International Refugee Regime: An Alternative Way of Protection for Human Rights Defenders?

Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) are subjected to serious human rights violations through legal and extra-legal actions. More worryingly, the abuses against them remain unpunished, perpetuating the cycle of violence against them. There is room for doubt that international human rights law has failed to provide efficient protection to HRDs, so this article considers the international refugee regime as an alternative to the protection of HRDs. In this sense, it first discusses the intersection between the term ‘refugee’ and ‘HRD’ in order to establish that HRDs fall under the protection of the Refugee Convention. The article considers the most-well trodden flaws in the refugee regime which, in conjunction with the reluctance of HRDs to use the refugee status, renders this alternative unsuitable for defenders. This article employs not only doctrinal research, but also draws upon interviews with HRD

The UN definition of human rights defenders: alternative interpretative approaches

Human rights defenders play a crucial role in promoting the realisation of human rights and, in doing so, are often subject to human rights violations.The article explores who can be a human rights defender and particularly looks at the definition of defenders derived from Article 1 of the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. The definition is broad and vague, as it concerns anyone who fights for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Recognising that the scope of the Declaration was uncertain, in 2004 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published Fact Sheet 29 in an attempt to provide guidance on how to approach it. The Fact Sheet establishes three requirements to be a defender; however, the definition remains problematic. The aim of the article is to show through examples that the requirements are themselves so vague that they could provoke misunderstandings, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the Declaration and to propose alternative interpretative approaches

International Refugee Regime: An Alternative Form of Protection for Human Rights Defenders?

Human rights defenders (HRDs) are subjected to serious human rights violations through legal and extra- legal actions. Notably, most of the abuses against them remain unpunished, perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence against them. There is room for doubt that international human rights law has failed to provide efficient protection for HRDs, and this article considers the international refugee regime as an alternative system of protection. In this sense the article first discusses the intersection between the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘human rights defender’ to establish that defenders fall within the protection of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Following an inductive reasoning, the article considers the most well-trodden defects of the refugee regime and the reluctance of HRDs to adopt refugee status; it concludes that this alternative may not be suitable for defenders. Besides a doctrinal approach, the article employs a socio-legal approach, which is enhanced by interviews with HRDs

GRDD: A Dataset for Greek Dialectal NLP

In this paper, we present a dataset for the computational study of a number of Modern Greek dialects. It consists of raw text data from four dialects of Modern Greek, Cretan, Pontic, Northern Greek and Cypriot Greek. The dataset is of considerable size, albeit imbalanced, and presents the first attempt to create large scale dialectal resources of this type for Modern Greek dialects. We then use the dataset to perform dialect idefntification. We experiment with traditional ML algorithms, as well as simple DL architectures. The results show very good performance on the task, potentially revealing that the dialects in question have distinct enough characteristics allowing even simple ML models to perform well on the task. Error analysis is performed for the top performing algorithms showing that in a number of cases the errors are due to insufficient dataset cleaning

OYXOY: A Modern NLP Test Suite for Modern Greek

This paper serves as a foundational step towards the development of a linguistically motivated and technically relevant evaluation suite for Greek NLP. We initiate this endeavor by introducing four expert-verified evaluation tasks, specifically targeted at natural language inference, word sense disambiguation (through example comparison or sense selection) and metaphor detection. More than language-adapted replicas of existing tasks, we contribute two innovations which will resonate with the broader resource and evaluation community. Firstly, our inference dataset is the first of its kind, marking not just \textit{one}, but rather \textit{all} possible inference labels, accounting for possible shifts due to e.g. ambiguity or polysemy. Secondly, we demonstrate a cost-efficient method to obtain datasets for under-resourced languages. Using ChatGPT as a language-neutral parser, we transform the Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek into a structured format, from which we derive the other three tasks through simple projections. Alongside each task, we conduct experiments using currently available state of the art machinery. Our experimental baselines affirm the challenging nature of our tasks and highlight the need for expedited progress in order for the Greek NLP ecosystem to keep pace with contemporary mainstream research

The Legal Obstacles to the Work and Life of Human Rights Defenders: Alternative Approaches and Recommendations for Reform

The thesis is concerned with the legal obstacles to the life of individuals who fight for the realisation of human rights and are known as Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). It argues that as a consequence of their struggle for human rights and justice, HRDs face numerous obstacles in their work, which affect their human rights activity and may entail serious consequences for human rights in general. In particular, the thesis identifies three main legal obstacles; the lack of a clear definition, the criminalisation of HRDs and impunity for crimes committed against defenders, placing particular emphasis on the failure of international human rights law to provide efficient protection to HRDs. On this basis, it also considers whether international refugee law can act as an alternative way of protection, as a HRD may meet the requirements of the term ‘refugee’. It, however, rejects the idea, emphasising the need of a protection system for HRDs within the state of origin, given the desire of HRDs to remain in their home countries, as well as the crisis of refugee and asylum law. It therefore makes recommendations that could respond to each of the identified obstacles, while drawing upon recommendations for strengthening the implementation of human rights in general, also proposes alternatives, not strictly related to international human rights law as such, that could contribute to the protection of HRDs and the implementation of human rights in general

The UN Definition of Human Rights Defenders: Alternative Interpretative Approaches

Human rights defenders play a crucial role in promoting the realisation of human rights and, in doing so, are often subject to human rights violations.The article explores who can be a human rights defender and particularly looks at the definition of defenders derived from Article 1 of the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. The definition is broad and vague, as it concerns anyone who fights for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Recognising that the scope of the Declaration was uncertain, in 2004 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published Fact Sheet 29 in an attempt to provide guidance on how to approach it. The Fact Sheet establishes three requirements to be a defender; however, the definition remains problematic. The aim of the article is to show through examples that the requirements are themselves so vague that they could provoke misunderstandings, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the Declaration and to propose alternative interpretative approaches