The aims of this study are two-fold: (a) to describe facilitators' educational beliefs about human rights education (HRE), and (b) to identify which of these are shared and are idiosyncratic. Using research on teachers' educational beliefs as a starting point for this study, the following five dimensions of educational beliefs about HRE were explored: (a) participants and participating, (b) facilitation, (c) HRE, (d) learning to facilitate, and (e) Self and the facilitation role. A sample of facilitators from North and Central America, Eastern Europe, Western and Eastern Africa, and South and South-East Asia who were affiliated with a large-scale HRE training program were invited to participate in this study. Fifteen facilitators were interviewed, three of whom consented to providing additional data through stimulated recall sessions. Research results suggest that facilitators' shared educational beliefs about HRE represent universal principles of facilitation practices in the field, while idiosyncratic beliefs are linked to local needs and issues, respectively. Focusing on facilitators' shared educational beliefs provides the basis for a general model of possible relationships that exist between key components of HRE. Outcomes from this study indicate that the psychological construct of educational beliefs is both a significant factor and viable research focus involved in the professional practices of facilitators working in non-formal contexts. Implications for future research and professional development arising from this study of facilitators' edudtional beliefs in non-formal educational contexts are discussed.

Recent events in East Timor and other regions have highlighted the dangers of leaving issues of self-determination unresolved for too long. Despite the tact that self-determination is one of the guiding principles of the UN Charter, many controversies over its precise meaning and application continue to preclude a coherent, comprehensive approach to the principle by Stales. This thesis analyses the main controversies over the right of all peoples to self-determination and suggests some conclusions as to the present status of this right under international law. The author also analyses potential approaches to enforcing a legitimate right to self-determination and concludes that there appears to be no effective enforcement mechanism, unless one has the support of a sovereign State in advocating one's cause. Historically, realisation of this right has more often involved a successful campaign of violence or coercion against the party denying the right, and subsequent recognition by the international community of the legitimacy of the campaign. Clearly, this situation is not conducive to international peace and security. The author argues that international criminal law may provide the only effective means of enforcing legitimate rights to self-determination at this time. This conclusion is drawn with reference to Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni's theory of five stages through which a human right evolves, from a mere aspiration, to a right whose breach attracts penal proscriptions. Bassiouni argues that, in international law, a human right becomes a suitable subject for international criminal law when effective enforcement modalities for that right have failed. The thesis concludes with a suggestion that the right to self-determination may be one of the rights protected under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, within the definition of the crime against humanity of "persecution" (article 7(1)(h) & (2)(g)).

Based on research involving an overview of 44 policies at Canadian universities and 21 interviews with anti-harassment practitioners across the country, this thesis explores the challenges faced by anti-harassment practitioners working with legally defined institutional harassment discrimination policies. Anti-harassment work at Canadian universities is complex because practitioners must negotiate institutional demands set out in policy as well as politicized demands from members of marginalized groups both inside and outside the institution. Interviews with practitioners reveal that their daily work in reactive investigation and mediation of complaints as well as their proactive work in educating campus communities may support the less powerful parties to complaints, rather than focusing only on limiting the institution’s legal liability. Therefore, although anti-harassment practitioners occupy a boundary role as defined by Fraser (1989), their work is not entirely “depoliticizing”. Practitioners’ identities, sense of marginalization, and commitment to activist politics contribute to their position as tempered radicals as defined by Meyerson and Scully (1995), helping to explain their commitment to both institutional prerogatives and to empowering marginalized members of the institution. The advent of neoliberalism has set the stage for the shift of discourses and practices away from those which value equity to those that underscore traditional divisions of power and challenge the demands of so-called “special interest groups’. This shift is underscored by concerns about “political correctness” that arise within institutional communities and the broader social context. Perhaps the most obvious of the changes relates to the shift from a focus on equity and human rights to what is termed the “respectful workplace model”. The inclusion of personal harassment issues in human rights policies shifts the focus of the policies to issues that are not tied to historical oppressions and can potentially deflect attention from the human rights component of these policies. The challenge is to move beyond a legalistic perspective regarding policy development and to consider changes in the broader social context that influence policy change and the work of anti-harassment practitioners.

