One way of understanding the exile of the Chagos Islanders and their inability to return to their ancestral land is through a reading of the case from a perspective of post-colonial legal scholarship. Chagossians have strong legal rights to land and remedies of compensation and return through a purposive application of the international legal definition of Indigenous, Magna Carta right to abode and international human rights law that could address their dispossession. Yet, the inability of those rights to be meaningfully applied has been constrained because of the post-colonial way they are legally interpreted, creating a legal vacuum in which basic fairness and substantive equality have been routinely compromised. Drawing attention to the continued legal denial of return in the context of decolonisation, ongoing colonialism and the rule of law makes sense of the legal record and explains the expulsion of the islanders despite the moral merits of return.

In the last decade, several states have increasingly tried to ‘un-sign’ to their humanitarian obligations by seeking ways to circumvent European or international law. Through an analysis of a recently passed act in Australia on the management of asylum seekers, this paper examines how the practice of ‘un-signing’ can be seen as a symptomatic instance of reconfiguring asylum in late modernity. We focus on the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ in the management of refugees. By ‘legal pragmatics’, we refer to the processual ways in which the state attempts to hollow out international refugee law and in which courts respond by reinstating it. Normative consequences are the criminalisation and the juridification of refugees. We argue that the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ illuminates not only the ever-expanding reach of neoliberal changes in domestic legislation, but also the limitations of human rights to adequately respond to the neoliberal vicissitudes of humanitarian government.

In its concluding observations for Cyprus, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) Committee stated that it ‘is concerned about the insufficiency of legal provisions and accessible mechanisms to detect, report, prevent and combat all forms of violence’.1 This paper focuses on the independent monitoring obligation Article 16(3) CRPD places on states parties, and discusses the implications of the insufficient implementation of Article 16(3) as it affects adults with intellectual disabilities in Cyprus. It examines the existing monitoring frameworks, explains why they do not meet with Article 16(3) CRPD requirements and explores the relationship of the national human rights institutions (NHRIs) with Article 16(3). This paper enables understanding as to how, despite pre-existing monitoring frameworks in place, no independent monitoring action has been taken since the ratification of the CRPD. It argues that there is an immediate need for measures to achieve the implementation of Article 16(3) and makes recommendations for Cyprus and other states parties.

In this paper, I develop the basis of a normative legal theory of mental health vulnerability. In Section 2, I conceptualise mental health vulnerability by integrating a universal understanding of vulnerability with a subjective-evaluative, psychosocial and dimensional account of mental health. In Section 3, I move on to consider the significance of mental health vulnerability for legal theory through an encounter with perspectives on vulnerability offered by MacIntyre, Fineman and Del Mar. This offers an insight into the normative foundations of mental health vulnerability. In Section 4, I outline a normative framework for mental health vulnerability that involves a synergy of rights and care. This extends Engster's idea of ‘a right to care’ to mental health and highlights the role of care and rights in mitigating power imbalances and inequality in relation to mental health. In concluding, I suggest future directions for research on mental health vulnerability.

This paper reframes debates about gender equality in the legal professions by interrogating the practices of men and interconnections between fatherhood, gender and parenting within the specific context of large corporate law firms. Drawing on interviews with male lawyer-fathers, it argues that closer exploration of fatherhood reveals much about the gendered dynamics of identity formation as a legal professional in this sector. A set of ideas about fatherhood, the paper suggests, shape how men's work can define a distinctive gender identity as a ‘family man’ and good lawyer. Political-economic and cultural shifts around fatherhood, however, are reconfiguring and adapting gender relations in law in a number of contradictory ways with implications for understanding the place of men in relation to gender-equality agendas. Ideas about fatherhood, family, work and career, I argue, are mobilised and enmeshed within the reproduction of distinctive law-firm cultures and gendered ideas of organisational commitment. What, in short, might it mean to be both a ‘good father’ and a ‘good lawyer’?

Ever since Evo Morales Ayma became Bolivia's first indigenous president in 2006 and the promulgation of a human-rights-enhancing Constitution (2009) thereafter, indigenous peoples’ rights were gradually recognised. Yet, with the increasing demand for natural resources, indigenous communities have been adversely affected by the state's neo-extractivist policies. While global indigenous rights norms protect their fundamental rights, legal-implementation processes in the country's lowlands reveal dilemmas in terms of the value of laws in practice as well as its reinterpretation on the ground. Namely, in the communities, different positions and camps have emerged in terms of the role and functions of participatory rights. Despite the potential of the latter in strengthening collective-rights regimes and self-determination, community leaders, advisers and other members report how such processes fracture and weaken decision-making mechanisms and human rights claims.