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When exploring the interplay between drug policy and human rights, commentators tend to adopt a harm reductionist approach, and centre their research on rectifying the vast amount of human rights violations carried out in the name of drug control. These violations include the use of the death penalty, the infliction of torture, and the denial of basic healthcare, to name but a few. Though this approach ameliorates some of the worst effects resulting from prohibition, a harm reductionist approach can only ever perpetuate the current regime. The thesis puts forth an alternative human rights perspective, one which explores the human rights of individuals to consume psychoactives, to challenge the moral hegemony of the global drug regime and prohibitionist logic. Part I (Chapters 1-3) comprehensively challenges the value of ‘human rights’ on a philosophical, political, legal and institutional basis- to appreciate their capacity to provide a new perspective on drug control. Part I concludes that: human rights are conceptually broad living instruments, capable of reflecting the complex reality of human psychoactive usage; human rights can better address the State/individual binary which is identified to be at the crux of drug policies and; human rights and drug control regimes are legally compatible. This bona fide human rights perspective is then applied to Part II (Chapters 4-5), which employs health and religious rights as conceptual starting points, to demonstrate how human rights could improve the drug control framework, and how the lens of human rights can point to different ways of regulating drug consumption. The broader regulatory implications resulting from this unique perspective call for an application of human rights which moves beyond medical and traditional prohibitive paradigms, to integrate broader categorisations such as ‘human flourishing’. This broader perspective accounting for pleasure, well-being and spirituality etc. would more thoroughly appreciate the often interconnected nature, and significance an individual accords their drug use. The thesis also concludes that drug policy is inherently political, and through centring upon the relationship between the State and the individual, a human rights perspective can comprehensively unpack the moral arguments involved. By introducing normative thinking in this sphere, as well as presenting the empirical evidence when weighing up the benefits and harms from psychoactives, a more open-minded, transparent approach to the issue of drug control can be adopted. Analysing (predominately) domestic and international case law which explores the conflict between the human rights and the drug control regimes, finally demonstrates that human rights have a transformative capacity to alter the drug control system, even while operating within the prevailing prohibitionist paradigm. The medical cannabis cases, and the religious exemptions for peyote and ayahuasca particularly demonstrate this, and give credence to the notion that the global regime of drug control is beginning to fall apart. Ultimately, this thesis uses the lens of human rights to provide a new perspective and direction to the issue of drug control.

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Este trabalho pretende investigar o percurso da política penitenciária brasileira contemporânea, partindo da aposta nas concepções humanizadoras e ressocializadoras do cárcere que a redemocratização tardiamente introduziu no país durante a década de 80, até seus desdobramentos que levariam a seu completo avesso. Assim, já no início da década de 90, um conjunto de medidas caracterizadas pela contínua supressão de direitos e pela maior punitividade das sanções impostas a acusados e presos acabou por instalar verdadeiros regimes de exceção dentro do sistema penal, nos quais a figura do sujeito de direito tende, gradativamente, a esvaecer. Outrossim, essa discussão está inserida a partir de um quadro teórico mais amplo que problematiza a persistência da prisão na contemporaneidade, não obstante a crise das disciplinas e a ordem de reconfigurações imposta pelas recentes transformações do capitalismo a todo um mundo social ancorado em suas representações. A análise das práticas e orientações adotadas mais recentemente pelo sistema penitenciário brasileiro é feita levando em conta a pertinência ou não dos deslocamentos ontológicos sugeridos pela literatura eleita neste estudo, a respeito das categorias que conferiam inteligibilidade ao crime, ao criminoso e à punição, e que se apresentam como centrais à compreensão da finalidade atribuída à prisão na atualidade. / This work intends to investigate the trajectory of Brazil?s contemporary penitentiary policy, starting from the bid for humanizing and rehabilitative conceptions of prison which redemocratization tardily introduced during the 80s, including its developments that would lead to its exact opposite. Therefore, already in the beginning of 90s, a set of measures characterized by continuous suppression of rights and greater punitivity of sanctions imposed to defendants and prisoners was able to install true regimes of exception within the penal system, in which the subject conceived tends gradually to vanish. Moreover, this discussion is inserted through a wider theoretical frame which discusses the persistence of prison in contemporaneity, albeit the crisis of disciplines and the sequence of reconfigurations imposed by recent capitalism transformations to a whole social world founded on its representations. The analysis of practices and guidelines lately adopted by Brazilian?s penitentiary system is conducted taking into account the pertinence or not of ontological displacements suggested by the literature elected for this study on categories which provided intelligibility to crime, criminal and punishment and that are presented as central to the comprehension of the goals referred to prison nowadays

