This article examines the unregulated practice of egg donation in Nigeria through the lens of international human rights law. Drawing on real-life testimonies, particularly the case of a 20-year-old student whose experience with a fertility clinic resulted in medical trauma and emotional distress, I expose systemic abuses rooted in legal silence. While international and regional human rights instruments impose obligations on states to protect bodily autonomy, prevent exploitation and ensure informed consent, Nigeria lacks a legal framework that addresses the complexities of assisted reproductive technologies. Legislative attempts to regulate egg donation have repeatedly stalled, leaving young, economically vulnerable women exposed to coercion, health risks and uncompensated labour. The article argues that the Nigerian state’s failure to regulate fertility clinics and to protect egg donors constitutes a violation of both domestic constitutional rights and international legal obligations; it calls for urgent legislative reform grounded in reproductive justice and accountability.

In 2011, the Waitangi Tribunal, a permanent commission of inquiry into Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, recommended reforms to Aotearoa New Zealand’s intellectual property law to recognize Māori authority over mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and taonga (culturally valuable objects). This article uses the case of the haka Ka Mate to argue that the Government’s failure to respond adequately means that Aotearoa New Zealand’s intellectual property system still fails to protect mātauranga Māori and taonga sufficiently. It highlights the limitations of existing statutory mechanisms and the delays in the Māori-Crown work program to respond to the Waitangi Tribunal. The article endorses the Taonga Record Framework, a tikanga Māori-based (Māori customary law) sui generis model, as a culturally grounded and legally viable means of safeguarding taonga and kaitiaki (guardian) relationships. It assesses its potential to support tino rangatiratanga and provide a basis for future law and policy reform.

This paper assesses the effectiveness of current legal standards in resolving rights-based disputes arising from compulsory curricula in schools, an issue of growing significance as such teaching expands in the areas of sexuality, relationship and religious education. Focusing on Article 2 of Protocol 1 (P1-2) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), it critiques the current reliance on the ‘objective, critical, and pluralistic’ (OCP) standard, examining its alignment with the core purpose of P1-2: preventing state monopolisation in education through safeguarding qualified parental choice. The analysis identifies shortcomings in P1-2 case law, particularly the subjective nature of determining when teaching is OCP, the negation of parental objections and the neglect of children’s rights in the assessment process. To address these issues, the paper proposes a revised review framework which prioritises a justification test that recognises parental concerns, reduces reliance on public interest justifications and acknowledges the legitimacy of children’s rights as grounds for limiting parental objections. The paper argues that this refined approach better aligns with the article’s foundational purpose whilst fostering an enlarged space for the balanced consideration of competing interests and rights in educational controversies.

The Paris Agreement’s commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 has resulted in an uptick in environmental laws and regulations. However, such state conduct could implicate other legal obligations and norms, including international investment law and international human rights law. The conversation about human rights, net-zero and investment treaties, including arbitration cases and arbitral awards under the treaties, is in its relative infancy. This article examines how investment treaties are equipped to reconcile relevant norms with a particular focus on corporate codes and policies that pronounce broad commitments to protecting human rights and the environment. It establishes certain principles to guide parties and arbitral tribunals as to the codes while recognizing the inevitable challenges they will face.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has enriched the lives of people around the globe. However, the emergence of AI-powered lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) has become a significant concern for the international community. LAWS are computer-based weapon systems capable of completing their missions, including identifying and engaging targets without direct human intervention. The use of such weapons poses significant challenges to compliance with international humanitarian and human rights law. Scholars have extensively examined LAWS in the context of humanitarian law; however, their implications for human rights warrant further discussion. Against this backdrop, this paper analyzes the human rights challenges posed by LAWS under international law. It argues that using LAWS in warfare and domestic law enforcement operations could violate human rights, such as the rights to life, human dignity, and remedy, among others. Thus, it calls for a prohibition of the use of killer robots against humans.

Amid Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, the human rights community has understandably focused its attention on human rights violations committed by the Russian state. This has, however, left the human rights implications of the martial law Ukraine has put in place for civilians largely unexamined. This essay highlights the ways Ukraine's travel restriction on “battle-aged” civilian men has harmed three overlapping groups—civilian men, the families of the men (including women and children), and trans and nonbinary individuals—and shows that the restriction runs counter to important principles in international human rights and humanitarian law. It then considers the ethical dilemmas faced by the international human rights community in addressing such harms, and the political psychology of rights advocacy that may explain the tendency to underplay this particular set of human rights issues. Nonetheless, the essay ultimately argues that advocates should hold actors—including and perhaps especially those with which they may sympathize—accountable to the human rights standards to which they have pledged.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contours of evolving jurisprudence on offensive expression and negative messages, and to suggest that it can best be understood by reference to the concept of stigma. At the European Court of Human Rights, there appears to have been an increasing willingness to recognise the harm of offensive expression through an interpretation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but the reach of this case law remains uncertain. In particular, while some cases associate negative expression with negative stereotyping, not all of these cases do, and there are potential conflicts with freedom of speech. In the domestic context, these issues recently arose in a significant case from the Court of Appeal, R (Crowter) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. In this case, the appellants argued that a legal provision sends a negative ‘message’, through the negative stereotyping of disabled people, but this ‘message’ is implicit, rather than explicitly articulated. While these developments raise important questions about the future evolution of case law, we propose that a focus on stigma can more clearly highlight the harms involved.

This paper explores the way in which childhood is socially constructed in the context of child marriage regulation. Despite extreme social and cultural diversity, there is a core ideology in UN human rights instruments, around which official versions of childhood pivot. International law recommends setting the minimum age of marriage at 18years. This article problematizes the progressively depoliticizing effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the UN’s promotion of a standardized construction of childhood. The immediate purpose of this article is not to offer solutions to child marriage, but to bring together some elements that may form a basis for understanding the way in which conceptions of childhood are contextually constructed. My hope is that a familiarity with these social perceptions will help to explain the present struggle and resistance to apply universal rights constructions of childhood to non-western societies.

The relationship between scholarship and adjudication has attracted considerable attention in recent years, especially in those areas where significant academic expertise has been developed and academic scrutiny of decisions is common. Yet the role of scholars and scholarship in the context of the adjudicatory practices of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has remained palpably under-investigated. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by carrying out the first large-scale empirical study of the use of scholarship by the ECtHR. The authors rely on a purpose-built dataset comprising all the citations made by the Grand Chamber of the Court in judgments and separate opinions appended to it. The study finds that the Court's majority uses scholarship for the purposes of reviewing facts and interpreting international and domestic law but does so rarely. The majority of the ECtHR does not use scholarship to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights or for persuasive purposes, unlike the individual Judges in their separate opinions. Indeed, individual Judges refer to scholarship more often, for more varied and arguably different purposes. This use, however, is inconsistent in terms of both frequency and the types of sources referred to.

In international human rights law, the notion of due diligence concerns a qualifier of behaviour to realize human rights protection, including the protection against non-state actor interferences. However, the question remains what due diligence obligations of states in the context of non-state actor interferences exactly entail in international human rights law. The present article aims to address this matter by comparing case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with that of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). Using a working model of due diligence that has been introduced in recent scholarly work, this article further explores this model and attempts to give further meaning to its two paradigms: ‘regulation’ and ‘risk management’. In that way, it maps out the relevant elements of this foundational concept that lies at the heart of human rights protection.