This thesis examines prosecutorial challenges of the International Criminal Court (ICC/the court) in relation to the dwindling legitimacy prosecuting under Article 5 of the Rome Statute and other relevant international law principles. The study attempts a prognosis of the future shape of ICC prosecutions in light of the challenges and proposes reforms to the operations of the Court and its constitutive instrument to improve the dispensation of justice. The focus of the study is substantive international criminal law, developments in relevant case laws of international courts and tribunals, structure and procedures of the ICC and relevant principles within the context of elements of the Crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the Crime of aggression. The thesis further evaluates the role of the Court as it ensures international cooperation with domestic efforts to promote the ‘Rule of law’, uphold the principles of international humanitarian law, human rights law and combat impunity being the first permanent treaty-based international criminal court with the intent and purpose of ending impunity for perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community and thus contributes to the prevention of such crimes. Additionally, the International Criminal Court advances international criminal justice, particularly with regard to victims by providing not only legal justice but also participation in the process and restorative justice to rebuild the society after mass violence. The thesis is an analysis of the prosecutorial challenges at the International Criminal Court, using its legal framework and jurisprudence to establish facts and reach new conclusions.

Protestant Dissenters launched a campaign for Test Act repeal in 1786 that encountered strong opposition. Half a century later a second campaign inconspicuously secured repeal whilst the established Church was preoccupied with the problem of Catholic emancipation. Historians have examined the political narrative of both campaigns and the theories of toleration propounded by some Dissenters. However, little attention has been paid to the symbolic importance of the Test Acts, which Dissenters considered as badges of their exclusion from national citizenship. This thesis will examine the language of the repeal campaigns as a window into wider notions of citizenship and national identity. The resultant picture of Dissenters' identities and the larger national identities that they contested makes it possible to problematise and refine Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, which expounds a pan-Protestant, anti-Catholic, British national identity. Protestantism and anti-Catholicism were indeed central to the language of the debate, but this language marginalised Dissenters as often as it included them. Several Dissenters therefore united with a parallel Catholic campaign for toleration, whilst very few united with their fellow-Protestant Churchmen against the Catholic threat. The Dissenters' strategies reveal the ambiguity of their relationship to the nation: they were usually seen by Churchmen as marginalised or subordinate though less so than the Catholics. Moreover, overlooked divisions between evangelical and old Dissent, and between Trinitarian and Unitarian Dissent, led different sections of Dissent to pursue different strategies according to their perception amongst Churchmen. Notions of national identity and citizenship were changing in this period, particularly as a result of the French Revolution and wars. Both Test Act repeal and Catholic emancipation may be situated within long-term processes of state-building and nation-building. Older notions of national identity endured to a greater extent than has been recognised, but adapted to these processes by becoming more inclusive and assimilative. Though Test Act repeal and Catholic emancipation granted Dissenters and Catholics similar rights, because of the enduring importance of Protestantism to British national identity Test Act repeal signified Dissent's integration into the nation in a way that Catholic emancipation did not for Catholics.

This thesis explores the intersection of freedom of expression (as protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter)) and copyright in Canada. In this thesis, I argue that both lower Canadian courts and the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) should reconsider their approaches to this intersection. Lower Canadian courts have consistently rejected arguments that provisions of Canada's Copyright Act unjustifiably infringe the Charter right to freedom of expression. The SCC, on the other hand, has consistently interpreted provisions of the Copyright Act in such a manner as to result in expanded protection for the expression interests of non-copyright owning parties. It has done so not by relying explicitly on the Charter right to freedom of expression, but through a process of statutory interpretation. I argue that both approaches merit reconsideration. Specifically, I argue that the approaches adopted by lower Canadian courts to the intersection of the Charter right to freedom of expression and copyright are based on now-invalidated approaches to both copyright and to freedom of expression, and are thus themselves invalid; that to the extent to which the SCC's approach to this intersection assumes that the Charter right to freedom of expression can be protected, in the context of copyright, through statutory interpretation alone, that it fails to adequately protect the Charter right to freedom of expression; that other leading national courts from which the SCC has previously sought assistance have explicitly engaged with this intersection, and that the SCC should follow suit; and that the SCC's own copyright and freedom of expression jurisprudence suggests that provisions of the Copyright Act may unjustifiably infringe the Charter right to freedom of expression. These four arguments, taken together, suggest that the time is ripe for reconsideration of this intersection.

