Acknowledging a relationship between international human rights and international trade law adds to the legitimacy of economic, social and cultural rights already enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the central institution for international trade law and it has demonstrated a commitment to enhance human rights. This commitment has been realized through WTO efforts to enhance human dignity and eradicate poverty. These WTO efforts ought to be fostered and used to promote human rights. The purpose of this study was two fold – first, demonstrate that a relationship between international trade law and international human rights exists; and second, that this relationship is useful in promoting economic, social and cultural rights. This relationship will be examined through WTO initiatives, case studies and the Accession of the Republic of China in 2001.

Since the end of French colonial rule in Guinea, “independence” has held a central place in its political culture. Implying both dignity and self-determination for the sovereign people which possesses it, independence is a concept that has meaning only in relation to other nation-states and cultures. Yet the political elite that dominated Guinea’s First Republic constructed a new national culture around this concept. The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958-1971 examines Guinea’s assertion of its right to independence and the response of powerful Western players, especially the United States and France, as Guinea challenged their assumptions about the nature of African sovereignty. Considering the history of the international relations of a single African state that enjoyed limited international power and prestige challenges conventions in the historiography of both Africa and international relations. It illuminates and contextualizes expectations concerning the meaning of modernity, African sovereignty as a matter of international law, and the end of formal colonial rule coinciding with the tensions and competitions of the Cold War. The study demonstrates that the international context played a crucial role, both in conditioning the timing and form of decolonization and in shaping the international community’s adaptation of colonial patterns of economic and political interaction to the new reality of African nation-states. Focusing on the invention, development and reception of one country’s insistence on independence in turn illuminates significant issues and events: the end of French colonial rule; limitations on the sovereignty of non-European postcolonial states; the advent of neocolonialism and the failure of the nominally anti-colonial United States to oppose it; the ideological appeal of African unity as a means of safeguarding sovereignty and the compromises that its institutional form entailed; foreign aid and the notion that development for modernization could be stimulated from outside; and the implications of unlimited internal autonomy for a state’s people. Guinea’s independence ultimately challenged developing norms of Western economic and political interaction with new African states by complicating assumptions about the universality of Western notions of economic development, justice and morality.

Canada’s Patented Medicines (Notice Of Compliance) Regulations fail to achieve the intended purpose of balancing innovation with timely generic market entry. An examination of the inefficiencies created by the Canadian regulations reveals that key features of U.S. pharmaceutical law should be adopted to improve the disjointed regulatory system that impedes generic competition. Specifically, the regulations should be amended to consolidate multiple proceedings into one cause of action that evaluates patent validity. An economic incentive to challenge weak patents should also be introduced in Canada. These features encourage competition without deterring pharmaceutical research and development because only patents that are not truly inventive will be invalidated after a full inquiry. As such, the intellectual property laws will continue to satisfy Canada’s international intellectual property obligations and protect innovative medicines and allow recovery of costs and monopoly profits to new and useful pharmaceutical products.

Canada’s Patented Medicines (Notice Of Compliance) Regulations fail to achieve the intended purpose of balancing innovation with timely generic market entry. An examination of the inefficiencies created by the Canadian regulations reveals that key features of U.S. pharmaceutical law should be adopted to improve the disjointed regulatory system that impedes generic competition. Specifically, the regulations should be amended to consolidate multiple proceedings into one cause of action that evaluates patent validity. An economic incentive to challenge weak patents should also be introduced in Canada. These features encourage competition without deterring pharmaceutical research and development because only patents that are not truly inventive will be invalidated after a full inquiry. As such, the intellectual property laws will continue to satisfy Canada’s international intellectual property obligations and protect innovative medicines and allow recovery of costs and monopoly profits to new and useful pharmaceutical products.

This dissertation explores the factors which contributed to a change in the paradigm that framed Canadian refugee policy over the course of the 1990s. This change is characterized in the dissertation as a shift from a refugee protection paradigm that dominated policy-makers’ thinking in the 1970s and 1980s, to a security-control paradigm by at the end of the 1990s. This change is puzzling because it occurred prior to the events of 9/11 rather than in response to them and because domestic motivations for change do not provide a complete explanation of the shift. The dissertation argues that although factors in the domestic and international environments may have enabled paradigm change, a more complete explanation of shift needs to consider the process through which Canadian policy-makers were socialized into a developing international norm. This process of international socialization occurred through bureaucrats’ international interaction in bilateral and Regional Consultative Processes akin to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s global government networks. Using data generated from primary document analysis and a series of interviews of key policy-makers this dissertation maps paradigm change over the two periods. This data is then used to provide evidence of the importance of bureaucratic socialization through a global government network for migration in explaining this change.

