Using the accounts of Gewirth and Griffin as examples, the article of Joseph Raz criticises accounts of human rights as those are understood in human rights practices, which regard them as rights all human beings have in virtue of their humanity. Instead it suggests that (with Rawls) human rights set the limits to the sovereignty of the state, but criticises Rawls conflation of sovereignty with legitimate authority. The resulting conception takes human rights, like other rights, to be contingent on social conditions, and in particular on the nature of the international system.
Gergely Romsics discusses the overlap in the field of application of international relations (IR) and human rights (HR), by analyzing the lack of a theory which would reconcile the tensions between the two. He devises the beginnings of an - as he calls -"anxious" alternative theory loosely based on a Foucaultian framework.
In an interview with András Bragyova, who is member of the Hungarian Constitutional Court, international lawyer Gábor Sulyok focuses on the constitutionalization of international law. They especially focus on the issue interpretative liberty of the Constitutional Court in defining international legal norms.
Petra Jeney and Péter Stauber gives an overview on how the EU reacted to terrorism after 9/11 in the fields of providing institutional answers, policy- and lawmaking and how these measures affected fundamental rights. In Gábor Kajtár's view it is out of question whether the various collective security mechanisms are to be reformed. The question is whether the international community is able to react before it legitimacy is totally impraired. Tamás Lattmann argues that a universalist conception of fundamental rights would require universal compromises, whereas regional international organizations struggle to reach consensus.
Attila Lápossy comments on the new decision of the Hungarian Constitutional Court on registered partnership. He emphasizes that the opinion of the court constitutes a compromise: to declare unconstitutionality in a way that would not expose the court to accusations of having abridged the rights of same sex couples.
In her writing, Júlia Mink examines the the United Nations' Human Rights Committee's operation by defining its status, greatest achievements, its challenges and obstacles. Acknowledging the Committee's work in becoming an effective human rights agency, Mink conludes that several problems could only be solved by the radical supervision of the UN control mechanisms.
Here we present Gábor Halmai's review on a book about the use of referenda in Hungary and throughout the World. ■
Visszaugrás
