Drawing on a qualitative study of Hong Kong's Women's Commission (‘WoC’), this article examines how institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women function in a hybrid regime that includes both democratic and authoritarian elements. Hong Kong has a rights-based legal framework and equality agencies that support the operation of equality laws and policies. Paradoxically, Hong Kong's political system is non-democratic, and Beijing's Central People's Government is exerting more direct control on the territory. Grounded in qualitative interviews conducted with WoC members, non-governmental organisations, and scholars in Hong Kong, this article concludes that the WoC's full institutional potential in drawing attention to gender inequalities has not been realised. The implementation of authoritarian governance practices also has implications for the WoC's composition and agenda and may inhibit the development of progressive gender equality strategies to advance the status of women.

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was finally established in 2004 after decades of negotiations. Despite forty years of resistance from governments who were reluctant to sacrifice sovereignty to a supranational body, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Protocol grant the ACtHPR far-reaching authority relative to other regional human rights courts. How did the ACtHPR end up with an expansive jurisdiction that is unprecedented among regional courts? This analysis proposes that legal experts’ ability to capture control over vital stages in the drafting of the African Charter and Protocol, thus limiting the influence of political advisors, yielded an institutional design that facilitated the ACtHPR's unique mandate. Furthermore, colonial legacies in newly-independent states pushed the founders of the African human rights system to envision an innovative, post-colonial human rights framework that integrated a wide-reaching spectrum of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

The international community has experimented with a variety of tools for promoting the rule of law in weak states, yet with few successes. An innovative tool is hybrid commissions not supplanting the justice system of the target state but fighting impunity from within it. In this contribution I therefore seek to identify the factors that render this novel mechanism of rule of law promotion effective, arguing that a set of factors – support from the Attorney-General, civil society and powerful donors; as well as the commission’s institutional design, its strategy, and the personality of the commissioner – will determine if the changes initiated by the hybrid lead to a deeper transformation of the host state, or if there will be a rule of law rollback as soon as the commission leaves the country.

In international human rights law, the right to food has become a widely accepted legal and normative framework for tackling the problem of food insecurity. However, as currently formulated, the right to food is insufficient as a framework to tackle gender-specific barriers that impede women's access to food, which has contributed to the persistence of women's food insecurity globally. While the equal enjoyment of the right to food is guaranteed by the non-discrimination and equality provisions in international law, this notion of equality, associated with the formal equality approach, fails to recognise and address women's historical experience of systemic discrimination. This article argues that women's food insecurity should be approached from a broader formulation of the right to food that is informed by a substantive equality perspective, drawing from contemporary interpretations and elucidations by human rights bodies which have pushed for a more substantive notion of equality.

Disability segregated employment (also referred to as ‘sheltered workshops’) violates disabled people's human right to work and employment. This article argues that modern slavery law might serve as one part of a broader strategy to end disability segregated employment, ensure accountability for the injustices within them and ensure equal access to open employment opportunities for disabled people. This is on the basis that disability segregated employment can be understood as a form of labour exploitation under modern slavery law – specifically forced labour and servitude. Modern slavery law is a useful legal tool to unseat deeply entrenched ableist attitudes of disability segregated employment as beneficial and necessary and build corporate/charity, public and government momentum towards the transition away from disability segregated employment, even if this particular area of law cannot itself legally compel the closure of sheltered workshops and an increase in open employment opportunities for disabled people.

Administrative tribunal judges determine rights and entitlements regarding bureaucratic decisions. In immigration appeal cases, they review negative decisions of permanent residency acquisition and family reunification. Based on an analysis of all immigration appeal decisions in Canada’s Quebec province over a period of twenty-three years, we find that tribunal judges confirm the bureaucratic decision in the vast majority of cases, noting the migrants’ inability to meet the annual income requirements, and rarely reverse the decision in favour of migrants. Documenting the marginal contribution of tribunal judges to promoting administrative justice, this article contributes to the debate on whether and how courts can advance immigrants’ rights.

In this work we analyse the way in which ideologies, understood as an extra-legal factor, are discursively manifested in a corpus of judicial rulings that resolve cases of Mapuche domestic violence. We understand the judicial ruling as an ideological discursive genre inherent to the legal field formed by social and discursive practices. By applying critical discourse analysis, we analyse the judicial discourse strategies used in order to construct (i) the idea of domestic violence in an indigenous context, (ii) the image of the Mapuche woman and (iii) the self-image of judges who resolve the conflict. We conclude that these strategies serve two purposes: one is to legitimate the law as an apparently impartial mechanism, and the other is to define the way those involved in the issue must be understood.