This study fills what has long been recognized as a major gap in the field of International Relations (IR): an account of when and how change occurs in the structure of the international system. Attempts to create social change, to create or to alter intersubjectivity, are relatively common; the crucial question is why some attempts succeed while most fail. I argue that social change is itself a rule-governed social activity, which I term institutional politics, and that attempts to create social change are more likely to succeed if they are pursued in a manner consistent with what H.L.A. Hart called secondary rules, or rules about rules. This central hypothesis is investigated in three cases: the emergence of great power management following the Napoleonic war, attempts to ban war as an instrument of state policy in the inter-war period,and the period of institutional contestation instigated by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Available evidence in all three cases provides strong overall support for the central hypothesis and for the other core expectations of my theory. In addition to achieving important descriptive and explanatory advances with respect to the dynamics and morphology of the international system, the study makes significant contributions to the constructivist literature in IR; namely, it suggests a basis on which to improve conceptual consolidation and comparability, and it moves beyond a primary focus on norm promoters to include explicit theorization of the evaluative acts of their audiences. The most important policy implication of the study is the need for explicit renovation of the contemporary international system’s stock of secondary rules, to counter a decline in their legitimacy among a much more heterogenous set of members.

Since the end of French colonial rule in Guinea, “independence” has held a central place in its political culture. Implying both dignity and self-determination for the sovereign people which possesses it, independence is a concept that has meaning only in relation to other nation-states and cultures. Yet the political elite that dominated Guinea’s First Republic constructed a new national culture around this concept. The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958-1971 examines Guinea’s assertion of its right to independence and the response of powerful Western players, especially the United States and France, as Guinea challenged their assumptions about the nature of African sovereignty. Considering the history of the international relations of a single African state that enjoyed limited international power and prestige challenges conventions in the historiography of both Africa and international relations. It illuminates and contextualizes expectations concerning the meaning of modernity, African sovereignty as a matter of international law, and the end of formal colonial rule coinciding with the tensions and competitions of the Cold War. The study demonstrates that the international context played a crucial role, both in conditioning the timing and form of decolonization and in shaping the international community’s adaptation of colonial patterns of economic and political interaction to the new reality of African nation-states. Focusing on the invention, development and reception of one country’s insistence on independence in turn illuminates significant issues and events: the end of French colonial rule; limitations on the sovereignty of non-European postcolonial states; the advent of neocolonialism and the failure of the nominally anti-colonial United States to oppose it; the ideological appeal of African unity as a means of safeguarding sovereignty and the compromises that its institutional form entailed; foreign aid and the notion that development for modernization could be stimulated from outside; and the implications of unlimited internal autonomy for a state’s people. Guinea’s independence ultimately challenged developing norms of Western economic and political interaction with new African states by complicating assumptions about the universality of Western notions of economic development, justice and morality.

This dissertation explores the factors which contributed to a change in the paradigm that framed Canadian refugee policy over the course of the 1990s. This change is characterized in the dissertation as a shift from a refugee protection paradigm that dominated policy-makers’ thinking in the 1970s and 1980s, to a security-control paradigm by at the end of the 1990s. This change is puzzling because it occurred prior to the events of 9/11 rather than in response to them and because domestic motivations for change do not provide a complete explanation of the shift. The dissertation argues that although factors in the domestic and international environments may have enabled paradigm change, a more complete explanation of shift needs to consider the process through which Canadian policy-makers were socialized into a developing international norm. This process of international socialization occurred through bureaucrats’ international interaction in bilateral and Regional Consultative Processes akin to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s global government networks. Using data generated from primary document analysis and a series of interviews of key policy-makers this dissertation maps paradigm change over the two periods. This data is then used to provide evidence of the importance of bureaucratic socialization through a global government network for migration in explaining this change.

This study fills what has long been recognized as a major gap in the field of International Relations (IR): an account of when and how change occurs in the structure of the international system. Attempts to create social change, to create or to alter intersubjectivity, are relatively common; the crucial question is why some attempts succeed while most fail. I argue that social change is itself a rule-governed social activity, which I term institutional politics, and that attempts to create social change are more likely to succeed if they are pursued in a manner consistent with what H.L.A. Hart called secondary rules, or rules about rules. This central hypothesis is investigated in three cases: the emergence of great power management following the Napoleonic war, attempts to ban war as an instrument of state policy in the inter-war period,and the period of institutional contestation instigated by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. Available evidence in all three cases provides strong overall support for the central hypothesis and for the other core expectations of my theory. In addition to achieving important descriptive and explanatory advances with respect to the dynamics and morphology of the international system, the study makes significant contributions to the constructivist literature in IR; namely, it suggests a basis on which to improve conceptual consolidation and comparability, and it moves beyond a primary focus on norm promoters to include explicit theorization of the evaluative acts of their audiences. The most important policy implication of the study is the need for explicit renovation of the contemporary international system’s stock of secondary rules, to counter a decline in their legitimacy among a much more heterogenous set of members.

The United Nations charter-based human rights apparatus has long been plagued by concerns of politicization. This pervasive issue first brought the demise of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 2006 and led to the creation of an entirely new entity, the United Nations Human Rights Council, in the hope of answering the concerns of the international community. Although major reforms were undertaken, politicization is now once again cited as one of the main issues of the new Council. In this essay, we identify the source of politicization as the intergovernmental nature of these human rights bodies, and suggest that mitigation of this issue is possible through the reform of the Council’s membership. The creation of a mixed expert-state body will allow for a more functional, depoliticized body in the protection and promotion of human rights.