Human Rights and the Private Sphere ─ A Comparative Study

This book is a companion volume to Human Rights and the Private Sphere: A Comparative Study Volumes 1 and 2, which analysed the effect of human rights on private relationships in a range of democratic jurisdictions around the world. This book looks at a number of additional important jurisdictions in self-contained chapters which describe the wider constitutional background of each system, the relevant national human rights regime, the influence of any international human rights instruments, the judicial enforcement of human rights, and the effect of human rights thinking in the private sphere.

This book does not just extend the geographical reach of the first two volumes but also addresses a number of specific questions which the particular experience of these new jurisdictions may help to answer. These additional lines of inquiry include the influence of religion; the question whether notions of human rights protection can affect private relationships even in an authoritarian public law environment; whether local systems of customary law fulfil similar functions as modern constitutional guarantees; and how private sphere protection develops in systems experiencing not only rapid constitutional changes but also a fundamental shift in their underlying societal paradigm.

This volume will be of interest to those working in the fields of human rights, public law and comparative law.

Dawn Oliver is Professor of Constitutional Law at University College London. She is particularly interested in constitutional reform, the UK Human Rights Act 1998, and the public law/private law divide. She recently published Constitutional Reform in the United Kingdom (OUP, 2003) and is co-editor of The Changing Constitution (OUP, 6th edn 2007). In 2005 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Jorg Fedtke is A.N. Yiannopoulos Professor in Comparative Law at Tulane University, USA. In 2005 he was invited by the United Nations to act as an external advisor to the constitutional negotiations in Iraq. His research interests are in constitutional law, administrative law, comparative methodology and tort law.