The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

International human rights law (‘IHRL’) provides minimum standards which states must observe in their treatment of individuals under their jurisdiction. In this respect, it differs from many other areas of international law which focus on regulating international relations between states. The human rights recognised in international instruments are considered to be fundamental rights which all human beings are entitled to enjoy, regardless of their personal circumstances or the state in which they reside.

The chapter traces the origins of human dignity, showing how it was originally used to denote titles of honor but is now seen as a universal human right or as undergirding universal human rights. In the context of discussing dignity rights, the chapter highlights international human rights treaties and national constitutions making refeerence to the concept of human dignity, which, in modern usage, has to do with the inherent worth of a life. The chapter discusses how human dignity is the foundation for many human rights, including the right to life, the right to be free from torture and other forms of cruelty, and the right to be free of discrimination. The chapter describes existing jus cogens norms prohibiting various acts that violate fundamental human rights, concluding that the death penalty must be abolished because it makes use of credible death threats, inflicts psychological torture, and violates an array of basic human rights. The chapter details how non-lethal corporal punmishments have already been abandoned and how the death penalty has been abolished or curtailed in many countries, with international criminal law tribunals precluding the death penalty's use.

The Introduction gives a snapshot of the current status of capital punishment around the globe. It gives current statistics from Amnesty International and describes Amnesty International's anti-death penalty campaign in the 1970s that led to the Declaration of Stockholm, which expressed "total and unconditional opposition to the death penalty." The Introduction describes the divide between retentionist and abolitionist countries, highlighting countries that have outlawed capital punishment in their constitutions or through judicial rulings. After detailing how the death penalty was traditionally seen as something other than torture, the Introduction discusses the law's evolving nature--and how the death penalty is increasingly seen as a torturous and cruel punishment that violates human dignity and fundamental human rights. Noting that death sentences are no longer treated as a "lawful sanction" in many locales, the Introduction describes how the U.N. General Assembly has voted on multiple occasions for a global moratorium on executions. The Introduction summarizes the current state of international law as regards capital punishment and previews the book's content.

This chapter traces the history of the world's anti-death penalty movement, noting how countries moved away from punishments such as breaking on the wheel and burning at the stake and how capital punishment has been abolished or curtailed in various countries and American states. After taking note of early successes of the abolitionist movement, the chapter discusses abolitionist efforts over time, including in the Progressive Era and in the post-World War II period (e.g., in Europe and the Americas). In particular, the chapter discusses American states (i.e., Michigan, Wisconsin and Rhode Island) that abolished capital punishment before the American Civil War, and describes how West Germany outlawed capital punishment in its constitution in 1949. The chapter discusses how international human rights law has evolved in the post-World War II period, with capital punishment coming under increased scrutiny and protocols to international and regional human rights conventions (e.g., the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Protocols 6 & 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights) abolishing or restricting the death penalty's use.

This chapter explores the different levels at which proportionality intersects with and shapes criminal law. Proportionality has been always important in the field but its impact increases if we approach the frontiers of penal intervention from the principles that inform an equalitarian understanding of the law – a central project in contemporary Latin America. The chapter shows the relevance how judgments of excess or defect based on proportionality shape the contours of criminal policy, criminal doctrine and the theory of criminal responsibility, criminal procedure and criminal punishment While exploring these different levels with Latin American social and political backgrounds in mind, and bringing inter-American doctrine into the analysis, the chapter also invites future, broader analysis about how the uses of proportionality in the domains of criminal and human rights law can illuminate and complement each other.

Climate litigation in the Global South is a novel and increasingly prominent phenomenon that prompted a first wave of scholarly work examining and systematizing its main features. Despite the rigour that these academic accounts apply to assessing the main legal arguments of both litigants and courts, they fail to address the possible tensions between climate justice and the consequences of a domestic court decision in developing nations that did not substantially contribute to the climate crisis. This piece aims to fill that gap by using case law from the Global South to examine challenges around remedies, which will underscore the tensions between climate justice and litigation. Thereafter, this piece, drawing from international norms, advocates for the recognition of a duty of international cooperation, which can inform future courts’ orders in climate cases in both the Global North and the Global South. This normative exercise provides the basis to reconcile climate litigation in the Global South with climate justice, two reputed allies.

