There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this book, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous - few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as this author shows, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade.

Business corporations can and do violate human rights all over the world, and they are often not held to account. Emblematic cases and situations such as the state of the Niger Delta and the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory are examples of corporate human rights abuses which are not adequately prevented and remedied. Business and human rights as a field seeks to enhance the accountability of business – companies and businesspeople – in the human rights area, or, to phrase it differently, to bridge the accountability gap. Bridging the accountability gap is to be understood as both setting standards and holding corporations and businesspeople to account if violations occur. Adopting a legal perspective, this book presents the ways in which this dual undertaking has been and could be further carried out in the future, and evaluates the extent to which the various initiatives in the field bridge the corporate accountability gap. It looks at the historical background of the field of business and human rights, and examines salient periods, events and cases. The book then goes on to explore the relevance of international human rights law and international criminal law for global business. International soft law and policy initiatives which have blossomed in recent years are evaluated along with private modes of regulation. The book also examines how domestic law, especially the domestic law of multinational companies’ home countries, can be used to prevent and redress corporate related human rights violations.

The Law and Slavery sets out the articles, book reviews and case notes by Professor Jean Allain which led to pioneering exploration of forced labour, servitudes, slavery, the slave trade, and trafficking in his 2013 Slavery in International Law: Of Human Exploitation and Trafficking (MNP). This collection brings together Professor Allain’s considerations of the evolution of legal abolition internationally, his critique of the then status quo in the area of slavery and the law, and goes on to develop the foundations of a legal understanding of various servitudes and slavery based on his archival research and legal analysis. Professor Allain’s research has transformed the landscape of how we understand contemporary slavery and those other servitudes which constitute human exploitation.

Slavery in International Law sets out the law related to slavery and lesser servitudes, including forced labour and debt bondage; thus developing an overall understanding of the term human ‘exploitation’, which is at the heart of the definition of trafficking.

Human Rights or Global Capitalism examines the application of neoliberal policies from a human rights perspective and asks whether states, by outsourcing to the private sector many services with a direct impact on human rights, abdicate their responsibilities to uphold human rights and violate international law.

Modern international criminal law typically traces its origins to the twentieth-century Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, excluding the slave trade and abolition. Yet, as this book shows, the slave trade and abolition resound in international criminal law in multiple ways. Its central focus lies in a close examination of the often-controversial litigation, in the first part of the nineteenth century, arising from British efforts to capture slave ships, much of it before Mixed Commissions. With archival-based research into this litigation, it explores the legal construction of so-called ‘recaptives’ (slaves found on board captured slave ships). The book argues that, notwithstanding its promise of freedom, the law actually constructed recaptives restrictively. In particular, it focused on questions of intervention rather than recaptives’ rights. At the same time it shows how a critical reading of the archive reveals that recaptives contributed to litigation in important, but hitherto largely unrecognized, ways. The book is, however, not simply a contribution to the history of international law. Efforts to deliver justice through international criminal law continue to face considerable challenges and raise testing questions about the construction – and alternative construction – of victims. By inscribing the recaptive in international criminal legal history, the book offers an original contribution to these contentious issues and a reflection on critical international criminal legal history writing and its accompanying methodological and political choices.

This book offers an up-to-date, comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the multifaceted and evolving experiences of human rights in Sierra Leone between the years 1787 and 2016. It provides a balanced coverage of the local and international conditions that frame the socio-cultural, political, and economic context of human rights: its rise and fall, and concerns for the broader engendered issues of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, women’s struggle for recognition, constitutional development, political independence, war, and transitional justice (as well as "contributive justice," which the author introduces to explain the consequences of the problems of the temporal nature of transitional justice, and the crisis of donor fatigue towards peacebuilding activities), local government, democracy, and constitutional reforms within Sierra Leone. While acknowledging the profound challenges associated with the promotion of human rights in an environment of uncertainty, political fragility, lawlessness, and deprivation, John Idriss Lahai sheds light on the often-constructive engagement of the people of Sierra Leone with a variety of societal conditions, adverse or otherwise, to influence constitutional change, the emergent post-coflict discourse on "contributive justice," and acceptable human rights practice. This book will be of interest to scholars in West African history, legal history, African studies, peace and conflict studies, human rights and transitional justice.

What are the origins of human rights? This question, rarely asked before the end of the Cold War, has in recent years become a major focus of historical and ideological strife. In this sequence of reflective and critical studies, Samuel Moyn engages with some of the leading interpreters of human rights, thinkers who have been creating a field from scratch without due reflection on the local and temporal contexts of the stories they are telling. Having staked out his owns claims about the postwar origins of human rights discourse in his acclaimed Last Utopia, Moyn, in this volume, takes issue with rival conceptions—including, especially, those that underlie justifications of humanitarian intervention

This book focuses on one of the most significant issues of our time-international human rights. Using the theme of visions seen by those who dreamed of what might be, The Author explores the dramatic transformation of a world patterned by centuries of traditional structures of Authority, gender abuse, racial prejudice, class divisions and slavery, colonial empires, and claims of national sovereignty into a global community that now boldly proclaims that the way governments treat their own people is a matter of international concern -- and sets the goal of human rights for all peoples and all nations.