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The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which met from January 28 to March 8, 1991, in the shadow of the gulf war, nevertheless completed what many observers considered its most productive session in recent history. The Commission took action on a record of nineteen country situations—creating new rapporteurs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait—began plans for a 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and set up an intersessional working group to complete a draft declaration on disappearances. The most important long-term accomplishment of the Commission, however, was the creation of a five-member working group to investigate cases of arbitrary detention throughout the world.

Examines activities of the 1990 session, responses to criticisms aired by its parent body, the UN Commission on Human Rights, resolutions adopted on human rights violations, and studies and meetings of the working groups.

The arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in October 1998 was a wake-up call to tyrants everywhere. The two subsequent rulings by the British House of Lords rejecting his claim of immunity forged legal history. This book traces the legal proceedings in the Pinochet case from the investigation in Spain, through the October 1999 ruling by a London Magistrate that Pinochet could be extradited to Spain, to the final decision to release Pinochet for health reasons. By including the full text of the British judicial decisions as well as the arrest warrants, translations of the key Spanish court rulings, excerpts from the legal arguments put forward by all sides, and commentaries by participants in the case and legal scholars, this volume gives the reader an understanding of the factual, political, and legal context of this historic prosecution

Reviews the development of standards by the UN and the Organization of American States to prevent and punish the practice of causing political opponents to "disappear".