This thesis evaluates Canada‘s compliance with human rights-based complementary international protection. Through an analysis of the roots of international refugee protection, it first links the evolution of the latter with the development of human rights law instruments. It then defines complementary protection as the corpus of legal bases for asylum claims outside of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It uses various human rights instruments to outline international protection obligations, which take three different forms of complementary protection. The first one consists in independent protection mechanisms outside of the Refugee Convention, the most important being the formulation of non-refoulement in the Convention Against Torture. The others are rights that expand the application of existing protection mechanisms, and protection mechanisms established by the UNHCR outside of existing international treaties. This thesis argues that Canada‘s application of these norms reflects partial compliance with its obligations, as it acknowledges important humanitarian concerns regarding international protection, while attempting to preserve its prerogative to exclude individuals based on national security.

This thesis explores a relationship between democratic self-determination, universal human rights, and democratic legitimacy. States are democratically legitimate when they satisfy the first two terms of this relationship. However, these two terms are in tension. This tension is between the universal and particular natures of the terms and requires democratic procedures to provisionally resolve it. A universal human right can be interpreted and contextualized through such procedures to resolve this tension. I argue that the human right to free movement cannot be adequately contextualized in nation-state fora, but instead require an international democratic institution to perform this act. As a result, nation-states, in order to be legitimate, must give up control of their borders to the international institution so that they recognize the human right to free movement. A consequence of this is that Canadian immigration policy is insufficiently democratic and does not recognize the human right to free movement. / SSHRC

Contemporary ad hoc United Nations Commissions of Inquiry (UN COIs) operate during or in the aftermath of many of the world’s worst conflicts. Over the years they have met with mixed success, and a good deal of criticism, yet are thought to provide a vital and unique benefit. Today, that benefit is seen either as the promotion of accountability for criminal wrongdoing, where quasi-criminal inquiries investigate whether war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide has taken place; or, it is seen as laying the foundation for transitional justice reforms, whereby UN COIs map the social, political, legal and even economic landscape and provide “holistic” transitional justice recommendations. Yet despite these lofty goals and the perceived importance of UN COIs, there is very little research on UN COIs. That which does exist tends not to question their purposes or seriously interrogate their procedures; instead, it focuses on incremental measures to improve UN COIs’ processes and legal analyses. This dissertation seeks to provide the basis of a theoretical, principled approach to the creation and work of UN COIs, a normative platform upon which human rights monitoring methods can expand and a continuity of investigatory practice can develop. By treating UN COIs as legal bodies with legal obligations, this dissertation draws on Fuller’s conception of legality and the theory of “interactional law-making” to question the very purposes for which UN COIs are seen to exist and the procedures by which they operate. It finds that neither the holistic transitional justice purpose nor the quasi- criminal purpose is legally or practically tenable. Instead, UN COIs should operate as post-conflict bodies, and delve deeply into a relatively narrow aspect of a systemic problem. A commitment to legality and interactional law-making can also offer a curative to the most salient criticisms of UN COI procedures by improving the credibility, reliability, and impartiality – the legitimacy – of their operations and how they are created.

The liability of companies for extra-territorial human rights violations does not solely arise from human rights statutes and traditional tort law approaches, but also from the corporate and securities law domains. Securities law requires that public companies disclose any high risk activity that the company is involved in, to the extent that it may affect the viability of the corporation, and this includes possible human rights violations. Management decisions in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility must concern the long-term viability of a company, and therefore accommodating, to the extent possible, the demands of stakeholders – be they traditional shareholders, responsible shareholders, or affected communities. This thesis will analyze the legal obligations triggering such corporate decisions, as well as the industry trends which inform them. The focus will be on Canadian public mining companies.

Prisoners are among the most vulnerable categories of citizens in every country, due to the large amount of control the state has over them. Enforcing Human Rights Law is a challenge in all areas that it covers. However, ensuring human rights for those behind bars sometimes seems nearly impossible because of the isolation, the lack of interest of the outside world and mostly because of the sometimes conflicting goals that Correctional Law and Human Rights Law seem to have. This is why this thesis focuses on the protection of convicts against torture and ill-treatment. The structure is that of a comparison between the regional protection granted to these people by the European Court of Human Rights and the local avenues granted in Canada, a country that does not benefit from a regional protection for its citizens. The purpose is to analyze how convicts can best fight abuses in a world where their inherent rights are increasingly ignored in the name of security. The parallel between a regional system and a national one will be developed by discussing and comparing the shared human rights framework provided by international instruments, the case law and the evolving principles for convicts’ protection in Europe and Canada, the abuses that take place in both regions under consideration and, finally, how these abuses are addressed and remediated by the authorities. I conclude by pointing out the importance of developing a strong national correctional system that obeys Human Rights Law and that is permanently under the national courts’ jurisdiction. Nevertheless, based on this analysis, I believe it is crucial that there also be an external monitoring and juridical mechanism that can enforce human rights when the national authorities deliberately or accidentally ignore them. It is hazardous to leave the protection of human rights, especially of those in an enclosed environment, to the state which sometimes has conflicting interests and which in most cases is the one that trespasses them. / Thesis (Master, Law) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-31 16:39:13.535

