten change whether that change is development or decline. In LJC the “living law” is, as O rightly says, is largely conterminous with “the moral tradition”. That can mislead in two ways. First, the impression can be given that the moral tradition is static, which it is not. Very many changes in state law over the past two centuries in many countries have been successfully urged by great changes in the moral tradition. Secondly, and this I think is insufficiently clear in LJC, in large and heterogeneous states there is no single moral tradition and so changes in state law have been brought about not by a homogeneous living law or moral tradition but by the one that is for the moment dominant.


[1] If one must choose between what one holds to be equal, and so indistinguishable, alternatives one must resort to an aleatoric method like tossing a coin or drawing a straw.

[2] H quotes (see at her fn 13) Christensen: “…there can be no natural differences between Greek and Barbarian, man and woman, noble and commoner, free man and slave.” In two cases the differences are institutional (noble and commoner, free man and slave) in one (Greek and Barbarian) the differences are in part cultural and historical and in part natural – the dark brown people of southern India naturally differ from the lighter brown people of the north in that one group is a darker colour than the other; in one (man and woman) the differences are natural, as, in some accounts, the difference between free-man and slave was wrongly thought to be.  The problem, not solved by denying them, is how to deal with the differences between man and woman. What is meant by claims that there are no natural differences between the letters A and R is that the differences between them are not differences as between letters and not-letters.  A and R differ from each other but are equally letters within the Roman alphabet. Indian, African Plains and African Forest elephants naturally differ but are equally elephants.

[3]   Cf. Aristotle, NE 1131a10: “ …the just is the equal as all men suppose it to be, even apart from argument.” where he discusses some difficulties surrounding the interpretation of that aphorism. He does so at greater length in Pol. 1282b14 – 1283b 14 where he asks if the best player or the best looking or the tallest or the wealthiest is to be given the best flute;

[4] Perelman, Chaim, “Le probleme des lacunes en droit Essai de synthese” in Droit, Morale et Philosophe, LGDF, Paris 1976, p. 129 – 131.

[5] Strictly speaking ,  I.III.2 in the Institutes contrasts the ius gentium with nature rather than with the ius naturaleServitus autem est constitutio juris gentium, qua quis domino alieno contra naturam subicitur.  (“Slavery is an institution of the law of nations by which one m an is made the property of another, contrary to nature.”)  However, in I.II.2 it is said that “Wars arose and in their train followed captivity and then slavery which is contrary to the law of nature; for by that law everyone is originally born free.” [bella etenim orta sunt et captivitates secutæ et seervitutes, quæ sunt juri  naturali contrariæ (jure enim naturali ab initio omnes homines liberi nascebantur)]  But, to know what is in accord with and what is contrary to nature is to know the ius naturale.

[6] In the NE, VIII, 1161b5, Aristotle wrote that a master cannot be the friend of a slave qua slave but qua man he can. Cf. Pol.I.1255b,10-15.

[7] In the NE, VIII, 1161b5, Aristotle wrote that a master cannot be the friend of a slave qua slave but qua man he can. Cf. Pol.I.1255b,10-15.

[8] It is also a rhetoric of covenant but I leave that aspect of the Torah aside.

[9] See Ralph Weber/Garrett Barden: “Rhetorics of Authority: Leviticus and the Analects Compared”, Asiatische Studien/ Etudes Asiatiques, LXVI.1.2010, Peter Lang, Bern, 173-240

[10] cf. Grime, Robert: Shipping Law, Sweet & Maxwell, London, 1978, p.126

[11] Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration (1948) and the Déclaration (1789) are related to this demand.

[12] Tuchman, Barbara W.: The March of Folly, Abacus, London, 1985, (orig. 1984) ch.1, 4.

[13] Cf. Garrett Barden, “Rhetorics of Legitimacy”, in eds. Dreier, Faralli & Nersessiants, Law and Politics between Nature and History, CLUEB, Bologna, 1998, 47 – 55.

[14] Aquinas in that place makes clear that when he writes of the legislator he has in mind one who is entitled to make law for the entire society.

[15] The problem of the “same” is not merely one of usage. For example, a constitution established in a state by popular vote in 1900 is, unless amended, commonly held to govern the same state in 2011 when very few if any of the original electors are still living.  That one set of people were held to bind another set was Hume’s and Adam Smith’s clear and fundamental objection to  any kind of original contract. See G.N.Casey, ‘Constitutions of No Authority’ (2010) 14 The Independent Review 325.

