English summary
Diplomatic immunity is protecting torturers
PEDER VEDEL KESSING
The article describes developments in international law in this area and the
relation between the Torture Convention and the Vienna Convention. It concludes
that in contemporary international law it is doubtful whether immunity takes
precedence over the obligation to prosecute international crimes, including
systematic torture. Danish authorities are criticised for not having given
the reasons for their decision and for disregarding developments in international
law.
Human rights, politics and love
MARTTI KOSKENNIEMI
This article discusses the paradox of an international law that aims to create
space for a non-political normativity in the form of human rights that can
be opposed to the politics of States but that is undermined by the practical
experience that what rights mean, and how they are applied, can only be determined
by the politics of States. This leaves reformist lawyers uneasily poised between
a naive enthusiasm and sophisticated cynicism. A familiar psychological trap,
I suggest. In order to reconceive the emancipatory ethos of rights it is necessary
to grasp their open-endedness, their irreducibly political nature, the way
they lead into a dialectic between universalism and particularism, individualism
and community, and perhaps, like love, sometimes make the two seem the same,
if only for a moment.
The concept of rights as friend and foe
KNUT ERIK TRANØY
The paper ends with a scenario involving the moral tension between two distinct
sets of rights: the right to life and a minimum of decent of living on the
one hand, and the right – at least in the West – to maintain or
even raise people’s standard of living. In a nutshell: given the present
demographic trends – more people living longer and longer – can
we defend a continued acceptance of such rights without transnational decisions
to introduce restraints, say, on the right to unrestricted consumption and
the right to have as many children as we please – while the medical
profession is still duty bound to prolong as many lives as long as medical
knowledge allows?
Housing rights
IDA ELISABETH KOCH
The point of departure of this article is the inadequate protection of housing
rights as framed in the specific conventions on economic, social and cultural
rights. Against this background the article analyses the extent to which housing
rights can be protected by the restriction of property rights as they are
protected in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). On the basis
of case law from the European Court of Human Rights the article concludes
that the ECHR allows for a quite comprehensive restriction of property rights
when housing policy is taken into account. However, the protection of housing
rights is of an indirect nature since the protection concerns the general
housing policy of the Member States rather than the individual tenant. The
article concludes that the so-called integrated approach to human rights protection
is far from being the only solution to the weak protection of housing rights,
and that the need to strengthen the individual protection by means of the
conventions on economic, social and cultural rights is still pressing
Europe's linguistic rainbow
Anne Lise Kjær
When studying European and national language policy today, it becomes clear that the trend is to stress the importance of maintaining linguistic diversity as an expression of the cultural wealth and tradition of Europe. But while languages are seen as the media through which cultures and national identities are expressed, it seems to have been forgotten that languages are also means of communication and the exchange of information between people. In the process of integrating the peoples of Europe in an ever closer Union, the need for cross-border and cross-language communication and understanding is increasingly important. Therefore, European language policy should focus on how an equal and mutual understanding of all Europeans might be secured across linguistic diversity and language barriers. The most reasonable and just solution would, in my opinion, be to define one lingua franca common to all peoples of Europe. In the world today, the global medium of common understanding is English. Speakers of the large languages of Europe have difficulties accepting English at the cost of their own languages. Regretfully, speakers of the small languages, including the Scandinavian languages, only think of the threat from English. They should be aware of the risk that, while Germans and Frenchmen speak of protecting the cultural and linguistic wealth of Europe, what they really mean is that their own languages should survive as first foreign languages, thus contributing to the formation of new linguistic minorities in Europe.