Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the international legal framework governing urban crises arising from conflict, “natural” and technological disasters.

The paper deploys legal analysis to the most relevant bodies of international law pertaining to urban crises and systematically outlines the key legal issues arising.

International humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) provide important protections to vulnerable persons in both human-made and “natural” disaster settings. While the two bodies of law do not draw explicit distinctions between urban and rural settings, their various provisions, and indeed their silence on, crucial issues that would enhance legal protection in urban settings merit greater attention.

The paper provides an overview of the sources of international law of most relevance to urban crises. Further research is required into how the urban environment influences their application concretely in urban settings.

In an era when international law is being challenged from many sources and attention is turning to the increasing potential for urban violence and vulnerability, this paper serves to sensitise the disaster management and humanitarian community to the relevance of international legal frameworks to its activities in urban settings.

This paper considers the most salient international legal issues arising during crises and compares and contrasts how the different bodies of international law (IHL and IHRL) address each of the kinds of crises (conflict, “natural” or technological disaster), respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of international law in disaster prevention and management, with a particular focus on the emerging field of international disaster law (IDL), and its relationship with international human rights law. It further introduces the four articles of the special column of this journal issue, dedicated to disasters and international law.

The analysis is based upon primary sources of legislation and policy, as well as academic literature on disasters and international law.

Although the field of IDL is in its infancy, the authors argue that this emergent area does have the potential to gain widespread recognition as a distinct field of law, and that this may benefit the wider disaster management community.

The paper introduces key legal features and themes relating to international law and disasters, highlighting their relevance for disaster management. The added value is to widen the discussion on aspects of disasters regulated by international law, thus facilitating the future exchange with other academic subjects and operational fields.

Extreme events are the occasion for many people’s encounters with climate change. Though causation is complex and no one event is directly attributable to climate change, when we consider Cassandra, we can consider what people encounter in assistance after an extreme event. This chapter takes the case of assistance to displaced people after Katrina to explore how care and surveillance were intertwined. Methods include analysis of government documents as well as interviews. When we consider assistance people receive, we often focus on the intended assistance and how it worked or did not. Evaluation is difficult, not least because criteria for determining what it means to work are uncertain. However, if we include the process of gaining assistance as part of the experience, we broaden concerns from the instrumental outcomes to the mixed messages people get in assistance. Assistance appears in a context, where the most vulnerable people have reasons to mistrust government and nonprofits, and where in the United States assistance has come intertwined with supervisory rules, a focus on getting people to work, and a need to manage criminal histories. Trust in government may be limited, emergency care can operate outside ordinary legal frameworks when providers are new, and legal accountability for assistance may be experienced as confining, despite caregivers’ intent.

This paper aims to synchronize the various constitutional regulations that regulate the natural disaster management in Indonesia, especially those which apply in the Yogyakarta Special Territory after disaster through a legal interpretation and construction method to find a community empowerment-based disaster management model, which suits the Indonesian ideals of law.

This research is carried out in the Yogyakarta Special Territory province; this research uses the juridical normative method or the method with the doctrinal or the juridical normative approach. The approaches used in this research are the conceptual approach, statute approach and the sociological approach.

The numerous constitutional regulations that are formed and implemented to regulate the disaster management in Yogyakarta Special Territory cannot yet run its function as an integrating mechanism efficiently. This is mainly because the handling of disasters is usually responsive, without clear planning.

In numerous constitutional regulations, there is a synchronization between the regulations on the society’s rights and responsibilities in disaster management. The point of these regulations is that they state that every citizen has the right to obtain social protection and a sense of safety. They have the right to obtain education, trainings and skills in the establishment of disaster management. Also, they have the right to participate in policies, in accessing information on disaster prevention policies.

Efforts of response toward a disaster should be neither exclusive nor partial. A condition of disaster is a complex condition, which usually asks for a holistic response from various perspectives and experiences. It needs effective teamwork between various institutional groups. Basically, it will not be effective if it is run by a single agency exclusively. Indonesia needs a clear disaster management and needs to synchronize the law for disaster mitigation for minimize the natural disaster impact.

Various constitutional regulations made and applied to regulate disaster management in the Yogyakarta cannot yet run its function as an efficient integrating mechanism, as the law cannot yet undergo the rearrangement of the productive process in the society optimally. The goals determined in the execution of the disaster management are often not legitimized by the society, and they do not yet give a full sense of justice to them. Recovery after Yogyakarta earthquake is a slow process.

This is a relatively new research, as other researches focused on the disastrous impacts of the Yogyakarta earthquake. The disaster management system must consider and must be responsive toward diversity, differences and competition, which may arise due to social, economic, political, community and even religious factors. These differences often create a dynamic and complex relation. A wrong manner in handling this may cause horizontal conflicts.

Purpose – This study explores legal justifications for applying an enhanced criminal sanction to wrongs committed before, during, and after disasters.

