Human Rights and the Private Sphere, Volume 2: A Comparative Study

This book is a companion volume to Human Rights and the Private Sphere: A Comparative Study (2007), 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. The book includes chapters on countries such as China, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Cameroon, Namibia, Nigeria and Zambia, seeking to discover whether and, if so, how and to what extent human rights thinking has moved beyond its traditional state-individual agenda in the various legal systems.

This book does not just extend the geographical reach of the first volume 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 book will be of interest to those working in the fields of human rights, public law and comparative law.