This thesis examines how English law has, and has not, balanced celebrities’ legal expectations of informational and seclusional privacy against the press and media’s rights to inform and publish. Much of the litigation that developed the English laws of privacy has been celebrity-generated by those with the financial resources to seek out and utilize privacy regimes and remedies in ways not immediately available to ordinary members of the public. The media, generally, has had the resources to present the relevant counter-arguments. Privacy protection was initially afforded to celebrities by breach of confidence and copyright. While public interest and “fair dealing” defences developed within English law, there was no underlying or consistent practical element in legislative or judicial thinking to promote a balance between the competing interests of protection and interference. That practical element, the concept of proportionality, developed in the Convention case-law of the ECtHR in Strasbourg during the 1950s. It was not until the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) that English legislators and the UK judicial system began to reflect and apply its consequences. Arriving at proportionate results and decisions – particularly in the realms of privacy - requires both the engagement of the rights that are sought to be maintained as well as a careful balancing exercise of these rights both internally and vis-à-vis each other. Because celebrities, with their Article 8 concerns, and the media, with Article 10 arguments, seek for their causes to prevail, the ways in which legislation and litigation now resolves matters is by the “ultimate balancing test” of proportionality. Proportionality is the measure within this thesis that is constant from chapter to chapter, highlighting, respectively, where the application of proportionality and balance might have produced different results as regimes developed historically and where new developments were needed to accommodate its requirements when it was apparently absent.

Over the last thirty years, research on the immigration policy-making of liberal democratic states has been preoccupied with the puzzle of why migrant inflows have reached unprecedented levels in Western countries, despite popular calls for restrictionism. A common response of scholars to this puzzle is that whilst governments endeavour to reflect public preferences for restrictive immigration policy, they are prevented from doing so by norms and institutions that are characteristic of liberal democracies. These ‘liberal constraints’ include the national judiciary; international human rights norms; and supranational institutions, such as the European Union. But what of the national legislature? What is the role of this key liberal institution in shaping immigration law within Western democracies? On this question, the literature says remarkably little. This thesis endeavours to redress this apparent neglect. Its case study is the United Kingdom, which is viewed, on the basis of existing research, as a ‘most-likely’ case for having a weak legislature; and in which the executive branch of government has been shown to be relatively unconstrained by the judiciary in comparison with other European states. Does anything, then, act to constrain the immigration restrictionism of the British government? Informed by a novel theoretical framework, ‘interpretive political opportunity structures’, the investigation focuses upon the Parliamentary passage of a single policy: the Immigration Bill 2013-14. Its analysis is based on a detailed examination of the Bill and its legislative process; and on thirty-three interviews that I conducted with key immigration policy stakeholders, including two Government ministers, one from each of the Coalition parties; Government and Opposition MPs; members of the House of Lords; civil servants; legal professionals; and lobbyists. The findings reveal that the UK Parliament had an important liberalising impact upon the Bill, acting to constrain the restrictionist bent of the executive. If the UK is accepted as a case in which we are most likely to find the opposite of this, i.e., a legislature impotent against a dominant executive, then the orthodox view that the legislature is in general a marginal actor in shaping immigration law may have to be revised. Notably, the unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords, appeared to constitute a stronger check on executive power than the elected lower chamber, the House of Commons. This is consonant with Peers’ understanding of their duty to legislate responsibly, rather than responsively (i.e., in line with popular opinion) like MPs in the Commons. Insulated from populist pressures, the Lords invites comparison with respect to its function and impact to the judiciaries of other Western nations, suggesting, perhaps, that in the British constitutional system, known for its pusillanimous judiciary, the Lords evidences an ‘adaptation’ to the marked power imbalance between the judicial and executive branches of the UK state.