[16] As far as I know there remain no European jurisdictions in which adultery is a criminal offence but there are societies in which it is treated as such in a kind of parallel non-state system.

[17] I am indebted to Jean Porter’s valuable Ministers of the Law, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2010 for this reference. Modern readers must remember that Aquinas wrote of the prelapsarian state described in Genesis 2.4-3.24 before “the Lord, God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.” (3.23&24) as of an historical event.   To us who no longer think that, the passage remains historically interesting in that it shows that Aquinas held the relation of ruler and ruled to be essential to human society in both the prelapsarian and lapsarian condition.

On Law and Justice in Community

 

 

I would especially like to thank Ágúst Þór Árnason of the University of Akureyri and his team for their tireless work and leadership. I hope that our faculties will continue to cooperate for the strengthening of academic scholarship in Iceland and in the international arena.

The lectures today have provided a wide variety of insights into the original thinking manifested in Professors Barden‘s and Murphy‘s work. We have discussed the concept of law in the Icelandic Commonwealth, the place of law in community in legal theory and law, justice and the trading order. An argument has been made for the legimitate authority of the living law and the value of theory for adjudication as well as a description of law as saga. It has indeed been intellectually engaging and refreshing to hear the different influences Garrett´s and Timothy´s book provide on the learned participants in today’s festivities.

The debate on the concept of law is on-going. Who knows, perhaps Law and Justice in Community will prove to be a seminal event in the history of legal theory!

 

G. Alfredsson, T. Koivurova (eds. in chief), D. Leary, N. Loukacheva (spec. eds.), The Yearbook of Polar Law (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010)

 

The symposium is now an established annual affair with the first three held in Akureyri and the fourth scheduled in September 2011 in Nuuk, Greenland. Although the symposia continue to provide rich fodder for the yearbook, submissions are encouraged from all scholars in pertinent areas of research. Submissions are subject to double-blind peer review.

 

The Yearbook has attracted some of the best known experts in their respective areas. A subjective selection of the most noted will always be unfair in such a distinguished field, but scholars of international law will recognise, besides the editors, established experts Malgosia Fitzmaurice, Nigel Bankes and  Asbjørn Eide.

 

The Yearbook of Polar Law responds to the growing strategic and economic importance of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. The Arctic is changing rapidly, not only geophysically in response to climate shifts but also geopolitically as human technology and security issues give it new social  meanings. Where the Yearbook departs from other Arctic and Antarctic scholarly publications is that it approaches the challenges of the polar regions principally from a legal standpoint. Nevertheless, studies in these areas require almost invariably an interdisciplinary approach: one cannot assess continental shelf claims under the Law of the Sea Convention without a basic grasp of geography; climate change governance without scientific evidence; nor indigenous peoples’ self-determination claims without anthropological and historical knowledge.

 

In contrast to the Polar Law Textbook which is intended as an introduction to Polar Law, the Yearbook is aimed at academics and policy makers already established in their respective areas of expertise.

 

The second volume includes a new “recent developments” section as well as relevant book reviews. What it lacks that was valuable in the first is an overall review of the symposium and the conclusions and recommendations of its participants. That overall review provided an excellent – and gentle – introduction to the sometimes highly technical and specialist papers that follow, in the manner of an introductory chapter in an edited collection of essays. In it, key general issues were identified, including climate change; human rights; new commercial activities at the Poles; shipping challenges; threats to native species; environmental governance; peace, security and dispute settlement. Then specific pressing issues were highlighted: management and protection of at-risk species; a more proactive approach by the International Maritime Organization in identified areas; the need, if any, for new laws, treaties and processes; and living marine resources management. States were advised of areas requiring immediate attention, such as: implementation of existing law; mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change in cooperation with indigenous peoples of the North. Long-term issues were noted:  namely, climate change and environmental governance. Finally recommendations from the symposium’s participants were recorded, aimed towards academics vis á vis needed research and states vis á vis needed action. This summary gives context to the rest of the articles and allows the reader to go on to read any one of the individual contributions with the bigger picture in mind.     

