“‘Made in China’ . . . Is a Warning Label”: Is America Doing Enough?

This Note explores China’s repressive actions against the Uyghur population and calls upon the U.S. to address these human rights violations. Part I discusses the background and human rights violations in Xinjiang, also known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Part II addresses U.S. economic regulations and sanctions imposed against actors involved in Xinjiang’s forced labor industry. Part III analyzes previous U.S. strategies and sanction regimes implemented to combat human rights violations in other countries. This Note recommends that the U.S. implement a more robust multilateral framework to combat the Xinjiang cultural genocide and impose secondary sanctions against China and entities involved in forced labor in Xinjiang

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent: Implications for Transnational Enterprises

This paper examines the scope of FPIC as an aspect of environmental justice and a tool for poverty alleviation. It also explains some of the difficulties encountered by transnational enterprises when they attempt to utilize FPIC and the benefits that accrue to indigenous communities and transnational enterprises when the principle is properly applied

Solving the Challenges to World Trade

World trade faces fundamental challenges. This essay examines six threats to the intellectual case for open trade: to wit, worries about ecology, fairness, morality, equity, security, and geopolitics. Together, these threats implicate a huge swath of international trade. One of the biggest indicators of diminishing support for trade is the moribund status of the leading institution of the trading system, the World Trade Organization (WTO). There are three branches of WTO governance and all three are in trouble: the judicial branch and its vacant Appellate Body, the executive branch and its vacant post of WTO Director-General, and the legislative branch where the WTO Ministerial Conference has failed to meet since 2017. Solving global problems often requires focused international policies and sometimes specialized international agencies to administer such policies. Unfortunately, during the 21 st century, the growth in international problems has not been matched by a growth in international solutions. The faltering of the trading system is one example of that mismatch, but the same pathology exists in many areas of global governance. The biggest problem may be the shallow Paris Agreement on Climate Change that lacks any mutually agreed commitments, such as a carbon tax, for harmonized actions to combat global warming. Yet even without any international commitment to impose a carbon tax on domestic commerce, there are political demands to impose carbon taxes on imported products for ecological and fairness reasons. This essay introduces the term “tradeclimate” questions as nomenclature for the set of environmental issues relating to transborder trade that should be resolved in the climate regime, not in the WTO. In discussing China, the essay notes that the trade war between China and the United States spills into the WTO, and explains why the WTO should not arrogate to itself the task of re-educating China. Gaining China’s cooperation is critical to achieving better policies in the WTO, the Paris Agreement, and the World Health Organization

A Roadmap for Integrating Human Rights Into the World Bank Group

Offers a framework for linking effective international development and poverty reduction with human rights, including empowering communities to use the World Bank Group's grievance mechanisms. Outlines accomplishments, shortfalls, and recommendations

The Sioux\u27s Suits: Global Law and the Dakota Access Pipeline

The Sioux Tribe’s lawsuits and protests against the Dakota Access Pipelines (DAPL) received an incredible amount of international attention in ways that many Indigenous peoples’ protests have not. This article argues that attention exists because the Sioux Tribe has been at the epicenter of the Indigenous peoples’ rights movement in international law. Accordingly, they have invoked or claimed international human rights—particularly free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC)— to complicate, and perhaps destabilize, the DAPL’s development. However, the importance of their activism is not merely in claiming human rights. Based upon a global map of law that involves multiple and overlapping legalities, this article tracks the Sioux Tribe’s activism according to the problem-solving approach. Accordingly, the Sioux Tribe is advancing a different model of legality, one that is not based on a top-down command and control authority. This article reveals a complex, global network of intercommunal Indigenous peoples and nonstate actors by tracing the historical trajectory of the Sioux Tribe, its opposition to the DAPL, its role in the Indigenous peoples’ rights movement, and the novel extra-national legalities the Sioux Tribe is helping to formalize