In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Latin & South America

26 Aug

Alicia Nicholls Caribbean small island developing States (SIDS) joined with other United Nations (UN) members to sign on to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. These 17 goals and their 169 targets form the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed in 2015, covering areas as diverse as no poverty, zero hunger, gender equality, climate action, peace justice and strong...

|
26 Aug

Gerardo Centeno García Mexico’s 2013 Reforma Energetica (Energy Reform, RE) was a constitutional reform that allowed the participation of private companies (national or foreign) in the Mexican Energy Sector (MES), previously reserved solely for State-owned enterprises (SOEs). This constitutional reform modified articles 25, 27, and 28 of the Mexican Constitution (CPEUM), entering into force on December 20, 2013. To help the...

|
25 Aug

Antonius R. Hippolyte & Jason K. Haynes  Most developing countries still lack the industrial capacity to participate in international trade in a manner similar to industrialised countries, whose industrial transformation was catalysed at the end of the 18th century. Thus, advocates of the neoliberal international economic order have long touted Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as the panacea for development and economic...

|
25 Aug

Ximena Sierra-Camargo In Colombia in the 1990s, a mining boom led to a significant increase in the extractive industries, including large-scale gold mining. This boom was provoked by legal and institutional reform of the framework of the Colombian constitutional State, and following the guidelines of transnational actors like the World Bank, who sought to standardise mining regulation across Latin America. The new...

|
24 Aug

Jodi-Ann Stephenson The socio-political context of colonialism and imperialism, within which the rules on foreign investment protection originated, has had an enduring effect on the evolution of foreign direct investment (‘FDI’) and its protection. Despite the formal ending of colonialism, the imperial space within which the rules of foreign investment protection originated has profoundly impacted the character and development of modern...

|
24 Aug

Nicolás M. Perrone & Leonardo E. Stanley The 1990s witnessed a surge in economic and legal reforms that prioritised markets over government in allocating economic resources, installing a new institutional ruling. For neoliberals, open economies and free markets forces would bring laggards towards convergence. Rational agents' investment decisions might place countries into a stable, long-run growth path. In the field of...

|
23 Aug

Mohsen al Attar and Rafael Quintero Godinez Investment is a heavy word. It stumbles rather than rolls off the tongue, perhaps because the speaker is aware of its convoluted character. It invokes images of factories, infrastructure, workers, money, and men (in suits or in hard hats, usually both). Most of all, investment conveys an evolutionary trajectory; one that is ideological and...

|
02 Aug

Rocío Quintero, Timothy Fish Hodgson and Young Park work at the International Commission of Jurists. This symposium consists of a series of posts authored by the different panelists of a webinar hosted by the International Commission of Jurists titled “COVID-19 and Courts: A Global Trend of Judicial Deference?“ On 11 May 2021, the Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca in Colombia ordered  the Colombian Government to...

|
16 Jul

[Javier S Eskauriatza is a Lecturer at Birmingham Law School.] Introduction In October 2020, it was a surprise when the U.S. arrested the former Mexican Defence Secretary, General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, on drug-trafficking and corruption charges, at an airport in Los Angeles, California. The indictment accused Cienfuegos of participating in an international conspiracy to manufacture heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana, to import and distribute them in the...

|
16 Jul

Despite the publication of the MMIWG Report and its findings of an ongoing “race-based genocide” against Canada’s First Nations, issues of indigenous genocide and (neo)colonial oppression have remained side-lined from political discourse in the rest of the American continent. In fact, the situation has arguably worsened: at the same time as Canada protested the unmarked graves of hundreds of indigenous...

|
05 Jul

[Carlos Rafael Urquilla Bonilla is a Senior Attorney at Inter-American Institute of Social Responsibility and Human Rights (IIRESODH)] In August 1936, husband and wife Antonio Alomar Mas and Margalida Jaume Vandrel were forcibly disappeared in Manacor (Mallorca) leaving two daughters behind at ages 8 and 11 amidst the Civil War. Their case is a paradigmatic example of the multiple gross human rights violations committed during the Spanish Civil...

|
16 Jun

While results have not yet been officially announced, it is now a fact that Pedro Castillo, a rural farmer and schoolteacher from the town of Chota, in the northern Peruvian Andes, won Peru’s Presidential Election. Let me say this from the get-go: this is a historical moment. Peru is an immensely centralised, deeply racist country. Castillo’s meteoric rise to the...

|