Law Commons^™

Reparations: A Comparative Perspective, Fernanda G. Nicola

Fernanda G. Nicola

This article focuses on the treatment of reparations in recent jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the so-called “prisoner cases,” Assanidze v. Georgia and Ilascu and Others v. Moldova and Russia, the ECHR moved beyond its previously limited approach to reparations by finding that continued detention of the lawsuit applicants would entail a prolonged violation of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and then asking the States to immediately release the prisoners. The author then turns to ECJ immigration cases Zhu v. Sec’y of …

Property And Transitional Justice, Bernadette Atuahene

All Faculty Scholarship

Transitional justice is the study of those mechanisms employed by communities, states and the international community to deal with a legacy of systematic human rights abuses and authoritarianism in order to promote social reconstruction. There is a well developed transitional justice literature on how states can deal with past violations of civil and political rights, which discusses the value of truth commissions, and international and domestic prosecutions. The transitional justice literature on how to deal with past violations of property rights, however, is significantly less developed. The goal of this essay is to begin an important conversation about how transitional …

A No-Excuse Approach To Transitional Justice: Reparations As Tools Of Extraordinary Justice, David C. Gray

Faculty Scholarship

It is sometimes the case that a debate goes off the rails so early that riders assume the rough country around them is the natural backdrop for their travels. That is certainly true in the debate over reparations in transitions to democracy. Reparations traditionally are understood as material or symbolic awards to victims of an abusive regime granted outside of a legal process. While some reparations claims succeed—such as those made by Americans of Japanese decent interned during World War II and those made by European Jews against Germany after World War II—most do not. The principal culprits in these …

A No-Excuse Approach To Transitional Justice: Reparations As Tools Of Extraordinary Justice, David C. Gray

David C. Gray

It is sometimes the case that a debate goes off the rails so early that riders assume the rough country around them is the natural backdrop for their travels. That is certainly true in the debate over reparations in transitions to democracy. Reparations traditionally are understood as material or symbolic awards to victims of an abusive regime granted outside of a legal process. While some reparations claims succeed—such as those made by Americans of Japanese decent interned during World War II and those made by European Jews against Germany after World War II—most do not. The principal culprits in these …

Reparations: A Comparative Perspective, Fernanda G. Nicola

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article focuses on the treatment of reparations in recent jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the so-called “prisoner cases,” Assanidze v. Georgia and Ilascu and Others v. Moldova and Russia, the ECHR moved beyond its previously limited approach to reparations by finding that continued detention of the lawsuit applicants would entail a prolonged violation of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and then asking the States to immediately release the prisoners. The author then turns to ECJ immigration cases Zhu v. Sec’y of …

Restorative Justice, Slavery And The American Soul, A Policy-Oriented Approach To The Question Of Slavery Reparations By The United States, Michael F. Blevins

ExpressO

This LL.M. Intercultural Human Rights thesis (May, 2005), awarded the best student paper prize for 2005 by the Institute of Policy Sciences at Yale University (in October, 2005), after analysing past and curent issues regarding the culture wars controversy of "reparations", proposes a specific process for establishing Truth and Reconciliation regarding the legacy of slavery in the United States. The proposal recommends commissions in each Federal judicial district under the supervision of a U.S. Slavery Justice and Reconciliation Commission (USSJRC), calling for "America's 21st Century Contract with Africa and African-Americans".

City And Citizen: Community-Making As Legal Theory And Social Struggle, Francisco Valdes

Cleveland State Law Review

The Eighth Annual LatCrit Conference met in Cleveland in May, 2003 to engage a timely and topical theme - City and Citizen: Operations of Power, Strategies of Resistance. Importantly, the theme explicitly drew critical attention not only to operations of power but also to strategies of resistance, and thereby implicitly invited LatCritical analysis of how the two converge in the messy and multifaceted processes of building communities on any human scale. To open and introduce this symposium, this Foreword similarly proceeds in two parts: the first Part, reviewing the four "clusters" of essays comprising the symposium, focuses mostly on "operations …

Competing Frameworks For Assessing Contemporary Holocaust-Era Claims, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

There are many angles from which to perceive the contemporary holocaust-era claims. In 1997, Time magazine quoted Elie Wiesel as saying that, [i]f all the money in all the Swiss banks were turned over, it would not bring back the life of one Jewish child. But the money is a symbol. It is part of the story. If you suppress any part of the story, it comes back later, with force and violence.

Wiesel touches on two perspectives: first, what has been described as litigating the holocaust, with all that that implies about the law's questionable capacity to adjudicate issues …