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Goldenziel, Jill

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Goldenziel

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Goldenziel, Jill

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2005 - 200932010 - 20167

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    Regulating Human Rights: International Organizations, Flexible Standards, and International Refugee Law
    (University of Chicago Law School, 2014) Goldenziel, Jill
    The bad actor problem, or the puzzle of how to get known human rights violators to improve their practices, is central to human rights scholarship and policy-making. Scholarship has largely focused on understanding how and if state commitments to multilateral international human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, can improve human rights practices. This article reframes the bad actor problem as a regulatory matter, suggesting that international agencies may, under certain conditions, provide a way to get even bad actors to improve their human rights practices. By flexibly interpreting international law, international organizations can use their authority to coordinate state interests, while enhancing the credibility of state commitments and providing valuable legal cover for state actions. I present examples of how international agencies may and have improved human rights practices, focusing on the case of the use of international refugee law during the post-2003 Iraqi refugee crisis in Jordan and Syria. My analysis suggests that traditional scholarly discussion of promoting compliance with international human rights instruments may be misplaced, and that the role of international agencies in regulating human rights deserves further attention.
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    When Law Migrates: Refugees in Comparative International Law
    (2014) Goldenziel, Jill
    The current European migration crisis has been playing out worldwide. As record numbers of migrants have fled their countries in recent years, wealthier states have had an increasing interest in restricting their borders to protect national security. The challenge of balancing domestic security interests with international human rights commitments has fallen to courts. Drawing on cases involving interdiction of migrants and refugees at sea from the U.S., Australia, and the European Court of Human Rights, this chapter will compare how the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees has been interpreted across countries and over time. It will show how courts have permitted countries to circumvent the core prohibition of the Refugee Convention, and discuss when courts choose to intervene to enforce it. The chapter will conclude by analyzing the implications of these cases for extraterritorial application of domestic and international human rights guarantees.
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    Displaced: Why We Need New International Law to Protect Refugees, Displaced People, and Human Rights
    (2015) Goldenziel, Jill
    How can international law protect both international security and the human rights of displaced people? Existing international law protects only displaced refugees: those who flee persecution on the basis of religion, race, nationality, or political opinion. This article argues that a new Displaced Persons Convention must be created to protect the human rights of the world’s other 35 million victims of civil conflict and climate change who do not meet this narrow definition. International Refugee Law must be preserved as it is because it enshrines critical protections for minority rights that must not be diluted. However, an additional instrument of international law is necessary to resolve an issue that is at once one of the greatest human rights issues of our time and a threat to international peace and security. To support this argument, this article presents a comprehensive history of refugees in international law, combining primary sources and original interview data to trace how states have agreed for centuries that refugee law should protect minority rights, even as shifting state interests have changed refugee protection over time. This article refutes other scholarly proposals and UN practices that expand the category of “refugee.” It also contributes to growing scholarly interest in the history of human rights law by arguing that refugee law predates the modern human rights regime, challenges its foundations, and extends its claims to universality.
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    Blaine's Name in Vain?: State Constitutions, School Choice, & Charitable Choice
    (University of Denver, 2005) Goldenziel, Jill
    In this article, Ms. Goldenziel explores the growing controversy over no-funding provisions, state constitutional provisions that restrict state funding of religious institutions. These provisions, allegedly rooted in anti-Catholic bigotry, may threaten state implementation of school choice programs and faith-based initiatives involving public funding of religious social service organizations. Ms. Goldenziel argues that these no-funding provisions, which are commonly termed Blaine Amendments, Little Blaines, or Baby Blaines, are often unrelated to the failed federal Blaine Amendment, and do not always share the federal amendment's infamous anti-Catholic history. In the first study of its type, Ms. Goldenziel surveys the language and history of constitutional provisions prohibiting funding of religious institutions in all fifty states, and details the constitutional history and judicial interpretation of these provisions in eight representative states: Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Vermont, and Maine. Ms. Goldenziel concludes that the fates of school vouchers and faith-based initiatives will not rest on the so-called Blaine Amendments, but on the ideological and jurisprudential tendencies of state judiciaries. Debate over school choice and charitable choice should therefore move from courtrooms to the political arena.
