International and Comparative Penal Law and Human Rights Law

International and Comparative Penal Law and Human Rights Law

QUESTION 2: Consider the challenges that are presented by human rights principles to the continued imposition and implementation of irreducible sentences of life imprisonment.

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis on the human rights law and its application on the life imprisonment. The paper discusses the ways through which the human rights law ensures that sentences are not grossly disproportionate to the offenses for which they are imposed. The paper discusses the application of human rights law, and the challenges faced by the human rights principles for the continued imposition and rights principles to the continued imposition and implementation of irreducible sentences of life imprisonment. The paper also discusses the use of community sanctions by international instruments and the restrictions of such sanctions by international human rights norms. Human rights are probably the dominant normative conception in the contemporary globalized world. It is common for struggles for national self-determination, the recognition of alternative identities, class-based and labor empowerment, gender equality, democratic inclusion, property rights protections, rectification of state violence, and consumer goods to use rights discourse in spite of varying political orientations and alliances among the actors involved. Development is no exception, whereas it was understood primarily in the terms of economic output from about 1950 to 1970, and concerned with poverty from around 1970 to 1990. Development has in the past two decades increasingly been framed in the language of human rights and related concepts, such as fundamental human capabilities and multi-dimensional poverty. The objectives for doing so, on the part of advocates, have been broadly speaking used to characterize the elimination of extreme poverty as a moral imperative, and to underscore that the kind of political power associated with the assertion of claims by the poor themselves is a prerequisite to the elimination of extreme poverty. The first point is commonly thought of as speaking to the intrinsic dimension of human rights, and the latter to their instrumental dimension. Trade actors, on the other hand, have traditionally been concerned about human rights obligations because of their ability to undermine the legitimacy of trade rules. So for instance, if it can be demonstrated that an obligation of the TRIPS Agreement, TBT Agreement or Agreement on Agriculture violates relevant human rights rules that would be a big blow to the legitimacy of trade rules. This is therefore, something to be guarded against. Much of the resulting debate about the interaction between trade rules and human rights rules has been primarily a lawyer's debate. It is therefore largely about clashes of legal norms and is conducted at a very high level of abstraction. At its crudest, it involves those raising human rights issues arguing that human rights norms and standards are superior obligations. Trade lawyers respond to the extent that human rights standards do contain any clear obligations in the trade law context, they are either irrelevant or are completely compatible ...