Este trabalho pretende investigar o percurso da política penitenciária brasileira contemporânea, partindo da aposta nas concepções humanizadoras e ressocializadoras do cárcere que a redemocratização tardiamente introduziu no país durante a década de 80, até seus desdobramentos que levariam a seu completo avesso. Assim, já no início da década de 90, um conjunto de medidas caracterizadas pela contínua supressão de direitos e pela maior punitividade das sanções impostas a acusados e presos acabou por instalar verdadeiros regimes de exceção dentro do sistema penal, nos quais a figura do sujeito de direito tende, gradativamente, a esvaecer. Outrossim, essa discussão está inserida a partir de um quadro teórico mais amplo que problematiza a persistência da prisão na contemporaneidade, não obstante a crise das disciplinas e a ordem de reconfigurações imposta pelas recentes transformações do capitalismo a todo um mundo social ancorado em suas representações. A análise das práticas e orientações adotadas mais recentemente pelo sistema penitenciário brasileiro é feita levando em conta a pertinência ou não dos deslocamentos ontológicos sugeridos pela literatura eleita neste estudo, a respeito das categorias que conferiam inteligibilidade ao crime, ao criminoso e à punição, e que se apresentam como centrais à compreensão da finalidade atribuída à prisão na atualidade. / This work intends to investigate the trajectory of Brazil?s contemporary penitentiary policy, starting from the bid for humanizing and rehabilitative conceptions of prison which redemocratization tardily introduced during the 80s, including its developments that would lead to its exact opposite. Therefore, already in the beginning of 90s, a set of measures characterized by continuous suppression of rights and greater punitivity of sanctions imposed to defendants and prisoners was able to install true regimes of exception within the penal system, in which the subject conceived tends gradually to vanish. Moreover, this discussion is inserted through a wider theoretical frame which discusses the persistence of prison in contemporaneity, albeit the crisis of disciplines and the sequence of reconfigurations imposed by recent capitalism transformations to a whole social world founded on its representations. The analysis of practices and guidelines lately adopted by Brazilian?s penitentiary system is conducted taking into account the pertinence or not of ontological displacements suggested by the literature elected for this study on categories which provided intelligibility to crime, criminal and punishment and that are presented as central to the comprehension of the goals referred to prison nowadays

The thesis focuses on the Czech human rights foreign policy, especialy in the period of 2011 - 2013 during the Czech membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council. The aim is to analyze Czech human rights foreign policy during the abovementioned period and to evaluate achieving goals of the policy through Human Rights Council.

Transitional justice has undergone tremendous shifts since it was first used in Latin American and Eastern European countries to address post-authoritarian and post-communist legacies of atrocity and repression. In particular, the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has increased the demand for prosecutions within a field that was previously marked by compromise and non-prosecution. While there are increasing expectations that countries with unresolved claims of human rights abuses should enact transitional justice policies, most of the literature on the subject largely omits to explain how elites from those countries choose among the possible options of transitional justice, and specifically, how they choose among international prosecutions, domestic prosecutions, and truth-seeking. Using case studies of Kenya and Uganda, this dissertation examines this decision-making process to understand how elites choose and reject different transitional justice policies. Theoretically, the research examines how preferences for transitional justice policies are constituted through “judicial statecraft”: the strategic efforts by heterogeneous, interest-pursuing elites to use justice-related policies as carrots and sticks in the overall contestation of power. The research finds that the choices of elites about judicial statecraft depend on three factors: the extent to which the elites are secure that their policy choices cannot be subverted from within; the cost and credibility of transitional justice threats; and the effects, both intended and unintended, of history.