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    Sanctioning Faith: Religion, Politics, and U.S.-Cuban Relations
    (University of Virginia, 2009) Goldenziel, Jill
    Fidel Castro's government actively suppressed religious life in Cuba for decades. Yet in recent years Cuba has experienced a dramatic flourishing of religious life. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cuban government has increased religious liberty by opening political space for religious belief and practice. In 1991, the Cuban Communist Party removed atheism as a prerequisite for party membership. One year later, Cuba amended its constitution to deem itself a secular state rather than an atheist state. Since that time, religious life in Cuba has grown exponentially. All religious denominations, from the Catholic Church to Afro-Cuban religious societies and the Jewish and Muslim communities, report increased participation in religious rites. Religious social service organizations like Caritas have opened in Cuba, providing vital social services to Cubans of all religious faiths. These religious institutions are assisted by groups from the United States traveling legally to Cuba on religious visas and carrying vital medicine, aid, and religious paraphernalia. What explains the Cuban government's sudden accommodation of religion? Drawing on original field research in Havana, I argue that the Cuban government has strategically increased religious liberty for political gain. Loopholes in U.S. sanctions policies have allowed aid to flow into Cuba from the United States via religious groups, allowing the Cuban government to open a controlled religious marketplace. The Cuban government has learned from the experience of similar religious awakenings in post-Communist states in Eastern Europe and has shrewdly managed the workings of religious organizations while permitting individual spiritual revival. By softening its anti-religious stance, the Cuban government has opened the door to religious pluralism on the island while closely monitoring religious groups to prevent political opposition. As the Obama Administration has already begun to ease U.S. Sanctions on Cuba, the U.S. Government must gain a broader understanding the relationship between Cuban religion, civil society, and democratic freedoms.
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    Displaced: A Proposal for International Law to Protect Refugees, Migrants, and States
    (Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, 2016) Goldenziel, Jill
    How can international law better protect both international security and the human rights of people fleeing violence? International refugee law protects only the refugees: those fleeing across borders due to a well-founded persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The world’s other 42.3 million people displaced by violence have few protections under international law. This article proposes and sketches new international law to address this crucial human rights problem. I argue that a new Displaced Persons Convention to protect people fleeing violent conflict is needed to supplement the 1951 Refugee Convention. The Refugee Convention must be preserved because of the critical protections it provides for the rights of minorities and political dissidents. Adding a new Displaced Persons Convention would better protect the human rights of individuals fleeing violent conflict and state failure, further state interests, and improve international security.
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    Administratively Quirky, Constitutionally Murky: The Bush Faith-Based Initiative
    (New York University, 2005) Goldenziel, Jill
    In this article, Ms. Goldenziel explores the administrative and constitutional peculiarities of the Bush Administration's Faith-Based Initiative. She argues that the Supreme Court's establishment clause jurisprudence offers no clear standards for administrative rule-making. However, the Bush administration has ignored the Supreme Court's guidelines and has crafted a program of dubious constitutionality. The Initiative is nearly impermeable to constitutional challenges or other public checks because of its peculiar place in the administrative structure. Because the Initiative endangers the fundamental constitutional right to freedom from religious establishment, Ms. Goldenziel calls for the Initiative to be publicly accountable, and provides suggestions for how the Bush administration can achieve this goal.
