دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی حقوق بین الملل مناسب برای اختلافات شهری و بحران - امرالد 2017

1. Introduction

Populations living in urban areas are rendered vulnerable due to myriad inter-related factors including rapid and unplanned population growth, organised violence, environmental degradation, precarious livelihoods and resource pressures. These challenges are likely to grow given that the proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas is projected to increase to 70% by 2050 (IDMC and NRC, 2014; UNISDR, 2014). Over the past forty years the urban population in lower income and fragile countries has increased by 326% and currently nearly one billion people or a third of the developing world’s urban population live in slums (UNISDR, 2014). While urban vulnerability presents an enormous challenge, it is important to acknowledge that urban areas are growing at least in part because of the relative availability of economic, social and other opportunities vis-à-vis rural areas. Nonetheless, it is commonly agreed that there is a pressing need to reshape humanitarian and development interventions undertaken in the urban context so that they harness existing resources and work to support and transform these urban systems to prepare, withstand, and recover from shocks and protracted crises (Knox-Clark and Ramalingam, 2012; Pantuliano, 2012).

4. Conclusion

The challenge of implementing the international legal framework within disaster settings has not adequately considered the particularities of urban crises. International legal frameworks such as IHL and IHRL provide important protections to vulnerable persons in both humanmade and natural disaster settings. While the two bodies of law do not generally 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 do merit greater attention. Against the supportive backdrop of significant international policy developments such as Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Reduction, disaster management and humanitarian actors ought to be sensitive to the circumstances under which these bodies of law apply and their key provisions. A minimum threshold of violence and organisation of the non-state warring party must be reached before an internal armed conflict that triggers application of IHL can be deemed to exist.

Similarly, under human rights law, emergency settings allow for states to limit or derogate from many, but not all, human rights standards. Nonetheless, these bodies of law provide important protections to victims of armed conflict and natural and technological disasters. While often difficult to achieve operationally by armed actors in densely populated urban settings, IHL enshrines the principle of distinction; that those not taking part or no longer taking part in armed conflict ought not to be targeted. The cornerstone standard within human rights law, the right to life, cannot be derogated from in any circumstance and imposes a positive obligation on public authorities, including municipal authorities, to take positive steps to prevent disaster risk that threatens lives. Limitation of movement and evictions in disaster settings are also tightly regulated by human rights standards. 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, it is incumbent on the disaster management and humanitarian community to be sensitive to the relevance of international legal frameworks to their interventions in urban settings.