Walter Kälin

Troubled Communication: Cross Cultural Misunderstandings in the Asylum Hearing.

This article demonstrates how misunderstandings rooted in the differences between the asylum-seekers and the officials cultural background can seriously distort the process of communication during the asylum-hearing and thus impair the ability of refugees from Third World countries to make their asylum-claims credible.

Flight in times of war

A rmed conflict always has been and still is the most important cause of flight.The 50th anniversary of the Refugee Convention provides an appropriate opportunity for reexamining the relevance of international refugee law for persons fleeing armed conflict and its multiple conceptual and legal relationships with international humanitarian law. The Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was adopted on 28 July 1951 as an instrument aimed at solving the residual problems of refugees in Europe whose flight was caused by the events of World War II.1 Today, it is internal rather than international armed conflict that forces human beings all over the world to abandon their homes and flee the dangers of war. For a long time, though, the Refugee Convention found little application to situations of flight caused by armed conflict but was instead mainly used to protect victims fleeing the often very stable totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and the south. It was thought that the protection of human beings in times of war should be left to international humanitarian law. However, international humanitarian law limits its protection to refugees who are on the territory of one of the parties to an international conflict.This limitation has resulted in considerable challenges to the refugee protection regime as, traditionally, refugees fleeing the perils of war to third States were not regarded as persons hav-

Late modernity: Human rights under pressure?

Human rights as a product of modernity are hugely successful in terms of number of treaties and ratifications, activities of international human rights bodies, expansion into new areas such as relations between private actors, and real progress achieved in areas such as the abolition of the death penalty. At the same time, several contemporary developments may, in the long term, erode the concept of human rights as developed since the Age of Enlightenment and undermine support for it. Three challenges are in the foreground: (1) the decline of state power, in particular the phenomenon of fragile states and the negative impact of weak state institutions on human rights such as the prohibition of torture; (2) the utilitarian challenge to the validity of core human rights guarantees, particularly in the context of the war on terror; and (3) the loss of empathy as a precondition for recognizing the rights of others even if they are our enemies.

Wahl- und Stimmrecht als Menschenrecht

The right to vote and to stand for elections is a fundamental human right. Guaranteed by several international human rights conventions, this right is also central to the constitutional order of states. International human rights bodies are challenged to strike an appropriate balance between enforcing individual rights and respecting the sovereign right of states to determine their political order. Consequently, this right is granted relatively weak protection in international law. Nevertheless, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, and other international human rights bodies have been able to provide clear and detailed guidance regarding both the content and the admissible limitations of the right to participate in free and fair, secret and periodical elections based on universal and equal suffrage. These international standards resemble and are fully compatible with those of Swiss law.

La lucha contra la tortura

En los ultimos cincuenta anos, la lucha contra la tortura ha sido uno de los principales temas de interes del derecho relativo a los derechos humanos. El primer texto juridico internacional para prohibir especificamente la «tortura» fue la Declaration Universal de Derechos Humanos (articulo 5). El primer tratado para prohibir la tortura, el Convenio Europeo de Derechos Humanos (articulo 3), se aprobo poco despues, en 1950. El ano 1984, la Convencion contra la Tortura de las Naciones Unidas se convirtio en el primer instrumento internacional vinculante exclusivamente dedicado a la lucha contra una de las violaciones de derechos humanos mas graves y frecuentes de nuestro tiempo.