Design/methodology/approach – This study uses recent social science evidence to evaluate the need for criminal statutes covering looting, price gouging, and other disaster-related offenses. Further, this study considers a broader historical context, identifying intersections of disaster crime and the common law's treatment of riots and public disorder.

Findings – Although individual disaster victims and communities are vulnerable to criminal harm, and this vulnerability often appears to motivate the punishment of disaster-related crimes, it is not the only or even the strongest justification available. As an alternative approach, one could focus on the public dimension of the harm – disaster-related crimes are particularly pernicious because they threaten to undermine the legitimate governing authority of the state.

Originality/value of paper – The public-order thesis yokes current legal doctrine to longstanding common law themes and, in so doing, departs from conventional justifications for the enhanced punishment of disaster-related crime. The critical perspective offered here could be extended to criminal penalty enhancements more generally. Moreover, because the rationale for identifying and punishing wrongful conduct is the fundamental question of criminal law, even a modest reassessment has potentially far-reaching implications.

Crisis management has gained importance in the policy agendas of many countries around the world due to the increases in the number of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Thus, this paper has two purposes. The first is to illustrate how the Turkish Government's Disaster and Crisis Management System has been developed. The second purpose is to make a qualitative evaluation of the current disaster and crisis management systems.

Literature review shows that the disaster and crisis management system in Turkey has been developed after tragic events. The paper examines what kinds of initiatives were introduced and what is the trend in shift. After analyzing recent cases and exploring some government initiatives, alternative approaches and suggestions were included.

Turkey has developed its disaster and crisis management system since 1930, which mostly depended on experiences. The current disaster and crisis management system is governed by a centralized structure which is the responsibility of different ministries. Nonetheless, the system is very weak at local level. Furthermore, participation of non‐profit organizations is very limited at both national and local levels. Thus, coordination and management of first‐response operations during crises are problematic and ineffective. Particularly, the system is not designed for different types of crises such as terrorist attacks.

Crisis management in Turkey needs a more unified and flexible structure to deal with current problems effectively. Further suggestions for better implication are also provided

The effectiveness of the disaster and crisis management system is analyzed in natural and man‐made disasters. Findings show that centralized and decentralized systems have different functions in different situations.

The purpose of this paper is to link debates around the international law on human rights and disaster management with the evolving debate around the human right to sanitation, in order to explore the extent to which states are obliged to account for sanitation in their disaster management efforts.

The paper is based on analysis of existing laws and policy relating to human rights, sanitation and disaster management. It further draws upon relevant academic literature.

The paper concludes that, while limitations exist, states have legal obligations to provide sanitation to persons affected by a disaster. It is further argued that a human rights-based approach to sanitation, if respected, can assist in strengthening disaster management efforts, while focusing on the persons who need it the most.

The analysis in this paper focuses on the obligations of states for people on their territory. Due to space limitations, it does not examine the complex issues relating to enforcement mechanisms available to disaster victims.

This is the first scholarly work directly linking the debates around international human rights law and disaster management, with human rights obligations in relation to sanitation. The clarification of obligation in relation to sanitation can assist in advocacy and planning, as well as in ensuring accountability and responsibility for human rights breaches in the disaster context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and responsibilities of non-state actors (NSAs) in contributing to disaster governance from an international human rights law (IHRL) perspective. In particular, it examines how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and business enterprises are implicated.

The paper analyzes a range of IHRL instruments, particularly treaties and international soft-law documents, and it utilizes the concepts “human rights-based approaches” (HRBAs) and “direct”/“indirect” human rights obligations to frame and understand how IHRL responsibilities for NSAs arise from these instruments.

IHRL not only includes relevant standards for NSAs in the area of disaster management, but NGOs and businesses also actively engage with IHRL and HRBAs by means of (soft) self-regulatory instruments to further clarify their responsibilities.

The findings are of interest to all actors involved in disaster governance, and are instructive for NGOs and businesses seeking to improve the design of disaster management activity. The research addresses only the responsibility of NGOs and private companies, but the framework of analysis set out is equally of interest to other actors’ activities.

The implications of IHRL for NSAs involved in disaster management are still poorly understood, despite their vast engagement. This study contributes by clarifying the roles and IHRL responsibilities of NGOs and businesses specifically, and articulates how applications of HRBAs may improve the protection of persons.

The intensifying effects of climate change and the growing concentration of population in hazardous locations mean that, for many communities, disasters are increasingly becoming not only foreseeable, but inevitable. While much attention is, and should be, focused on what these foreseeable disasters require in terms of disaster planning and mitigation, attention should also be focused on a related and equally pressing phenomena: mismanagement of disaster response, particularly as climate proves an increasing stressor. Like disasters themselves, disaster mismanagement – while not entirely predictable – may exhibit some predictable patterns. This chapter explores past disaster management failures, considers how climate change may alter or exacerbate certain response pathologies, and evaluates some potential remedies that might mitigate these challenges.