ANALYSIS Kilili Nthiw’a A little more than a decade ago in May of 2007, a boat, a leaking fishing trawler abandoned by its skipper, washed up on the shore of La Tejita beach in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. Surprisingly, the boat was loaded with 130 young men of African origin, some of…
ANALYSIS 15 April 2022 René Brosius Somalia’s complicated election process is ending – and remains complicated. After many delays, Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble recently announced his intention to complete the electoral process by April 14, 2022. After a one-and-a-half-year delay, this would create the basis for electing the speakers of both chambers as well…
ANALYSIS John Yajalin 8 April 2022 Introduction On the 22nd of November, 2021, myjoyonline.com carried a sensational headline: “We are tasked to buy motorbikes and iPhones for our husbands after years of working– Kayaye Association President”.[1] Even though the story might sound absurd and hyperbolic, the complaint by the Kayayei Association’s president has some truth.…
ANALYSIS Bantayehu Demlie Gezahegn 4 April 2022 In less than a month since 24 February 2022, at least 3.6 million people fled armed conflict in Ukraine according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The mass movement of people is one of the aspects of the conflict that attracted global attention and rightly so. One key…
OPINION Prof. Dr Phillipe Cullet 31 March 2022 COP26 specifically recognized the importance of the concept of climate justice in the preamble to the Glasgow Climate Pact. Yet, the main focus of policymakers remains on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as reflected in the call to reach net zero by mid-century. On the…
In the last two years, we have found ourselves confronted with a series of global crises that seem to have pushed the pressing issues of environmental protection and climate change to the side. But wrongly so. On the one hand, the progression of the climate crisis requires immediate responses and cannot be put on hold…
ANALYSIS Kilili Nthiw’a 31 March 2022 The 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will take place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt from 7-18 November 2022. Ordinarily, it ought to be the 28th session but for the Covid-19 Pandemic which saw the postponement of…
ANALYSIS Julia Reiher 25 March 2022 Alarming pictures of burning landfills at the margins of our cities or dying marine species in large garbage swirls come to mind when thinking of the effects of plastic waste. Humans as well as animals are confronted with the omnipresent hazards of single-use plastic every single day: „There are…
ANALYSIS Isabelle Zundel 18 March 2022 This contribution connects with former publications on this platform on combatting single-use plastics in Malawi facilitated through the project “Building collective ownership of single-use plastics waste (SUP) in youth communities: case studies from Kenya, Jamaica, and Malawi”. For this month’s topic on Climate Justice and Environmental Law, our contribution…
If the aim of LGBTIQ+ rights discourse is to promote and protect the interests and lives of all LGBTQI+ identifying peoples, what does it mean to think about improving lives in ways that are responsive to lived realities? Given the centrality of the state in human rights discourse, we ask what a rights discourse has…