Human Rights Law Commons^™

From Oblivion To Memory: A Blueprint For The Amnesty, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

This Review Essay examines Mark Freeman’s thoughtful book, Necessary Evils: Amnesties and the Search for Justice. One of the book’s core arguments is that amnesties from criminal prosecution, however unpalatable to liberal legalist sensibilities, should not be entirely purged from the toolbox of post-conflict transitions. Although advancing this argument, Freeman also struggles with it, and ultimately builds a very restrained and heavily technocratic defense of the amnesty. This Review Essay weighs this argument, among others, on its own terms and also within the context of recent events that post-date the book’s publication. The result is a vibrant exposition of …

The Art Of Persuasion: International/Comparative Human Rights, The Supreme Court Of Canada And The Reconstitution Of The Canadian Security Certificate Regime, Graham Hudson

PhD Dissertations

In this dissertation, the author explores the jurisprudential foundations of the “relevant and persuasive” doctrine, which authorizes Canadian judges to rely on international and comparative human rights when interpreting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Viewed in its best light, this doctrine improves respect for human rights in two distinct ways: securing Canada’s compliance with its international human rights obligations and enhancing the responsiveness of state law to the global and multicultural context of Canadian society. However, actual jurisprudence suggests that the doctrine has helped undermine principles of respect for constitutional supremacy and respect for international law, in part because …

National Discretion And International Deference In The Restriction Of Human Rights: A Comparison Between The Jurisprudence Of The European And The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights, Pablo Contreras

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

International Ngos, The Arab Upheaval, And Human Rights: Examining Ngo Resource Allocation, Gerald M. Steinberg

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

Speechlessness And Trauma: Why The International Criminal Court Needs A Public Interviewing Guide, Philip A. Sandick

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

Politics As Usual At The Un: Implementing Pillar Three Of Rtop, Eric A. Heinze

Human Rights & Human Welfare

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon's most recent report on RtoP seeks to evaluate the various ways that Pillar Three of RtoP can be implemented. As anyone familiar with RtoP is aware, the commitment is understood to have three separate but interrelated pillars. The first pillar says that states have the primary responsibility to protect their own citizens from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Pillar Two says that the international community should assist states in fulfilling this responsibility, while Pillar Three says that if the state fails in its primary responsibility to protect its citizens from these crimes, …

October Roundtable: Un Secretary-General Report On “Responsibility To Protect: Timely And Decisive Response”, Introduction, Claudia Fuentes Julio

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“Responsibility to Protect: Timely and Decisive Response” Ban Ki-moon, July 2012.

Responsibility To Regulate: How The ‘Responsibility To Protect’ Expands State Power, Philip Cunliffe

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Like most UN reports, particularly those concerned with the doctrine of the "responsibility to protect" (RtoP), the latest report of the UN Secretary-General is filled with plenty of pious guff mixed in with the platitudes that engulf UN diplomacy. But buried within the blathering are also some disturbing prescriptions for how the UN envisages rolling out RtoP around the world. I want to draw attention to three specific points in order to consider what these tell us about RtoP as a political model. First, I will look at the treatment of media and speech in the report; second, how the …

“The Rtop And Responsibility While Protecting: The Secretary-General’S Timely And Decisive Report On Timely And Decisive Responses”, James Pattison

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The United Nations Secretary-General's report on pillar three of the responsibility to protect (RtoP), "Responsibility to Protect: Timely and Decisive Response," is the most interesting, timely, and decisive of his four reports thus far on the RtoP. To start with, the subject matter of pillar three – the international community's potentially coercive responses to humanitarian crises, including humanitarian intervention – is the most controversial part of the RtoP doctrine and the area that has attracted the most criticism from skeptics. Previous reports, such as Implementing the Responsibility to Protect(2009), gave pillar three, and humanitarian intervention in particular, fairly short shrift, …

Strategies & Decisiveness: What Is Implied By A “Timely And Decisive Response” For Rtop Situations, H. M. Roff

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Reflecting upon United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's recent report concerning the third pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), on the "timely and decisive response," two items become clear to me. First is that the third pillar is inherently coercive in nature, even though the report and many RtoP pundits stress that it entails more than merely sanctioning the use of force. Second is that this is unsurprising if we recall that the purpose of RtoP is to ensure the protection of particular human rights (rights against: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing) and that having a …

The Bush Administration And The Office Of Legal Counsel (Olc) Torture Memos: A Content Analysis Of The Response Of The Academic Legal Community, Arthur H. Garrison

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The article critically examines the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) torture memos authored by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002, which were intended to justify interrogation techniques such as waterboarding post-9/11. These memos have been widely criticized for undermining human rights and international law, and for compromising the OLC's role in providing impartial legal advice. The memos' perceived advocacy for White House policies rather than objective analysis led to ethical breaches and procedural shortcomings, ultimately resulting in their withdrawal. The article emphasizes the crucial role of ethical standards and independence in legal institutions to prevent such abuses and maintain …

