Antoine Buyse on Post-Conflict Housing Restitution

Antoine Buyse (formerly of Leiden University, now at Utrecht's SIM Human Rights Institute) last week defended his PhD Thesis on 'Post-Conflict Housing Restitution. The European Human Rights Perspective, with a Case Study on Bosnia and Herzegovina' (cum laude!) at Leiden University. The thesis is published with Intersentia (see details below).

Here's the book's back cover text:

The loss of one’s house is often one of the most dramatic personal consequences of armed conflict. In fragile post-conflict societies such a loss does not only cause a flow of refugees and other displaced persons, but it can also be a source of renewed conflict. Restitution of housing could help to solve these problems and thus help to attain peace and to rebuild the rule of law. This study focuses on the legal aspects of restitution. Its purpose is to identify the stumbling blocks which in many cases hamper restitution. Thus, the main research question is how the right to housing and property restitution for refugees and other displaced persons can be secured more effectively in European post-conflict situations.

The study is structured around three requirements for the effectiveness of a legal norm: its normative clarity, the operational framework which supports the norm, and the political will or consensus, among the main actors involved, to implement the norm. Throughout, the main perspective is the European Convention on Human Rights within the broader context of public international law and human rights law. First, the issue of the existence and content of a right to housing restitution is elaborated upon. Secondly, specific challenges in the institutional sphere are addressed. Thirdly, the research focuses on the application of housing restitution in practice, by way of a case study. It analyses how restitution was implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the wake of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement. The study concludes with a set of specific recommendations for the effective implementation of the right to housing restitution in post-conflict states.

Many thanks - and congratulations - to Antoine!

Antoine Buyse, Post-Conflict Housing Restitution. The European Human Rights Perspective, with a Case Study on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Intersentia: Antwerp/Oxford 2008 (ISBN 978-90-5095-770-0).

For more information on the broad topic of 'transitional justice', visit the University of Wisconsin's extensive and up-to-date Transitional Justice Bibliography online.

If you're interested in the topic of housing restitution, have a look at the website of COHRE, a leading NGO devoted specifically to the issue.

Kelley on Exporting Western Law to the Developing World

Thomas Kelley III (North Carolina - Chapel Hill) has published 'Exporting Western Law to the Developing World: The Troubling Case of Niger' as a 'Frontiers' Article in Global Jurist (Vol. 7 : Iss. 3 (Frontiers), Article 8).

This is the abstract:

In recent years the West has dispatched ``rule doctors" across the developing world to guide poor countries through the process of legal modernization and westernization. Their goal, laid out by the so-called Washington Consensus, has been to reform those countries' legal systems so that they might share in the economic bounty of globalization. But things have not always gone well, particularly – this paper argues – where those rule doctors have ignored existing legal traditions. The paper focuses on the particular case of Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world. At present, most of Niger's citizens rely on magio-religious traditions to accomplish what we in the West would consider law. One important, and from a Western perspective colorful, Nigerien legal tradition is its citizens' reliance on an oracle called the gon to identify wrongdoers and restore harmony to their communities. The paper will describe the gon, and will point out some of the ways that it differs fundamentally from Western conceptions of law. It then will conclude that Washington Consensus law reform in Niger will fail, and will very likely cause social unrest, unless it takes a different tack and finds a way to accommodate existing legal traditions.