Every wrongful act gives rise to an obligation to redress the offense. In the international legal context, following the 'traditional' claims approach for wrongful acts, it is the state of nationality that has the duty to request redress for the violations incurred by its nationals through diplomatic protection. However, this 'traditional approach' excluded stateless persons, who are not considered nationals by any state. This article explores the manners in which stateless persons have been able to access mechanisms of redress for violations of their rights under international law, by exploring the challenges and opportunities their situation of statelessness creates for them in terms of accessing justice at the international level. For this purpose, three different existing international mechanisms with the powers to issue measures for redress have been selected. Through exploring access to redress for stateless persons at the international level, this article also provides an overview and analysis of the selected mechanisms, exploring their law and practice.
This article investigates the risk of epistemic injustice in conducting sociolegal research in Global South contexts. Diving into the ethical imperatives of honouring knowledge, agency, and voice, we challenge extractive research practices and reframe participants as active, legitimate bearers of knowledge. Covert research is a highly controversial research practice which bypasses the right to informed consent of participants. Marieke Hopman’s article titled ‘Covert Qualitative Research as a Method to Study Human Rights Under Authoritarian Regimes’ advocates for covert research in the field of human rights, provided this covert research passes her proposed ‘ethical test’. We argue that this test permits and requires practices of knowledge-making which unjustly silence, undervalue, and exclude the capacity of systematically marginalised communities to produce knowledge claims. Hopman’s ethical test requires researchers to translate participants’ testimonies and situated knowledge into a doctrinal human rights framework, which comes with certain onto-epistemological assumptions which may not be shared by participants. Her approach frustrates research participants’ agency in choosing their own epistemic projects. Finally, her test exacerbates structural inequalities between the Global North and Global South by reinforcing unequal power relations. We advocate for a situated ethics approach to mitigate epistemic injustice in socio-legal research in the Global South. Cross-cultural ethical dialogue between western and non-hegemonic ethics on a non-hierarchical and equal basis can contribute to building ‘intercultural ethics’. Reflexivity – where researchers critically examine their worldviews and social position throughout the research process – can ensure greater accountability and integrity. Reciprocity – building mutual research relationships and producing research useful to the researched – can help shift the power imbalance between the researcher and researched.
The idea for this special TLR issue on citizenship and statelessness was initiated at the first PhD Workshop on Citizenship and Statelessness hosted at Tilburg University and funded by the Tilburg University Alumni Fund in September 2018. This special is a result of rapidly growing interest in citizenship and statelessness among early career researchers worldwide and reflects innovative research and new developments in researching citizenship and statelessness issues, particularly focusing on interdisciplinary research. Statelessness has been traditionally understood as a legal issue: it denotes the lack of legal membership of an individual in a state. Efforts to reduce statelessness have traditionally been of a legal nature, through conventions and efforts to change laws that cause statelessness. Therefore, work related to statelessnessboth academic and in practice-has primarily had a legal focus. Over the last ten years, however, major developments have taken place, which have resulted in the issue of statelessness gaining prominence and being acknowledged as an important issue on its own, and in the academic domain, as a fascinating field of academic inquiry. Economists, anthropologists, social scientists, human geographers, historians, and people from other backgrounds have become interested in conducting academic research on this issue. This became visible in, among others, the first special issue on statelessness published by Tilburg Law Review in 2014, which compiled the work of over 30 scholars and practitioners working on statelessness and spanned two volumes, across various disciplines. Due to the relatively small size of academics working in the field of statelessness, it has become like a small family where faces are familiar, and newcomers are welcome. This has allowed for people from different backgrounds to come together in events and become interested in the works of others who might work outside of their own discipline, but still related to statelessness. Two recent events come to mind that showcase this. The first is was an academic meeting organized by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, the NYU Centre for Global Affairs, and Open Society Justice Initiative, which took place in New York in mid-2017. In this academic meeting, senior and junior academics doing research on statelessness or closely related fields came together and discussed some of the most pressing issues they encountered in their own work. The second event, the PhD Workshop on Citizenship and Statelessness was a follow-up from the 2017 academic meeting in NYC. This PhD workshop brought together 15 PhD students from around the world and from very different academic disciplines for four days to discuss not only their own research but also to attend masterclasses by various experts from different fields whose research is interesting for statelessness research. They learned about statelessness and digital data from Dr. Linnet Taylor (TLS & TILT), about citizenship and statelessness from literary and philosophical perspectiv...
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