Paradox In Preventing And Promoting Torture: Marginalising 'Harm' For The Sake Of Global Ordering: Reflections On A Decade Of Risk/Security Globalisation, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The ultimate result of globalisation is that as the world setting is compressed there is an intensification of consciousness towards global interests, such as selective ordering, running parallel with strongly influential autonomous interests of the nation state and regional concerns. However, as risk and security disproportionately motivate globalisation, dominant nation state interests (which are at the heart of what operationalises global hegemony) become the prevailing measure of global ordering. Attitudes to ‘harm’ converge around these sectarian interests from the local to the global. As such, the need to torture, it is logically and even ‘legally’ argued, to better ensure domestic …

Informe De La Comisión De Verdad, Honduras: La Voz Más Autorizada Es La De Las Víctimas, Elsie Monge Yoder, Luis Carlos Nieto García, Mirna Antonieta Perla Jiménez, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Nora Cortiñas, Craig M. Scott, François Houtart, Francisco José Aguilar, Helen Umaña, Fausto Milla

Commissioned Reports, Studies and Public Policy Documents

No abstract provided.

The United States' Use Of Drones In The War On Terror: The (Il)Legality Of Targeted Killings Under International Law, Milena Sterio

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States government began to use drones against al-Qaeda targets. According to several media reports, the United States developed two parallel drone programs: one operated by the military, and one operated in secrecy by the CIA. Under the Obama Administration, the latter program developed and- the number of drone attacks in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen has steadily increased. Because the drone program is operated covertly by the CIA, it has been impossible to determine the precise contours of the program, its legal and normative framework, and whether its operators …

The Evolving Asean Human Rights System: The Asean Human Rights Declaration Of 2012, Gerard Clarke

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Apostasy: The Ambiguities In Islamic Law After The Arab Spring, Brian O'Connell

Northwestern Journal of Human Rights

No abstract provided.

Counting Drone Strike Deaths, Human Rights Clinic

Human Rights Institute

Popular debate on U.S. drone strikes often centers on how many individuals are killed, and which of two categories the individuals killed fall into – militant or civilian. U.S. officials emphasize the precision of drone technology and contend that extremely few civilians have been killed. Yet others have questioned these claims and stated that there is evidence to suggest that deaths, and civilian deaths in particular, are much higher than U.S. officials admit.

The uncertainty about civilian deaths is largely due to the U.S. government’s resistance to openly providing information about strikes. In the absence of official data, the most …

Targeting Demand: A New Approach To Curbing Human Trafficking In The United States, Morgan Brown

Law Student Publications

Part I of this paper will provide a general framework for understanding human trafficking in the United States by laying out basic statistics relevant to human trafficking, describing the basic economic model under which the business of human trafficking should be understood, and discussing the major legislative approaches the United States has taken to curtail the increase in human trafficking in the country in the past ten years. Part II will then analyze the shortcomings of this approach and the successes of unique efforts to combat trafficking in Sweden. Part III recommends an approach the United States should take moving …

The Chixoy Dam: A Time For Justice, Lauren Carasik

Media Presence

No abstract provided.

Accountability And The Sri Lankan Civil War, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

Sri Lanka's civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka's armed forces on a small strip of land in the island's northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter's rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian …

Seeking Asylum For Former Child Soldiers And Victims Of Human Trafficking, Tina Javaherian

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Kony 2012, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In spring 1997, few people outside Uganda had heard of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA arose in the late 1980s out of the ashes of Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement, and over the next decade, LRA raids killed thousands of villagers in Northern Uganda. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, and an estimated 10,000 children were forcibly abducted by the LRA and brutally coerced into becoming killers, sex slaves or both. But in the spring of 1997, the LRA had yet to make CNN.

Stoney Road Out Of Eden: The Struggle To Recover Insurance For Armenian Genocide Deaths And Its Implications For The Future Of State Authority, Contract Rights, And Human Rights, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Sarig Armenian, David Mcclure

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Keeping The Promise: Improving Access To Socioeconomic Rights In Africa, Nsongurua J. Udombana

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sana Crítica: The System For Weighing Evidence Utilized By The Inter-American Court Of Human Rights, Álvaro Paúl

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

The Spanish version of the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights often states that this tribunal's as- sessment of evidence is ruled by saia crilica, a notion which has received several translations in the English ver- sion of the Court's case law. This concept has a clear mean- ing in the Hispanic civil law tradition. Sana critica is a system for evaluating the weight of evidence whereby a court or tribunal is not constrained by the evidentiary rules of legal proo but must judge in accordance with the rules of logic and experience, and state the grounds …

Jurisdiction Over American Private Military Contractors: The Illusion Of A Loophole In The Law And The Reality Of No Oversight, Ryan Larose

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Women And Girls Fleeing Conflict: Gender And The Interpretation And Application Of The 1951 Refugee Convention, Valerie Oosterveld

Law Publications

No abstract provided.

Indonesian Discourse On Human Rights And Freedom Of Religion Or Belief: Muslim Perspectives, Syamsul Arifin

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rising Restrictions On Religion: A Global Overview, Brian J. Grim

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Insurance And Cultural Perspectives On Katrina, Jeffrey E. Thomas

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

No abstract provided.