Volume 13, Issue 2-3 - Special issue: Law and Boundaries

This paper discusses the assumptions behind an evergreen issue of EU law – the so-called horizontal effect of the EU Treaty free movement rules. It is usually claimed that the use of those rules to impose duties on individuals should be limited in order to protect private autonomy. Debate on this issue is largely confined to how far those limits should go. This paper takes a step back and questions the central assumptions made both by legal practice and by scholarship: first, the public–private distinction as a basis for applying the EU Treaties; second, the broad argument for “private autonomy”.

European human rights protection, ensured by the European Convention and Court of Human Rights, is declared to be universal and inclusive, protecting not only citizens of Europe but also anybody residing within the jurisdiction of the signatory countries. This article challenges this declaration and argues, with the help of some examples from the case law, that European human rights protection is based on the defined concepts of European-ness that exclude the perceived non-European within the Convention and the Court system.

Framing the Rwandan genocide as a “failure” of international law forces one to approach it as an unintended consequence of an otherwise benign system of formal relations between states. The present article looks at it instead as a physiological product of international law, disclosing the possibility to contemplate the latter as a fundamentally imperialistic system pegged on the controversial notion of “rule of law”. International law embodies a system of legalised extraction swaying between cynicism and guilt: despite its real face showing on occasions like Rwanda, it keeps revamping itself so as to prevent a fundamental appraisal of the contradictory nature of the system as a whole.

This paper investigates alternative critical insights into the conflict of religion and queerness in Canadian constitutional law, through the tools offered by Queer Theories. In Canada, this implies the adoption of a critical phenomenology of pluralism as the object of Queer Theory. Adjudicating pluralism becomes a sovereign performance, and publicness a zone of national intimacy. The conflict of rights produces a typology of queer religious bodies as constitutional strangers through a range of capacities that a body can or cannot do. Will be argued that the norm of religious citizenship is heteronormativity, and the norm of queer citizenship deciphers the ascendency of male whiteness.