Chaque année, des centaines de milliers de ressortissants de pays tiers en séjour irrégulier ne peuvent être éloignés de l'Union européenne (UE). L'inéloignabilité de certains étrangers n'est pas toujours transitoire, et nombreuses sont les personnes qui y demeurent pendant des années. Et pourtant, l'inéloignabilité de longue durée ne mène pas forcément à la régularisation du séjour. Je suis intéressé par la manière dont l'UE gère l'inéloignabilité, ainsi que par les raisons pour lesquelles autant de personnes inéloignables se retrouvent dans des limbes juridiques d'exclusion du séjour régulier. Dans une première partie, je conceptualise la nature et les conséquences des divers statuts d'étrangers inéloignables, tels que réglementés par le droit de l'UE. Je propose ainsi une typologie des limbes juridiques entre le séjour irrégulier et régulier. Il existe des limbes de tolérance, d'un côté, et des limbes de séjour régulier non-Reconnu, de l'autre. Je me consacre principalement aux limbes de tolérance. Dans une deuxième partie, j'examine la manière dont l'UE a gouverné ces limbes juridiques, notamment son impact sur le lien dans ses États membres entre divers types d'obstacles à l'éloignement, d'un côté, et les statuts de tolérance, de l'autre. Dans une troisième partie, j'analyse les fonctions attribuées aux limbes de tolérance par des acteurs institutionnels de l’UE. Je soutiens que les statuts de tolérance peuvent se voir attribuer des fonctions de rétribution, de dissuasion, d'éloignabilité, de spectacle étatique, de sélection, et de réduction des dépenses publiques. / Hundreds of thousands of illegally staying third country nationals (TCN) cannot be removed from EU Member States despite the issue of return measures against them. Illegally staying TCNs may not be removable as a result of legal, policy, or practical obstacles to removal. Non-Removability is not always temporary and can in many cases last a very long time. And yet protracted non-Removability does not necessarily lead to regularisation of status. I am interested in how the EU has managed non-Removability and why so many non-Removable persons have been left in a limbo of exclusion from legal residence. In Part I, I provide a conceptual framework for understanding the nature and consequences of a variety of positions that non-Removable TCNs may find themselves in. I do so by providing a typology of what I call limbo spaces between illegal and legal stay. There are limbo spaces of toleration, on the one hand, and limbo spaces of unrecognised legal residence, on the other. I mainly focus on toleration. In Part II, I examine how the EU has governed limbo spaces of toleration, namely its important impact on the nexus in Member States between various forms of non-Removability, on the one hand, and limbo spaces of toleration, on the other. In Part III, I analyse the functions of limbo spaces of toleration. I argue that toleration positions can be viewed as sanctions of membership exclusion, and may be perceived by certain EU institutional actors as performing a range of functions akin to administrative detention and imprisonment: retribution, deterrence, enhanced removability, the expressive power of the State, and selection/rehabilitation.

This thesis examines the rationale for religious liberty in England and Wales. Currently, United Kingdom religious liberty literature shows very little sustained interrogation of the topic. Authors are likely to assume religious liberty is, most notably, a species of personal autonomy. This fails to explain why we should care about religious liberty and deepens religion’s privatisation, its separation from politics or public life. Drawing from a theological sensibility known as Radical Orthodoxy (RO), this thesis criticises current assumptions and argues that religious liberty discourse should be re-envisioned. The Introduction and Chapter One explore the current problems facing religious liberty discourse and map rationales given by prominent authors. Chapter Two argues that the main problem is that current discourse is shaped by a secularisation narrative: the differentiation of religious and secular spheres. Chapter Three relates the RO argument that this differentiation is underpinned by three themes, all of which have theological components: the rise of secular order as the protection of individual rights; the invention of private religion in modernity; and the contemporary shift to 'authenticity' or diffuse individual experiences as the hallmark of religion. Chapter Four contends that these three themes are echoed in religious liberty discourse and jurisprudence, leaving us with the question of why religious liberty matters. Chapters Five and Six explore the RO-influenced alternative, in theory and with reference to common questions in religious liberty discourse: the relationship between an individual claimant and the group; the reality of plural religious traditions; and the tension between sexual orientation non-discrimination and religious liberty. On the RO-influenced account, religious liberty concerns, against sphere differentiation, a commitment to the flourishing of multiple groups contributing to desirable social ends, understood ultimately as participating in the life of 'charity', the love of God and of others. This encapsulates two themes, both rooted in the Christian tradition: judgement against politics (as reflected in the secular order), and transformation of society along social pluralist lines. These two themes, the thesis argues, better explain why religious liberty matters.

