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1. Values

Global justice, human rights, and values 
 

This stream examines how dynamics in and between local, national, European, and international legal orders can raise questions of fairness, inequality, accountability, legitimacy, and sustainability. It investigates how legal rules and instruments can be used to safeguard these values and reflects on the extent of integration and fragmentation in and between these orders.

This stream also examines how national, international, and European law are or could be used to address political, economic, criminal, environmental, social, and military challenges, and how they relate to domestic policies. It discusses whether the idea of global justice is achievable and to what extent it entails extraterritorial obligations for issues such as human rights violations, refugee crises, the emergence of pandemics, the threat of terrorism, or the transgression of planetary boundaries. Other important themes include the role of different actors in the national, European, and international legal orders, whether there are interdependencies between these orders, and how they influence each other.

The rights-related research in this stream investigates the appropriate scope of economic, social, and cultural rights, and to what extent these rights impose or steer policy making at the national, European, and international level. It also examines the relations between national, regional, and international law, for instance in the context of the European Union or in sub-fields and policy areas, such as security, migration, climate change, digitalisation, social security, and criminal law. Special attention is given to the relationship between the EU and the Council of Europe systems, as well as their interaction with national legal orders.

MACIMIDE

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Global justice research takes place 
in the following institutes and groups:

 GLaw-Net
 ICGI
 MCEL
 MCfHR
 M-EPLI
 METRO
 MICS
 Montesquieu

Values - focal points

  • Integration can produce
    both winners and losers
    Integration itself can provide many benefits to humanity, but it comes with many potential threats as well. Indeed, integration can produce both winners and losers. Moreover, the legal and policy instruments used to bring about integration can also have different consequences for different groups.

    Integration therefore inevitably also leads to the question of the type of quality of legal rules one wishes to achieve within this integrated community. That therefore leads to the question of the universal character of human rights and equally raises questions with respect to the scope of, for example, economic, social and cultural rights.

    Questions of integration and interaction lead, for example, to the question whether obligations of states with respect to the protection of human rights extend beyond their own territory and therefore have an equally extraterritorial character. 

  • Will various types of globalisation 
    lead to further integration?
    The study of human rights lies at the core of global justice. Questions in this respect are related to the consequences of the process of globalisation for individual citizens and the role of law in regulating and mitigating these consequences. From a global justice perspective, not only is economic globalisation important, but so too are processes of political and military globalisation, with consequences such as the global fight against terrorism and its consequences for human rights. Will various types of globalisation lead to a further integration (convergence) or fragmentation (divergence) of the legal system? 

    Obviously, important questions also arise with respect to the consequences of globalisation for the democratic nature of the creation of legal rules. This is the traditional domain of public and public international law, and more particularly constitutional law, where the powers of the different actors involved and their interrelationships are analysed in a dynamic framework.

  • Beyond the traditional domains of
    human rights and criminal law
    In the fields of (international) criminal law, criminal procedure and criminology, considerable attention is also being paid to various aspects of global justice in an increasingly interacting and integrating world. The same applies to gender studies, an area characterised by long-standing cooperation between researchers of various departments. But questions relating to global justice also go beyond traditional domains of human rights and criminal law.

    Environmental problems (which by nature are often transboundary) lead to many justice-related questions as well. Climate change related literature has, for example, highlighted the fact that climate change may have especially harmful consequences for vulnerable groups in developing countries. The ways in which corporations should respect human rights, also when doing business globally, lies at the core of modern company law and corporate social responsibility.