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"Bruno Tesch was tried, found guilty, and executed for his company's production and sale of the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi Germany's extermination camps. Tesch was not alone. More than 300 economic actors faced prosecution for crimes against humanity during the Holocaust. This book examines those trials and subsequent judicial and non-judicial (truth commission) efforts up to the present to hold economic actors accountable for complicity in gross violations of human rights during armed conflict and authoritarian rule. It probes what these accountability efforts are, why they take place, and when, where , and how they unfold. It also explores obstacles blocking accountability efforts, particularly business veto power and weak international law. The book uses an original oneof- its-kind Corporate Accountability and Transitional Justice database to develop its argument. It claims that the accountability processes underway around the world constitute "accountability from below," a kind of Archimedes' Lever in which the right tools in weak hands can lift weighty international human rights"--

Bruno Tesch was tried and executed for his company's Zyklon B gas used in Nazi Germany's extermination camps. This book examines this trial and the more than 300 other economic actors who faced prosecution for the Holocaust's crimes against humanity. It further tracks and analyses similar transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world. This book probes what these accountability efforts are, why they take place, and when, where, and how they unfold. Analysis of the authors' original database leads them to conclude that 'corporate accountability from below' is underway, particularly in Latin America. A kind of Archimedes' lever places the right tools in weak local actors' hands to lift weighty international human rights claims, overcoming the near absence of international pressure and the powerful veto power of business.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- orientations: War and culture in Uganda -- chapter 1: Acholi worlds and the colonial encounter -- chapter 2: Neocolonial legacies and evolving war -- chapter 3: Rebel manifestos in context -- chapter 4: Displacements -- chapter 5: Wartime rumors and moral truths -- chapter 6: Uprooting the pumpkins -- reorientations: Unfinished realities -- Notes -- Acronyms -- References -- Index

Enthält Rezensionen u.a. von: Brinks, Daniel M.: The judical response to police killings in Latin America : inequality and the rule of law. - New York/N.Y. : Cambridge University Press, 2008

The global transitional justice tool kit - involving the use of criminal prosecutions, amnesties, and other mechanisms to address past human rights abuse - has become a primary means for thwarting future human rights violations and consolidating democracy. Nevertheless, evidence on the consequences of transitional justice remains mixed and amenable to contradictory interpretations. Existing studies fail to adequately address issues of selection, the difference between short- and long-term effects of transitional justice mechanisms, and qualitative and quantitative differences in state practices. This article uses a new database of transitional justice mechanisms to address these concerns and test propositions from realist, constructivist, and holistic approaches to this set of policy issues. We find, among other things, that prosecutions increase physical integrity protections, while amnesties increase the protection of civil and political rights. Our analysis suggests that different transnational justice policies each play a potentially positive, but distinct, role in new democracies and in decreasing violations of human rights.

The new millennium began with the triumph of democracy and markets. But for whom is life just, how so, and why? And what is being done to correct persisting injustices? Blending macro-level global and national analysis with in-depth grassroots detail, the contributors highlight roots of injustices, how they are perceived, and efforts to alleviate them. Following up on issues raised in the groundbreaking best-seller Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (California, 2001), these essays elucidate how conceptions of justice are socially constructed and contested and historically contingent, shaped by people's values and institutionally grounded in real-life experiences. The contributors, a stellar coterie of North and Latin American scholars, offer refreshing new insights that deepen our understanding of social justice as ideology and practice