Suchergebnisse

In the 2007 case of R (Al-Skeini) v. Secretary of State for Defence (2007), the United Kingdom refused to extend rights under the European Convention on Human Rights to civilians shot by British troops who were at that time in occupation of the Iraqi city of Basra. It justified this
refusal on the grounds that it would constitute 'human rights imperialism' to apply European human rights norms to Iraq. This article examines some of the historical resonances of this decision, analysing the reasoning of the House of Lords in the context of Britain's former relationship to
its colonial possessions and its historical scepticism of European Human Rights Institutions.

Although opposition to the Iraq war often relies on legal argument, the illegality of the invasion is not always easy to prove in international law. The sense of the war's illegality was fuelled by the failure of the United States and the United Kingdom to obtain Security Council sanction
prior to the invasion. However, this argument is too simple, and the interpreters of law have generally fallen into two camps; those who supported the invasion tend to see the war as legal, and vice versa for opponents of the invasion. This essay examines the legal arguments for and against
the war, and comes to the conclusion that international law is often given a normative status in political debate that it does not deserve. Despite its shortcomings, the author argues for a commitment to the utopian potential of international law, even if this potential is not realizable.

This article uses a psychoanalytical methodology to examine how the nation secures the ideological coherency of Irish constitutional discourse. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland makes a claim to embody the nation, but paradoxically it also seeks to invoke the nation as its own authorizing agency. Drawing particularly on the work of Slavoj Žižek, this article explores how the concept of nation, as a little "piece of the Real," effectively conceals this cognitive gap. The invocation of nation in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland configures political subjectivity by appealing not just to liberal-legal universality, but also simultaneously to a fantasy frame of Irish nationalism. Psychoanalytical theory is valuable in this context because it allows us to treat the ideological address of constitutional discourse as one that fragments rather than constitutes the subject. The ideological operation of the nation is encapsulated by the "inevitability" with which the legal subject finds something of itself in the partial and contradictory accounts of nation that are articulated by Irish constitutional discourse. Crucially, the inconsistencies and contradictions in this melange of national images point not simply to the aporetic nature of legal origins, but to ideological efficacy of the nation as a foundation of legal authority.

Human rights and democracy are the products of the active participation of people building their own societies. From the perspective of the Arab Spring the US-led war to enforce democratic regime change from the outside appears all the more arrogant and colonial. The involvement of
the United Nations in giving legitimacy to the process is highly problematic especially as its own recent report assesses the human rights situation in Iraq as 'fragile'. It will be Iraqi citizens drawing on their own resources who will create an authentic human rights culture.

Two experiments tested the biased-scanning hypothesis that high financial inducement leads to greater cognitive contact with counterattitudinal arguments and thus to greater attitude change. In Experiment I, given time to listen to only half of the pro- and counterattitudinal material,
role-players attended primarily to counterattitudinal arguments. In Experiment II, given sufficient time to listen to all material, role-players sought out pro-attitudinal material first, regardless of inducement. No differences in biased scanning or attitude change were observed as a function
of financial inducement. Contrary to the "open-mindedness" formulation, results were interpreted in the framework of reactance and of self-immunization to persuasion.