Security Citizenship And Human Rights Shared Values in Uncertain Times

This book explores how and why the transposition of EU directives in the new and contentious policy area ‘Business and Human Rights’ differs between member states. It reveals the extent to which individual member states are pursuing diverging approaches in dealing with the ‘discretionary space’ in EU directives, and highlights theoretical and political explanations. Drawing on historical institutionalism and rational choice institutionalism, the book establishes a link between the degree of corporatism in a given political economy and government behaviour in terms of Business and Human Rights policy. Moreover, it identifies political salience within the policy subsystem as a pertinent factor for explaining national transposition outcomes.

With the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence, governments are integrating AI technologies into administrative and even judicial decision-making, aiding and in some cases even replacing human decision-makers. Predictive policing, automated benefits administration, and automated risk assessment in criminal sentencing are but a few prominent examples of a general trend. While the turn towards governmental automated decision-making promises to reduce the impact of human biases and produce efficiency gains, reducing the human element in governmental decision-making also entails significant risks. This book analyses these risks through a comparative constitutional law and human rights lens, examining US law, German law, and international human rights law. It also highlights the structural challenges that automation poses for legal systems built on the assumption of exclusively human decision-making. Special attention is paid to the question whether existing law can adequately address the lack of transparency in governmental automated decision-making, its discriminatory processes and outcomes, as well as its fundamental challenge to human agency. Building on that analysis, it proposes a path towards securing the values of human dignity and agency at the heart of democratic societies and the rule of law in an increasingly automated world. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars focusing on the evolving relationship of law and technology as well as human rights scholars. Further, it represents a valuable contribution to the debate on the regulation of artificial intelligence and the role human rights can play in that process.

In the West, human bondage remains synonymous with the Atlantic slave trade. But large slave systems in Africa and Asia predated, co-existed, and overlapped with the Atlantic system—and have persisted in modified forms well into the twenty-first century, posing major threats to political and economic stability within those regions and worldwide.