Rape is often considered as a crime against a woman’s virtue. However, cases of male rape and sexual violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community can-not be overlooked. Though such cases are much underreported as compared to male-on-female rape, every victim of sexual violence should have legal recourse, regardless of gender, at the very least from a human rights perspective.
In India, however, rape is classified as a gender-specific offence. To provide deeper insights into the issue, this paper examines two key questions: (1) What factors contribute to the persistence of gender-specific laws in India; and (2) What can be learned from a critical analysis of gender-neutral rape laws in the UK, South Africa, and European Union, with a particular focus on Sweden? Additionally, the paper explores the potential for India to adopt relevant legal principles from these jurisdictions.

The approximation of the domestic legislation with the international legal frame-work is one of the main guarantees for the implementation of international standards. According to the Albanian Constitution, ratified treaties constitute part of the inter-nal juridical system and are implemented directly, except for cases when they are not self-executing, and the issuance of a law is necessary for their implementation. This article aims to analyse the alignment of Albanian criminal legislation with inter-national standards on prevention and fight against sexual violence. It seeks to achieve this through an approximation and comparative analysis of provisions of the Criminal Code with the international conventions ratified by the Republic of Alba-nia. Thanks to these methods, the paper has reached some important conclusions about the limited compliance of Albanian criminal provisions on sexual crimes with international standards and the need to approach them to international standards.

The present paper is a reaction to Maciej Pichlak’s article "Law in the Snares of the Political: Addressing Rafał Mańko’s Critical Philosophy of Adjudication" which was published in this journal (“The Critique of Law” 2020, 12(3), pp. 109–125). The present response addresses selected issues raised in Pichlak’s critique, focusing on three aspects: law and the political, the importance of justice in the critical project, and finally the question of adjudication and ideology. On a more general note, the polemic reveals the importance of philosophical, political and ideological commitments and presuppositions of legal theorists and poses the question of the limits of the autonomy of jurisprudential debates vis-à-vis such commitments.

Women’s rights are an inseparable part of the human rights, and human rights are an integrated part of women’s rights. The Swedish Government has adopted a concept of feminist foreign policy, aiming at strengthening these rights on a global level. Women’s rights are continued to be violated as much as ever, hindering democracy, peace, rule of law, sustainable development and economic growth – the overarching aims of international policy. Women’s rights to education, financial resources and access to the labour market are crucial in defending human rights and having a policy for 100 per cent of the world’s population. A priority task of the feminist foreign policy is supporting women’s inclusion in all decision-making structures, both on national and multilateral level. This in order to achieve wider foreign, development and security policy objectives through a new approach, different way of thinking and different solutions.

The subject matter of the second part of the article (the first part was published in issue 1/2019 of the “Critique of Law”) is a continuation of the analysis of the impact of cultural patterns such as integrity, social dialogue, elimination of violence on the formation of the relationships between authorities and members of the state community.

The subject matter of this paper is the analysis of the phenomenon of subordination
as a manifestation of the relationships between political authority and society and of the phenomenon of equality as an inherent right of individuals. The author has made an attempt to examine the mutual relationships between the two phenomena, especially from the perspective of the impact on the establishment of relationships between political authority and society.

The paper aims at reconstruction and critical discussion with the main tenets of political theory of adjudication, as presented by Rafał Mańko in his book, W stronę krytycznej filozofii orzekania. Polityczność, etyka, legitymizacja [Towards a Critical Philosophy of Adjudication. The Political, Ethics, Legitimacy]. In the paper, I demonstrate: that the interpretation of the concept crucial for the entire theory – which is the concept of political – has been chosen by Mańko in an ideological and a priori manner; that the choice above effectively prevents the realisation of the main objective of the book, which is to legitimise adjudication; that the adoption of the ethics of adjudication advocated in the book is – in the light of the basic assumptions of that very publication – both improbable and hardly acceptable. Finally, I claim that Mańko’s theory, due to its totality, can distinguish neither between legitimate law and violence, nor between justified and unjustified adjudication. As a result, it loses its critical force. All these problems are not peculiar to Mańko’s theory, but they are general weaknesses of various versions of critical jurisprudence.