In this article I argue that the judicial concept of non-marriage racialises and orientalises minoritised communities and their marriages. Applying a critical postcolonial lens, I show how the development of non-marriage has been influenced by colonial racialising attitudes towards marriage. This has led to its application in racist and orientalist ways to demean and other minoritised marriage practices. My analysis of the case law exposes three patterns in the judicial discourse in this area. First, that the courts emphasise “English (Christian) marriage” and its supposed hallmarks when deciding if a ceremony is non-existent; second that judgments foreground the technical, formal aspects of the law obscuring the use of personal judicial opinions which are orientalist. Finally, the application of this concept to playacting, sham and forced marriages at the same time as legitimate minoritised marriage practices is demeaning and insulting to the already marginalised communities that practise them.

That international law progressively recognises and prohibits emergent forms of torture and related ill-treatment has become widely accepted in the anti-torture discourse. The premise that torture's techniques and contexts change is taken to shape juridical recognition, representation and response. Authoritative international treaties, such as the UN Convention Against Torture, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture, are therefore deemed ‘living instruments’ – influenced by social and scientific change as channelled through the doctrine of dynamic interpretation. This article argues, however, that these premises are not sufficiently empirically grounded and, far from faithfully reflecting social and scientific changes, invoke critiques around the ideological and epistemological registers of advocates and adjudicators. Taking scholarship on dynamic interpretation and forms of state violence which do not leave overt physical marks as paradigmatic entry points, this article problematises torture's juridical conceptualisation and contextualisation through a critical theoretical lens.

This article explores how complaint investigations undertaken by health ombudsman contribute to the improvement of the healthcare system. Using a qualitative case-study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants form the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) and three health boards within its jurisdiction. Health board participants were frustrated by complaints process used by the SPSO, in particular the lack of communication during an SPSO investigation especially when there were differences in clinical judgment. Using Braithwaite’s typologies of motivational postures and Hertogh’s models of administrative control it was found that a sense of capitulation was the primary determinant in ensuring health board compliance with SPSO recommendations and that the relationship between SPSO and health boards was predominantly coercive in nature. For the SPSO to be more effective in contributing to system improvement requires it to review its role and means of conducting complaint investigations.

This article presents a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of constitutions: ‘constitutional institutionalism’. Conventional approaches in law, philosophy or political science tend to reduce constitutions either to their formal, factual or ideal aspects. The constitutional-institutionalist approach, by contrast, seeks to integrate these aspects into a more general perspective by focusing on the dynamic interplay between constitutional actors and constitutional norms. It understands constitutional norms as binding institutions that shape and constrain political action, but never fully determine it. Constitutional institutionalism furthermore asserts that constitutional norms, whatever form they take, only have meaning in relation to other constitutional norms as well as to constitutional actors, who impose meaning on these norms. Therefore, constitutional phenomena ultimately require interpretive explanations. This article concludes with a brief constitutional-institutionalist research agenda.

Accounts of human beings as vulnerable have provided powerful reposts to liberal individualism in recent decades. Concurrently, the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence on Convention states’ positive obligations often obliges public authorities to address particular vulnerabilities. These developments reflect elements of different theoretical accounts of vulnerability but lack a coherent approach to the human subject. Exploring the impact of this in the UK Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, we evaluate two case studies in which positive obligations have been imposed on the police; (1) public order in the context of inter-community tensions in Northern Ireland (DB v. Chief Constable of Police Service of Northern Ireland) and (2) police investigations in regard to serial sexual offending (Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis v. DSD). This jurisprudence illustrates how some domestic judges are supplying their decisions with rationalisations which are lacking in the European Court’s case law.

Reflecting the international experience, statistics show that most medical negligence cases in Ireland settle. Less is known, however, about the duration of these cases, though anecdotal evidence suggests that they are protracted in nature. Procedurally focused reforms, aimed at reducing costs and facilitating more expedient resolution of these disputes have been proposed in Ireland, yet await implementation. As such, the pace of litigation is largely determined by the parties to the dispute. Drawing on the findings of an empirical study (an analysis of closed case files and qualitative interviews), this article explores two questions: first, how long do medical negligence cases take to resolve; and secondly, what contributes to delay in this context. Whilst causes of delay may vary by case, it is important to attempt to identify and explore common factors which contribute to delay. If these factors can be problematised and understood, possible solutions may be reached. In doing so, the article contributes to the debate on medical negligence reform across common law jurisdictions, evidencing the broader considerations, in addition to procedurally focused reforms, which are required when considering the issue of delay.