http://hdl.handle.net/2123/765 Search the Channel search http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/simple-search http://hdl.handle.net/2123/4045 Title: The Globalisation Paradox and the Implementation of International Human Rights: the Function of Transnational Networks in Combating Human Trafficking in the ASEAN Region<br/><br/>Authors: Renshaw, Catherine<br/><br/>Abstract: In A New World Order, Anne-Marie Slaughter describes the “globalisation paradox” as “the need for global institutions to solve collective problems that can only be addressed on a global scale” juxtaposed with “the infeasibility and undesirability” of world government and its concomitant threat to individual liberty (Slaughter, 2004). Slaughter’s solution – and the solution offered by a number of scholars in the neo-liberal tradition – is governance via transnational networks of national government actors. It is both a descriptive and a prescriptive programme for a new world order. Neoliberals envisage the aggregate elements of the state – regulators, legislators, judges – interacting with their foreign counterparts in a decentralized and dispersed way to conduct the business of global governance. This paper explores the application of global network theory in the field of human rights. In particular, it focuses on the work of a regional network of national human rights institutions, the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions (APF). Since 1996, the APF has promoted regional cooperation on human rights issues by providing a forum for the region’s national human rights institutions (NHRIs) to share expertise and information on best practice, to undertake joint projects and to develop joint positions on issues of common concern. I examine the APF’s function in relation to the issue of human trafficking as an example of the interactive dynamic generated by and between network members in their efforts to address this transnational human rights issue. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/4044 Title: The Poetics and Politics of Past Injuries: Claiming in Reparations Law and in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved<br/><br/>Authors: van Rijswijk, Honni<br/><br/>Abstract: Why is there such a discrepancy between legal time and historical time? Or rather, whose historical time is tacitly represented and silently justified in legal representations? Whose interests are served by the law’s particular fictions and whose injuries are privileged? In exploring these questions I will focus on the 2006 case of In re African- American Slave Descendants, a claim made for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Since the 1980s a number of litigants have filed claims for injuries arising out of slavery and none has succeeded, but these very failures are worth examining for what they reveal about the contemporary inability to reconcile the demands of the past on the present. Throughout the twentieth century, historians challenged the idea that we have transparent access to historical truths, which has obvious implications for the status of the legal text; and yet the law itself has remained largely untouched by these insights. However, I argue that reparations cases can be read as theorising a new relationship between law and history, and as interventions in the law’s logic of time. Reparations claims intercept legal logic in at least two important ways: first, by insisting on the continuing damage of slavery, the claims defy positivist representations of history and time; and second, in their reliance on the legal fiction of corporate identity across time, these cases allude to the interconnected history of the fictions of corporate and slave identities, and potentially rework these fictions in the direction of social justice. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/4043 Title: Different Routes to Relationship Recognition Reform: A Comparative Discussion of South Africa and Australia<br/><br/>Authors: Goldblatt, Beth<br/><br/>Abstract: Relationship recognition has profound implications for the dignity, equality and property rights of disadvantaged groups. The paper will consider the often intertwined interests of women and gay men and lesbians in relationship recognition reform. It will also address situations where these interests sometimes diverge depending on how the reform debate is framed. It will compare South Africa’s recognition of same- sex marriage and its failure to protect the rights of domestic partners with recent proposals in Australia to remove discrimination against gay and lesbian couples and their children in federal legislation. The paper will focus on the varied roles played by law reform bodies, legislators and the courts in these two separate processes as well as touching on the approaches of some of the social movements in lobbying for changes. It will conclude with the caution that relationship recognition through law must challenge conservative legal and social categories if the rights and interests of people in choosing the forms of family appropriate for them are to be advanced. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/4042 Title: The Khmer Rouge Tribunal: Justice for Genocide in Cambodia?<br/><br/>Authors: Lambourne, Wendy<br/><br/>Abstract: After 30 years a tribunal has finally been established to try those responsible for the mass human rights violations perpetrated against the Cambodian people by the former Khmer Rouge regime. Popularly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT), the Extraordinary Chambers of the Criminal Court of Cambodia (ECCC) is one of the first so-called ‘hybrid’ tribunals to be established by the United Nations in collaboration with local courts to try international crimes such as genocide. This paper will assess the KRT as a transitional justice mechanism in terms of its ability to provide Cambodians with a sense of justice for the past as well as its potential impact on human rights and justice in Cambodia in the future. The cultural specificity and local conflict conditions that affect responses to different types of transitional justice approaches will be interrogated, asking who chose this mechanism and how does it meet the needs and expectations of Cambodians.