 

While all the articles in the two published volumes could easily have found homes in alternative fora – specialist journals on the law of the sea, environmental law, natural resource law, dispute settlement, human rights, arctic studies as well as general international law and social science volumes – the Yearbook of Polar Law is, as its title indicates, the first journal to draw together all these fields with a specific focus on the Polar Regions. By tying together all these related fields in one publication, it gives scholars, policy makers and stakeholders the opportunity to form a more holistic view of the challenges facing the Polar Regions.

 

At 156 Euros per volume, the Yearbook is presumably aimed at institutional subscribers: law school libraries, governmental institutions and research facilities; principally those focussed on the Arctic and Antarctic. This is a little unfortunate as these perspectives from the Poles are informative not only to specialist researchers at the World’s ends, but for people all over the World facing challenges such as climate change, resource management, territorial disputes and indigenous claims. One can only hope that, price notwithstanding, the Yearbook’s contents will nevertheless reach the wide audience that they merit.

Eligio Resta, Diritto Vivente (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2008)

The book tackles these two aspects of the living law in seven chapters – entitled respectively “Life”, “Body”, “Technique”, “Archives”, “Truth”, “Trial” and “Time” – and through different paths of analysis, most of which relate to issues that are hotly debated today within academe as well as outside it, e.g. living wills, biological damage, life’s dignity.

The former aspect constitutes a fairly traditional way of thinking about the relationship between life and law. In it, the law is seen as an instrument through which someone’s life disciplines, in the Foucauldian sense, another’s. On the contrary, the latter aspect, i.e. speaking of law’s own life, represents Resta’s original attempt to consider the law as an evolving natural “corpus” – which in classic antiquity was understood as the experiences of a living organism shaped by many different forces – and not as a static “positive” body. This attempt rests upon an intellectual shift from exegesis to hermeneutics, which can only be achieved by a philosophy of praxis that has in the interpretation of the living text its focal point of acting.

Resta’s main references, cited more or less explicitly throughout his book, are some amongst the most important philosophers of the last two centuries: Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. Yet these are not the only philosophers to be mentioned in the book.

In the first two chapters, for instance, there appear lengthy reviews of classic thinkers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and of their definitions of soma, psychè, nomos, dìkaion, and much else. In this manner, the ancient roots of Western legal and philosophical culture are revealed and investigated.

In the third chapter, the relationship between technique and law is scrutinised as judicial nihilism. On the one hand, “technique” means the human ability to create new possibilities, thus even a post-human model of life. On the other hand, the law is the social request for normative limits that should be applied onto this human ability. In this context, the term “nihilism” means the technique’s potential and will to destroy the existing normative limits imposed by law, so as to extend the technique’s power as much as possible. This ambivalence between technique and law should not be opposed, however. Resta believes the law to benefit from keeping alive this ambivalence within its own corpus, for it spurs creativity and adaptability.

In the fourth chapter this comparison is scrutinised further, starting with the analysis of modern archive technologies, first of all information technologies. Even if they do enable life and law to express in new ways, information technologies also try to gain power to the detriment of life’s and law’s traditional expressions and regulatory functions. The ambivalence between technique and law thus persists.

The fifth chapter explains how the notion of truth is not the consequence of the principle of non-contradiction, but is a process-generated result bound to a specific context, that is to say, a truth that is conventional, conditional, and that implicates the passage from “truth” to “charity”: we do not agree when we find the truth, but we find the truth when we agree.

In the sixth and seventh chapters Resta writes about the history of modern legal life, e.g. the history of trials, and how life’s time and law’s time are continuously out of sync. Thus, the living law regulates time being regulated itself by life’s needs; whilst life’s exceptions, the most important of which being war, threaten to reduce the law to a particular form of conflict, thus turning it from being that which aims to preserve life into something that kills life. This way, the book closes with a warning about the “rectilinearity” of progress, which will not save humanity from violence, and with a call to take seriously Plato’s notion of law as phàrmakon, i.e. as poison and antidote at the same time.

I genuinely commend and recommend this book, as well as Resta’s work in general. Living Law deals with a very difficult subject, across diverse disciplines and technical jargons, and in so doing it links important authors from different ages and different areas of inquiry, offering infra alia highly original and insightful comments, also with regard to concrete contemporary issues.