Global standards on judicial independence and removal

with Christina Murray

Event details
Date: 2024-09-12 - 2024-09-13
Time: 13.30-15.00
Venue: Room C413 (LexLab), C building, level 4, Frescati campus

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with

 

Christina Murray
on

Global standards on judicial independence and removal: Grappling with vetting and fresh appointment

An independent, professionally skilled and widely trusted judiciary is indispensable to the rule of law. It is a great feat for national judiciaries to attain this level of functioning, and some fall far short. A project that I am working on with a colleague, Jan van Zyl Smit (Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, London), explores whether international standards are sufficiently attentive to the challenge of reforming problematic judiciaries in post-conflict or post-authoritarian transitions. We focus on situations in which the removal of judges is sought and consider global standards that have some form of UN endorsement as well as approaches in the European system, concentrating on norms relating to the tenure, conduct and accountability of judges. In situations where judicial shortcomings are thought to be widespread, transitional societies have been willing to qualify judicial tenure and introduce exceptional, time-limited accountability processes such as fresh appointments to judicial posts, or systematic, individualised vetting.

Thus far, we have a set of case studies that explore the ways in which new, democratic regimes have dealt with compromised judiciaries in a range of countries including Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Kenya, Pakistan, the Czeck Republic, Germany and Tunisia. We chart a growing understanding that a rigid adherence to security of tenure may not always strengthen the rule of law and that exceptional measures may be necessary. We see that approaches are emerging, particularly in the European system, for determining when exceptional removal processes are acceptable and setting standards for such exceptional approaches. We argue that the international norms require revision to deal with these situations and that the preferable approach is not to treat them flexibly, as currently in the European system, but to revise them. We are alert to the fact that revision of these norms carries significant risks. Nonetheless, we are interested in exploring how revised principles, or principles that allow for exceptions to the accepted norms, might be framed so that they are both pragmatic and able to protect and contribute to building the rule of law.

***

Prof Christina Murray BA LLB (Stellenbosch) LLM (Michigan) is a visiting fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford University. Professor Murray is Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town. She is a South African, educated at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Michigan. The early part of her career was university-based where she combined teaching and research (primarily constitutional law, human rights law, gender and international law) and activism (focused on human rights and women’s rights). Since 1992, she has combined academic and practical work on matters relating to constitutionalism, the rule of law, human rights, gender, and democratic transitions. She teaches annually at the Central European University summer school in the course on Constitution-building in Africa. From 2007 to 2014 she was President of the African Network of Constitutional Lawyers and a Vice President of the International Association of Constitutional Law. Between 2001 and 2009 she was an alternate member of the South African Judicial Service Commission.

Her work has included academic research, reports for government and other institutions, and briefing documents (including guidance notes, explanations of constitutional ideas, etc) for constitution-makers and civil society. This work primarily covered issues relating to constitutionalism and the rule of law including human rights, international norms, traditional leadership, women and gender, matters of constitutional design (executive power, legislatures, rights, the judiciary, federalism and multilevel government, and fiscal federalism) and constitution-making processes. Her main interests at the moment are on the judiciary in transitions to democracy, unconstitutional changes of government and, more broadly, on the role that constitutional issues and constitutional decisions can (and can’t) play in political transitions.

Please register at scilj@juridicum.su.se, preferably before 10 September

26 August 2024 Pål Wrange

International Courts and the Politics of Climate Litigation

with Phoebe Okowa

Event details
Date: 2024-09-26
Time: 13.00-15.00
Venue: TBA

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice invites you to a lecture with

Phoebe Okowa

on

International Courts and the Politics of Climate Litigation

Commentator: Anne Orford, Melbourne University, Olof Palme Guest Professor at Stockholm University

Phoebe Okowa is Professor of Public International Law and Director of Graduate Studies at Queen Mary University of London and a member of the International Law Commission. She previously taught Public International law, Constitutional Law and Private International Law as a member of the Faculty of Law at the University of Bristol. She has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Lille, Helsinki Stockholm and WZB Berlin Social Science Center for Global Constitutionalism and has lectured for the United Nations at its Regional Course on International Law for Africa. In 2011 and 2015 she was Hauser Global Visiting Professor of Law at New York University, School of Law. An advocate of the High Court of Kenya, she has acted as counsel and consultant to governments and non-governmental organisations on questions of international law before domestic and international courts including the climate changes in the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. In 2017 she was nominated as an arbiter to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague.