Proportionality analysis is considered a central tool for rights adjudication in contemporary constitutional law. Prevailing academic narrative explains its worldwide spread as a matter of legal migration. This chapter challenges this narrative through the analysis of Argentine constitutional practice. It reconstructs the different variants of proportionality scrutiny that have been applied by the Argentinian Supreme Court from the beginnings of the twentieth century, well before the development of the modern proportionality test by the German Constitutional Court, and surveys its role in the adjudication not only of civil and political rights but also social rights. It ultimately argues that constitutional practices in this domain are better explained under a paradigm of interaction, rather than under one of migration.

The coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has made it apparent that states have different capacities to detect, effectively respond to, and manage highly infectious diseases. Concomitantly, the resources necessary to support robust health systems are distributed inequitably, which inevitably places greater stress on societies with the most vulnerable health infrastructure. In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) found that health capacities were nowhere near “a path to timely implementation worldwide.” By 2013, well before the current Covid-19 pandemic, studies found that no African state had fully implemented their core health capacity requirements under the International Health Regulations of 2005. Indeed, many of the countries listed in the Global Health Security Index ranked as “least prepared” are in Africa, with Somalia and Equatorial Guinea appearing at the very bottom. The lack of capacity especially visible in African countries and elsewhere in the Global South is in part due to historical vulnerability from slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, political instability, and conflict, as well as neoliberal reform policies like structural adjustment. This chapter analyzes the international obligations of capacity-building and cooperation in light of Covid-19.

This chapter considers dignity as a constitutional value in Hong Kong. The courts have invoked dignity in a small number of cases involving a limited assortment of rights. Overall this use of dignity has been uneven: while it has helped expand the scope of constitutional rights in some circumstances, dignity has functioned more restrictively in others. An examination of this jurisprudence allows for a reflection on debates about the role of dignity in comparative constitutional law more generally. Commentators have queried whether such a vague and imprecise term has any substantive meaning and whether it should be abandoned altogether. The chapter concludes that attention to context can mitigate these concerns about dignity’s indeterminacy and contribute to its development as a holistic constitutional value. The relevant context is both universal and local. It includes dignity’s position as a broad-based foundational principle in international human rights law across civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. It also depends on domestic factors such as a jurisdiction’s constitutional framework and empirical realities that impact the realization of dignity.

Chapter 7 presents the third of the three case studies: Killing the Individual Human Being via Drones. Here I look at targeted killings and the growing use of drones in this practice. The chapter offers a detailed discussion of the predominantly legal and ethical debate. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates the relevance of an analysis guided by insights from IR theory. But it also discusses legal questions concerning International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law. The case study engages in detail with the general discourse on drone strikes and targeted killings and provides an in-depth analysis of specific strike types and drone strikes. The analysis demonstrates how the individual human being appears as an innocent civilian who should not be killed (if possible) or as a guilty terrorist who should be killed.

The year 2011 should have been a watershed for Mexican human rights. Mexico’s Supreme Court historically strengthened human rights protections by adopting progressive doctrines grounded in international law, the country modernized its criminal justice system, and civil society united in its calls for justice. Despite these changes, one decade later Mexico finds itself in an unprecedented human rights crisis. How do we understand the spectacular and tragically costly failure of Mexico’s judicial system to strengthen human rights protections and break patterns of impunity over the past decade? The chapter argues that this disconnect stems from two intersecting dynamics: first, the Mexican state’s historically weak, fragmented, federal nature has resulted in the institutionalization of mechanisms that enable impunity, in particular through the work of a powerful and unaccountable Ministerio Público that is able to selectively apply, or defy, the law. Second, socio-legal mobilization has not coalesced around demands for effective implementation of progressive jurisprudence or basic tenets of the rule of law. Instead, human rights litigation proceeds simultaneously on two distinct tracks: strategic litigation of a small number of paradigmatic cases connected to, or in relation with, the inter-American human rights system; and the advocacy and collaborative investigation of cases by small, state-based organizations. The patterns create a critical disconnect, where impunity remains rampant despite Mexico’s embracing of progressive human rights norms and principles.