Any research that attempts to tackle the issue of human rights in Africa is likely to raise emotions because of the history of perpetual human rights violations in the region. Nevertheless, the establishment of the African Union (AU) brings hope that Africa has turned the corner. The provisions of the preamble, objectives and principles of the Constitutive Act of the African Union are crystal clear. Article 3 (h) of the Act makes a critical provision in terms of human and people's rights. (See appendix 1). Paradoxically, this article recognizes the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, which led to innumerable inconsistencies in enforcing human rights under the Organization of African Unity (OAU) (See appendix 2). By implication, the recognition of the 'Charter' justifies its existence in the new African human rights set up. The 'Charter' historically introduced the concept of peoples' in the definition and application of human rights in the African region. This further complicated the concept of human rights, and made it difficult to enforce them. As a result, the dichotomy between human rights and peoples' rights practice in the African region became difficult to reconcile. Hence, the concepts became vulnerable to abuse by governments, who justified their violation of individual human rights for the benefit of peoples' rights. The above assertions hold true for the ailing African region that has evolved from a defunct OAU regime into the radical African Union human rights corpus. The dissolution of the OAU on 9 July 2002 during the last 38th ordinary session of the OAU Assembly in Durban, and the subsequent launching of the AU on the same occasion pioneered a new era for human and peoples' rights approach in the African region. The shift from the toothless-human-rights-system to a clear-visionary-human-rights-regime is an articulation of the desire and commitment to transform the African region. This study therefore reviews the pattern or system that the AU has employed in transforming human and peoples' rights in the African continent. Chapter two attempts to assess the prospects of the African Union to bring reforms in areas of human and peoples' rights, the rule of law, good governance and so on. A comparative analysis of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the Constitutive Act of the African Union is drawn from the key clauses, objectives and intentions of the two human rights regimes. Chapter three presents an analytical comparison between the African Union and the European Union. The chapter documents the historical developments of the European Union to illustrate how far the African Union has to go to ensure long lasting peace and stability in the region. The discussion in this chapter acknowledges the differences in these two regions, but uses the European Union to draw some lessons. In so doing the study reviews the historical developments of the union of states that has advanced itself in critical areas of democracy, human rights, good governance and so on. Hence, the chapter recognizes the remarkable accomplishments of the African Union in the last five years. The parity of judges in the AU Commission, the commitment of 53 African nations to adopt and ratify the Constitutive Act of the African Union in record time, the establishment of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, the introduction of the African Peer Review Mechanism and the peace-keeping missions in Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and so on are among the achievements of the Union in the last few years of its existence. In an attempt to justify the radical shift of the African Union from the OAU past, chapter four discusses the establishment of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. Even though the idea of establishing a Court of justice emanated from the OAU decades after its existence, the chapter acknowledges the radical stance of the African Union to put in place a 'Court' from the beginning. The chapter further looks at the structure of the 'Court' in terms of its composition and election of judges, court procedure, court judgments and their execution and its relationship with the African Commission. In making recommendations and drawing conclusions, chapter five makes a strong point that the pre-requisite for stability and prosperity in the African region is through transforming and consolidating national institutions into democracy. The chapter also acknowledges the continued existence of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, but raises a concern that its existence is subject to abuse by non-democratic governments. The chapter concludes the study by drawing an inference that indeed the African Union represents a radical shift from the OAU in terms of promoting and protecting human and peoples' rights. However, the study acknowledges that the African Union will take some time to fully bear the benefits, but its efforts so far are worth the accolades. / Thesis (LLM)-University of Durban Westville, 2003.

The liability of companies for extra-territorial human rights violations does not solely arise from human rights statutes and traditional tort law approaches, but also from the corporate and securities law domains. Securities law requires that public companies disclose any high risk activity that the company is involved in, to the extent that it may affect the viability of the corporation, and this includes possible human rights violations. Management decisions in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility must concern the long-term viability of a company, and therefore accommodating, to the extent possible, the demands of stakeholders – be they traditional shareholders, responsible shareholders, or affected communities. This thesis will analyze the legal obligations triggering such corporate decisions, as well as the industry trends which inform them. The focus will be on Canadian public mining companies.