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Criminalization and International Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2019

Alice M. Miller*
Affiliation:
Yale Law and Public Health Schools.

Extract

Human rights advocacy today engages with criminal law at international and national levels with a new and rather conflicted posture. It is reorienting from an approach that primarily treated human rights as a shield from (unjust) prosecutorial and carceral power, and toward one calling for criminal penalties and vigorous prosecutions as a remedy for harms. The human rights abuses for which state prosecution is invoked today include not only past and present state violations, such as torture, but crimes by non-state actors, such as sexual and gender-based violence. At the same time, paradoxically, many rights groups are calling for the review and reduction of criminal regulation of a range of sexual and reproductive health practices, including abortion, consensual sexual conduct outside of marriage (same sex, heterosexual, and sex for money), and HIV transmission.

Type
Criminalization and International Human Rights: A Roundtable of Perspectives on the Uneasy Linkages, with Attention to the Regulation of Sexuality, Gender, and Reproduction
Copyright
Copyright © by The American Society of International Law 2019 

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Footnotes

This roundtable was coordinated by Amanda Klasing of Human Rights Watch, and convened at 1:00 p.m., Thursday, April 5, 2018, by its moderator, Alice M. Miller of Yale Law and Public Health Schools, who introduced the panelists: Aziza Ahmed of Northeastern University School of Law; Widney Brown of the Drug Policy Alliance; Carrie Eisert of Amnesty International; Karen Engle of the University of Texas School of Law; and Sinara Gumieri of the Anis-Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights and Gender. All the presenters have coordinated to synthesize their remarks for this set of Proceedings.