Suchergebnisse

Apartheid or not apartheid?: that was the question addressed by participants – both jurors and expert witnesses – in the third session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine over the course of its deliberations in Cape Town, South Africa, from the 5th to the 7th of November, 2011. Specifically, that is, the tribunal adherents were concerned to learn "whether Israel's policy and certain practices affecting the Palestinian population in Israeli territory and the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel" could be taken to have (1) "amount(ed) to a 'breach on the international legal prohibition of apartheid,'" and/or (2) did these policies and practices "constitute persecution as a crime against humanity"? This article discusses some of the contributions to that discussion, the competing political and humanitarian stakes, and the vexed comparisons/contrasts between apartheid South Africa and Israel.

The opening of Guantánamo as a US detention centre in the initial phase of the 'war on terror' in January 2002 and its continuing existence almost a decade later have spawned a vast body of literature and cultural production: political commentary, personal accounts of detainees, memoirs, fiction, legal analysis, film, documentary, reconstruction, and so on. In this major review of Guantánamo literature, which foregrounds work by Moazzam Begg, Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, Anna Perera and Clive Stafford Smith, the author analyses the whole field to shed light not simply on the interconnections and disjunctions between the various modes of representation, but also on how the works serve, in different ways, the aim of closing Guantánamo for good, and what they reveal about the nature, imperatives and relationship to international law of the US state.