Please register at scilj@juridicum.su.se, preferably before 24 September, for the campus event

Inaugural Lecture of the 2024 Olof Palme Guest Professor

with Anne Orford

Event details
Date: 2024-08-29
Time: 10:00-11:30
Venue: Lecture Hall 4, Södra Huset, Floor 3, Frescati AND livestreaming (see below)

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice, in cooperation with the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg and the Faculty of Law at Lund University, invites you to the

 

Inaugural Lecture of the 2024 Olof Palme Guest Professor
with

Anne Orford

Anne Orford

The Securitization of Climate Change

Commentator: Professor Jonas Ebbesson, Director of the Stockholm Environmental Law and Policy Centre

The event will be opened by President Astrid Söderbergh Widding

 

Description:
A growing number of states and their legal advisors are turning to security as a frame through which to address the challenge of climate change in international fora, including the UN Security Council. While many states and civil society groups are uneasy about the push to treat non-military or non-traditional issues as threats to international peace and security, the trend towards treating climate change as a security threat appears to be gaining momentum. This lecture will explore what is at stake in securitizing climate change. It will consider how the relative strengths of states and other actors in different international fora have influenced the direction of the securitization project, evaluate the motivations and arguments made by the proponents of these changes, and consider the consequences of framing climate change as a security challenge or a matter for international criminal law. It will consider the geopolitical implications of securitizing climate change, and the effect of treating great powers (many of whom are also great polluters) as legitimate managers of the climate issue, while shifting the focus of global attention and action away from more broad-based negotiations associated with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. More broadly, it will ask what it means to adopt a ‘wartime mentality’ in response to climate change (as advocated by John Kerry, President Biden’s former climate envoy), and consider whose security is enhanced by entrusting climate politics to the military and intelligence communities.

Bio:
Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, climate change, and the history and theory of international law. She is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She has been a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and an international expert adviser on climate change and international law to the Pacific Islands Forum. Her latest book, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2022 European Society of International Law Monograph Prize for Excellence in International Law Scholarship.
 
Please register at scilj@juridicum.su.se, preferably before 27 August, for the campus event.

 

The event will also be livestreamed (click here).

Celebrating Professor David Fisher: universalism versus relativism in the human rights discourse

with Elena Namli, Hans Ingvar Roth, Joakim Nergelius and Jarna Petman

Event details
Date: 2022-10-04
Time: 13:00-16:00
Venue: Juristernas Hus (Law Students’ House), Reinhold

Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice invites you to the seminar

Celebrating Professor David Fisher

on

Universalism versus relativism in the human rights discourse

Professor David Fisher retires this year from Stockholm University. His research fields include human rights, conflict of laws and outer space law. This event is in celebration of him. We hope that as many of you as possible will be able to attend. David Fisher obtained his B.A. 1978 (Fordham), J.D. 1981 (New York Law School), jur dr 1990 (Stockholm) and was promoted to professor international law 2005 (Stockholm).

The event centres around the universal versus cultural relativist debate, i.e. whether one should strive for human rights standards applicable to all humans or if the account should be taken to differences in culture, history and societal factors. One may also discuss human rights as a means of dealing with diversity within a society, and how much account should be afforded to individuals and groups with distinct beliefs, traditions and preferences. Here one could compare John Locke’s weaker and Roger William’s stronger approach to what extent a majority should accommodate the preferences of religious minorities. The speakers of this panel will shed light on these different views on these matters.

Speakers and panelists

Elena Namli is professor of ethics at the faculty of theology, Uppsala university. Her field of expertise is social ethics, political ethics and ethical theory. Currently, she is conducting research on the political potential of soft legal positivism. Among her publications are Human Rights as Ethics, Politics, and Law (2014); Future(s) of the Revolution and the Reformation (2019); and Etik (2019).

Hans Ingvar Roth is professor of human rights at the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University. He has previously worked at the Ministry of Justice and for the OSCE. He has authored the monographs “Mångfaldens gränser” (2010), “Är religion en mänsklig rättighet?” (2012), “När Konfucius kom till FN” (2016) and “Peng Chun Chang, Intercultural Ethics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (2016).

Joakim Nergelius is professor at Örebro University, where he was the first professor in law. Previously he was an associate professor in constitutional law at the University of Lund, associate professor in comparative law and EU law at Åbo Akademi. He has also worked at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Committee of the Regions (CoR). He has authored “The Relationship Between National Constitutional Courts and the EU Court of Justice – A Matter of Growing Importance in Times of a “Rule of Law Battle” (2020) and “EU:s rättighetsstadga 20 år: Vad har den åstadkommit?” (2020)

Jarna Petman is Associate Professor in public international law at Stockholm University. She was one of the three founding members, and then the Deputy Director, of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights at Helsinki Law Faculty. A former member of the European Committee of Social Rights, she is currently one of the Commissioners of the International Commission of Jurists. She has acted as legal expert for the various ministries and the Parliament of Finland. She has authored “Human Rights and Violence – the hope and fear of the liberal world” (2017), “Resort to Sanctions by Not Directly Affected States” (2000) and “Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Humanitarian Law” (2017)

After the seminar there will be a reception.

Registration (voluntary): scilj@juridicum.su.se, latest the same day