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    Veiled Political Questions: Islamic Dress, Constitutionalism, and the Ascendance of Courts
    (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2012) Goldenziel, Jill
    This article explains how judicial independence can develop in regimes that are not fully democratic. Conventional wisdom holds that a strong legislature and political parties are necessary for the emergence of an independent judiciary. This article challenges conventional wisdom by explaining how judicial independence may arise in regimes where these conditions are not present. It presents a theory of how judicial independence emerges and why and when other political actors will respect it. The article also explains why courts may be better poised than legislatures to counter executive power in non-democracies. The theory is developed through a discussion of cases involving Islamic headscarves and veils in Middle Eastern courts. These cases have broad political implications because of their significance to Islamists, who pose the biggest challenge to the power of traditional elites in majority-Muslim countries; and their broad legal ramifications with respect to judicial power, individual rights, constitutional convergence, religious freedom, and the relationship between shari‘a and state law. The article also explains how national courts have interpreted Islamic law and challenges the notion that courts function to secularize state-sponsored religion. To the author’s knowledge, this article contributes the most complete discussion in the English-language academic literature of recent high court cases in Egypt, Kuwait, and Turkey that were translated for the purposes of this article, thus contributing to the body of foreign constitutional case law available for comparative study.
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    The Curse of the Nation-State: Refugees, Migration, and Security in International Law
    (Arizona State Law School, 2016) Goldenziel, Jill
    How does international law protect migrants? For the most part, it does not. Of the millions of people who flee persecution, conflict, and poverty each year, international law protects only refugees: those who flee persecution on the basis of religion, race, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees provides critical protections for minorities that must never be diluted. However, it is insufficient to protect the swarms of migrants landing on the shores of Europe and elsewhere, or to guide states on how to protect them while guarding their own security. This article argues that states have always revised international law regarding displaced people to protect their own security interests and changing circumstances of displacement. The time is thus ripe for the creation of an additional instrument of international law to protect the 35 million displaced people who do not meet the definition of “refugee.” To support this argument, this article presents a comprehensive history of refugees in international law, combining primary sources and original interview data to trace how states have used refugee law to protect minority rights, even as state security interests have changed refugee protection over time. In doing so, the article makes two theoretical claims that contribute to growing scholarly interest in the history of human rights law. First, the article argues that refugee law is paradigmatic human rights law, although it is often excluded from the human rights canon. Second, the article claims that refugee law predates the modern human rights regime, challenges its foundations, and extends its claims to universality.
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    Aid, Agency, and the Malleability of International Law: The Post-2003 Iraqi Refugee Crisis
    (2013-03-06) Goldenziel, Jill; Bates, Robert H.; Simmons, Beth; Feldman, Noah; Jamal, Amaney
    Why do states tolerate large numbers of refugees? This dissertation offers an answer to this puzzle by examining changes in policy responses by the international community toward Iraqis displaced after the U.S. invasion of 2003. From 2003-2006, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt remained quiet about the growing humanitarian needs of displaced Iraqis. From 2007-2010, these countries abruptly shifted policy to claim that they were hosting millions of Iraqis, and to allow Iraqis greater access to public goods and humanitarian assistance. I argue that this policy shift occurred because of new opportunities to extract strategic rents from the international community in the form of foreign aid and development assistance tied to the presence of refugees. I also explain how and why the UN Refugee Agency facilitated host country behavior during these two time periods, even in contradiction with its mandate under international law. I ground my argument in more than 100 interviews with UN Agency officials, NGO workers, government officials, and Iraqi refugees conducted in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt and at the UN Refugee Agency Headquarters in Geneva between 2007 and 2010. I also utilize research in the archives of relevant newspapers, national departments of statistics, and the UN Refugee Agency Headquarters. Previous political science literature largely conceives of refugees as a burden on state infrastructure, or as a potential security risk. This dissertation challenges this literature by suggesting that, under some conditions, states may derive political and economic benefits from the presence of refugees, explaining why they tolerate displaced populations. This dissertation also contributes to the understanding of how authoritarian regimes adapt to new opportunities for strategic rents. This dissertation also explores how an international organization can operate as both a principal and an agent, constrained by the preferences of its member or donor countries, yet autonomously advancing its own interests while shaping the political environment in which it operates. I show how the malleability of international refugee law has helped actors to manipulate humanitarian assistance for their own gain. Finally, this dissertation explores how the destabilization of Iraq affected international relations within a region that has been forever changed.