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The article revisits the relationship between culture and human rights through the analysis of one traditionally condemned cultural practice known in human rights law as female genital mutilations. The analysis draws on anthropological and medical literature and demonstrates importance of interdisciplinary analysis to any enquiry within the area of relationship between culture and human rights. An analogy between the traditional practice of female genital mutilations and the less widely publicised female genital aesthetic surgeries practiced in many Western countries serves as a methodological tool. Laws and attitudes towards both practices are compared demonstrating many similarities and thus the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut line between a cultural and a-cultural practice. In this light human rights' insistence on condemnation of the practices of the Other exclusively appears as hegemonising, racialising and ultimately discriminatory in its effects. Some suggestions as to how a more adequate human rights approach could look like are made as well as the constant necessity for interdisciplinary enquiry in human rights law is emphasised.

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This article reassesses the impact of the concept of vulnerability as it emerges from the MSS v Belgium and Greece case of the European Court of Human Rights, and subsequent developments relating to the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. This examination is performed in light of the human rights principle of equality. The choice of the principle of equality is justified by frequent claims that vulnerability allows more substantive equality outcomes. Examining the concrete functions and consequences of the recourse to vulnerability in relation to refugees and asylum seekers in post-MSS judgments, the article argues that, in the European setting at least, vulnerability produces a set of negative consequences. More specifically, the article demonstrates that the deployment of the language of vulnerability results in the positioning of refugees and asylum seekers as passive recipients of benevolence rather than as active rights claimants, the introduction of additional layers of subjectively constructed stratification, and the erasure of the specificity of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ experience. It is contended that these negative consequences of deploying the concept of vulnerability can be mitigated if recourse to vulnerability is accompanied by a highly skilled technical discussion of the principles of substantive equality as they are known in international human rights law, including such aspects of substantive equality as structural discrimination and intersectionality.

Abstract:The article addresses the use of notions of gender equality and non-discrimination in the discussions concerning the practice of Islamic veiling by the European Court of Human