Owen Taylor

The scale of homelessness in Europe throws a stark light on the right to housing that exists in many European states and in European and International Law. This disparity between legal right and the social reality of homelessness and housing precarity begs the question as to the efficacy of a rights-based approach to housing.

This article examines the ‘enforceable’ right to housing in France, in place since 2007, to explore the efficacy of approaching a chronic lack of housing through justiciable rights. The lack of progress in over a decade of jurisprudence highlights the challenges posed to legal advocacy in this area, particularly when combined with a lack of political will. The article concludes by reflecting on alternative approaches, in which justiciable rights have played less of a role, stressing the need for political and financial commitment over legal rights.

Background: Most European countries report rising numbers of people experiencing homelessness. For those with mental disorders, interventions are centered on achieving mental health and drug rehabilitation alongside housing readiness, often to the detriment of access to housing. Notwithstanding, more European countries are investing in a new model, Housing First (HF), which postulates immediate access to permanent housing with no initial requirements for treatment. While results of the European HF programs are published on individual-level data, little is known about the opinions of the general population about homelessness and the societal value of the HF model, which can represent barriers to the model's dissemination. Therefore, we present the protocol of a study designed for the following objectives: 1) to explore the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) about homelessness within the general population of 8 European countries, 2) to assess the valuation of the HF model by European citizens, and 3) to estimate the lifetime prevalence of homelessness in the targeted countries. Methods: A telephone survey was conducted from March to December 2017 among adults selected from opt-in panels from France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Poland, and Sweden. A total sample of 5600 interviews was expected, with 700 per country. The interviews included three sections: first, the KAP about homelessness; second, the valuation of the HF model by measuring a respondent's willingness-to-pay (WTP) through the contingent valuation method; and third, an assessment of the lifetime prevalence of homelessness among the general population. Descriptive analyses and comparisons between countries will be conducted. KAP indicators will be created and their psychometric properties assessed. Determinants of WTP will be assessed through regression models. Discussion: This survey will highlight Europeans' views of homelessness, especially their level of tolerance towards homelessness, potential misconceptions and the most important barriers for the implementation of the HF model. Additionally, the results on the valuation of the HF model by citizens could be instrumental for key stakeholders in understanding the level of support from the general population. Ethics approval has been obtained from the Aix-Marseille

Objectives To examine the lifetime, 5-year and past-year prevalence of homelessness among European citizens in eight European nations. Design A nationally representative telephone survey using trained bilingual interviewers and computer-assisted telephone interview software. setting The study was conducted in

With the events of the Arab Spring the language of revolution has suffused public and academic discourse. In light of this it seems timely to open discussion on how the concept of revolution functions in international law. This paper argues that the content specific to the modern concept of revolution involves a necessary connection between structural analysis and social agents of change, but that within critical scholarship the organised and disciplined elements of that agency have been elided. This paper argues that this is indicative of a broader rejection of modernist elements within critical discourse in international law, stemming from a traumatic relationship to history informed by pervasive liberal narratives. This aversion to one side of the concept of revolution severely limits its emancipatory potential within international legal discourse. This paper makes a call for the reclamation of revolution’s analytical and political content, through an engagement with its conceptual history, and a brief examination of revolution’s contemporary theoretical alternatives, such as the Badiouvian ‘event’.

There are various ways in which the law appears to hold the progressive promise of combating inequality and enabling the redistribution of wealth within a society. Human Rights discourse embodies these principles perhaps more than any other area of law; appearing to offer a method of both protecting vulnerable populations from the effects of inequality, and a way of fighting for redistribution. However, this tends to overlook two aspects of law - firstly that law offers a way of balancing between rights, such that even if a struggle to include a new set of rights-based considerations (for example economic and social rights) is successful, these rights are then only balanced against others within the existing legal framework. Secondly that the fight to include a previously excluded set of principles, whilst perhaps on the one hand ‘progressively developing’ the law, simultaneously bolsters the legitimacy of the broader legal framework whilst also depoliticising the struggle by transforming it into one about rights (rather than combating a system that structurally reproduces and extends social inequality).
This paper intends to explore this dynamic through examining the function of sovereign debt and its relationship to the broader international financial system. Confronting the ways in which sovereign debt and the international investment framework perpetuate and exacerbate international inequality has proved a key site of struggle over the distribution of wealth, risk exposure and decision making. Contemporary Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanisms have further isolated the interests of international capital (and the interests of national elites with which they are aligned) from broader social accountability, and international negotiations over real and potential sovereign debt defaults have demonstrated the symbiotic relationship between maintaining wealth inequality (via protected profits) and legal argument.
The paper will highlight connections between the debt-default of Southern US States in the 1840s, the coincidence of US expansion into Latin America in order to secure debt repayments known as the Roosevelt Corollary (Mitchener and Weidenmier, 2005), through to the recent NML Capital ruling in New York which benefited the infamous vulture funds holding pre-2001 Argentinian bonds, and the utter capitulation of Syriza’s debt restructuring and anti-austerity programme by the Troika. The NML Ruling is particularly educational, as in rejecting the US Government’s Amicus Curiae application arguing for the protection from attachment orders of central bank funds held abroad, it seems to demonstrate that the only times law opposes the interests of the powerful (in this case the US state) it does so in favour of upholding the sanctity of contract in the interests of maintaining broader inequality.
The broader narrative of the paper will situate these examples in a developing international system in which one of the most fundamental aspects of the contemporary global economy is the free flow of international capital, coupled with the formation of complex and shifting global production chains. These developments have both extended inequality between states, and undermined domestic efforts to address inequality within the state. This occurs as the state redesigns its regulatory environment to attract foreign direct investment, legislates under the threat of capital flight, and in doing so begins to favour the interests of international capital over other domestic constituencies (thus exacerbating the ways in which the state might already serve particular interests). This broad framework suggests that human rights discourse, or indeed any legal framework, is ill-equipped to address inequality. This is particularly true at the international level, and it is necessary to conclude that adopting the discourse of human rights to address inequality will shut down other more radical, and potentially productive, means of intervention.

This book explores the historical inter-relations between international law and revolution, with a focus on how international anti-capitalist struggle plays out through law. The book approaches the topic by analysing the meaning of revolution and what revolutionary activity might look like, before comparing this with legal activity, to assess the basic compatibility between the two. It then moves on to examine two prominent examples of revolutionary movements engaging with international law from the twentieth century; the early Soviet Union and the Third World movement in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The book proposes that the `form of law', or its base logic, is rooted in capitalist social relations of private property and contract, and that therefore the law is a particularly inhospitable place to advance revolutionary breaks with established distributions of power or wealth. This does not mean that the law is irrelevant to revolutionaries, but that turning to legal means comes with tendencies towards conservative outcomes. In the light of this, the book considers the possibility of how, or whether, international law might contribute to the pursuit of a more egalitarian future.

Available to purchase: https://www.routledge.com/International-Law-and-Revolution-1st-Edition/Taylor/p/book/9780367076597