Article 31(1) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provides all children, everywhere, with the right to play. The CRC is the most widely ratified international human rights treaty, yet children’s right to play is considered ‘the forgotten right’. The widespread State inaction to fulfil this right could be partly due to continued uncertainty about how to define play. This Article argues for the application a large body of recent research with the group most qualified to determine whether activities are play or not: young children. This research demonstrates that choice and autonomy are two universal and essential indicia for an activity to be experienced as play. The Article contends that the fulfilment of young children’s right to play would significantly increase if early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions within States utilised these two indicia within daily programmed activities and in ECEC policies.

Suicide is a major global public health problem, but rarely is the subject viewed as a human right. With the sole exception of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), no international authority has taken a strong position on whether a human right to suicide exists. Even that court’s jurisprudence goes no further than intimating that such a right falls within the scope of the human right to private life. This essay tackles the question of whether there is a human right to suicide under existing international law and, if so, what are its sources and limits. It concludes with an analysis of what obligations, both negative and positive, a right to suicide would impose on the state.

Under the League of Arab States’ human rights regime, Arab countries are governed by the Arab Charter of Human Rights 2004. The Charter, however, lacks an enforcement mechanism. The Statute of the Arab Court of Human Rights 2014 aims to fill this enforcement void. This article addresses the criticism that, because it fails to provide for a direct right of individual petition, the Statute is not fit for purpose. It is argued contrarily that, within the context of an Arab human rights system, the Court should be welcomed as an important step in the process of establishing an effective regime.

The past decade has seen increased scholarly attention on the practice and latent potential of the United Nations General Assembly (‘Assembly’) to secure accountability for atrocity crimes. This increased focus has arisen primarily due to growing frustration over permanent member deadlock in the Security Council in the face of documented atrocities. One aspect of this nascent research agenda yet to be analysed is the invocation of the crime of genocide in Assembly resolutions and practice. Studies have shown the Security Council to have applied the genocide label selectively and only where aligned with the permanent members’ interests. Can the same be said about the Assembly? This article tracks the use of the genocide norm in Assembly resolutions, revealing two major functions: prescriptive and quasi-judicial. It notes that Resolution 96(I) (1946) has had a pervasive influence on the development of the crime of genocide. Still, later attempts in the Assembly to develop the genocide definition have enjoyed less success. Although the Assembly has been beset with political selectivity in the use of the genocide label, the rise of commissions of inquiry in UN practice can usefully augment a closer dialogue between their outputs and Assembly resolutions, as recent resolutions concerning alleged crimes against the Rohingya show.