International law, rights and politics docx

[...]... role of international law and the institutions in it How do these changes affect the structure of and the correlation of forces in the international 2 INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS system? What challenges do international institutions and norms face? Are these changes conducive to the effectiveness of international law and organizations? How did international law and its institutions respond... inter-state system Thus, Louis Henkin writes that international law is the normative expression of the international polity which has states as its basic constituent entities’.2 Grigorii Tunkin even writes that international law functions in the inter-state system.3 INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS 7 But some specialists in international law, and others in international relations, are questioning such... Bosnia-Hercegovina and are tearing their way through the Caucasus Ethnicity has never been as actively debated this century, and the debates remain inconclusive because these are more questions of culture and politics than about law A related cluster of issues concerns minority and general human rights Some may feel that these rights should be seen as universal and legally defined, but the reality is that politics and. .. time There were poems written to glorify the conquests of Alexander the Great, Peter the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and many other empire builders Now Milosevic and Karadzic are international outcasts for their attempts to create a Greater Serbia INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS 23 Every aggressor nowadays has to justify his actions and, as a justification, can accuse others of doing what hundreds... the outstanding problems of mankind such as poverty, population pressure, violence, and ecological decay.’5 This does not, of course, mean that the creation, interpretation, and application of international law can be separated from international (or even domestic) politics, or that these or other societal values do not affect the decision-making in the international system International law, though... which encompasses all actors and relations and transcends state boundaries Moreover, international law often deeply penetrates into domestic relations Robert Keohane rightly observes that in order to deal with issues concerning the compliance of states with their international commitments, ‘[w]e must look at the interaction between international politics and law and domestic politics, ’7 which he calls... though very important ones, of states and are not in themselves super-states In most important areas of global concern, such as environmental protection, issues of peace and war and even in the field of human rights protection, one may say that there is, thanks to modern means of communication, an emerging global ‘constituency’ represented INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS 11 mainly by different NGOs,... level of the nation (and the nation-state) ‘It will lie in the transnational formations of different sorts and in civil society.’20 There are good reasons for such an assertion INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS 13 The process of the ‘marketization’ of economies in countries of planned economy also leads to the eventual decrease in the role of the state in international, especially international economic,... this means that international law should be studied as a part of the wider international system, the political core or the most important sub system of which is the state system And to understand the functioning of and changes in the international system, including international law, it is necessary to follow closely what is going on inside the major actors of this system THE COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM... at most, if not all, international problems in the light of the East-West confrontation This inevitably distorted many of them and made their solution difficult or even impossible Fuller writes that the ideology of anticommunism as a guiding principle of foreign policy came to overshadow an emphasis on democracy and INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS 15 freedom While democracy and anticommunism are . particularly dynamic area. International law, rights and politics Developments in Eastern Europe and the CIS Rein Müllerson London and New York First published. paradox, irony, intuition, imagination, and not least in importance—style. 6 4 INTERNATIONAL LAW, RIGHTS AND POLITICS And even at the risk of being accused