This thesis examines the concept of civil disobedience, and the role the latter can play in a democratic society. It aims to offer a moral justification for civil disobedience that departs from consequentialist or deontological considerations, and focuses instead on virtue ethics. By drawing attention to the notion of civic virtues, the thesis suggests that, under some circumstances, an act of civil disobedience is the very act displaying a virtuous disposition in the citizen who disobeys. Such disposition is interpreted in light of a duty each individual has to respect her fellow citizens as autonomous agents. This grounds, in turn, a moral obligation to respect the law. The central claim of the thesis is that the obligation towards the law is fulfilled not only through acts of obedience but also, under different circumstances, through acts of disobedience. The status of non-violence as a necessary component of civil disobedience is questioned, and it is argued that a degree of force or violence may be permissible in civil disobedience, when it is compatible with the duty to respect others’ autonomy. Subsequently, the thesis offers an analysis of ‘reasonableness’ as a civic virtue, and by comparing three different approaches to the issue of reasonable disagreement among democratic citizens, it defends the deliberative approach as the most suited for treating fellow citizens as autonomous agents. The last two chapters focus on the importance, for an act of civil disobedience, of the agent’s willingness to accept the legal consequences of her law-breaking behaviour. It is argued that a civil disobedient has an obligation to face the prospect of being punished for the breach of the law. However, in considering the behaviour of a virtuous civil disobedient who appears at her criminal trial, it is also claimed that she should plead not guilty and aim to persuade her fellow citizens that she does not deserve to be punished, because what she did does not constitute a criminal wrong. In doing so, this thesis depicts civil disobedience not as a merely permissible form of behaviour, but as a morally praiseworthy conduct within a democratic community.

One of the most comprehensive collective rights regimes has been developed in the area of indigenous peoples and respective land and resource rights in particular. International legal instruments (ILO C169 and UNDRIPS) and Inter-American jurisprudence (e.g. the Saramaka and Sarayaku cases) significantly safeguard such rights. The latter materialise in the form of prior consultation mechanisms regarding natural resource extraction and ultimately exemplify indigenous peoples’ self-determination. However, practice shows that such collective mechanisms are established without truly taking indigenous peoples’ representative institutions according to their customs and traditions into account. This can be attributed to the fact that the interplay and local dynamics between indigenous communities, leaders and representative organisations are too complex to be reduced to collective wholes. In order to disentangle such dynamics, power relations between the players, issues of legitimacy, representativity and accountability of participatory mechanisms, and the inclusion of subgroups and individuals in collective decision-making are examined. By combining international legal standards and ethnographic research, a legal anthropological perspective informs this piece of research. Firstly, insights are gained by understanding individual or ‘subgroup’ rights in relation to collective claims in international and regional legal standards. Secondly, this relationship is observed by means of two case studies in the Bolivian Lowlands that shall shed light upon the implementation of such standards in the extractive sector. Thereby, specific subgroups are chosen to illustrate participatory exclusion and inequalities, including women (I), different age groups (II), monolingual people and persons with lower education levels (III) and local leaders (IV). Empirical insights draw on a prior consultation process with Guaraní people in the hydrocarbon sector and collective decision-making mechanisms in the case of Chiquitano people in the mining sector. Based on such empirical observations, a catalogue of guiding principles will be proposed in order to refine the existing UNDRIPS framework.

This thesis considers how the law should manage conflicts between religious freedom and the prohibition of sexual orientation discrimination. It starts from the basis that both these rights are valuable and worthy of protection, but that such disputes are often characterised by animosity. It contends that a proportionality analysis provides the best method for resolving these conflicts. In particular, it argues that proportionality is a conciliatory method of reasoning because it provides context-dependent and nuanced answers to these issues, providing scope for re-­assessment in future cases, and because it accepts losing claims as in principle as worthy of protection. It is also argued that proportionality is advantageous because it inherently demands justification where rights are infringed. The thesis takes a comparative approach, examining the law in England and Wales, Canada and the USA to demonstrate the clash of rights and to compare how these issues have been dealt with by courts and legislatures. It considers these issues with reference to four areas of law. The first assesses how far employees with discriminatory religious beliefs should be accommodated in the workplace, including whether they should have a right not to perform aspects of their work that are contrary to their beliefs and whether they should be permitted to share their discriminatory views at work. The second considers whether and when religious organisations should be permitted to discriminate in their employment decisions. The third examines how far religious organisations should be permitted to discriminate in providing services, such as charitable services or when hiring out premises, and the fourth whether religious individuals should be allowed to discriminate in the secular marketplace.