Suchergebnisse

Difficult as it is to admit, poverty cannot be defined in law. In the tension between dealing with poverty and focusing on extreme poverty, there is an indeterminacy that makes democracies inattentive to the economic and social dynamics of poverty as inequality. As a result, responses to extreme poverty, especially when they are explicitly targeted or preferential, violate the fundamental equality of rights and dignity that they are supposed, formally, to express. Measures for the underprivileged thus do not offer them a way out from their status, but rather, paradoxically, lead them to qualify their suffering, and to find in favours received the strength to think of themselves as poor without being exposed to the terrors of extreme poverty. In a sense, such people, who depend on minimal welfare granted to them, have no "rights". Should we thus learn to think of poverty as an inevitable and unavoidable phenomenon in a world that claims to work to guarantee human rights, civil and political rights, economic, social, and cultural rights?

This article analyzes the central arguments and findings of "transitional justice," the study of how incoming rulers address the human rights abuses of outgoing regimes. A scholarly consensus suggests the balance of political power matters most for explanations of transitional justice decision making. However, other important influences include international factors and the passage of time combined with democratic governance and/or emotions. Our review finds no consensus on the efficacy of transitional justice measures, in part because few studies currently exist. However, existing studies suggest that trials and truth commissions neither destabilize democracy nor foster animosity, respectively. Finally, this article considers whether restricting the study of transitional justice to third-wave democracies is appropriate in light of recent developments in long-established democracies.

Every year the lives and livelihoods of more than ten million people across the globe are affected by forced displacement due to infrastructural projects such as dams, mines, industries, power plants, roads, etc. thereby denigrating them from their culture, customs and language by mainstream communities. As a way out, the process of displacement and rehabilitation ought to be executed as a last resort and that, too, be achieved in a planned and more humane manner while taking into confidence the affected people.

This volume maps out the response of states to human rights violations. It covers the period 1946-1999 and offers a complete and unmatched record for this period. Its starting point is that such responses are not established and accepted state practice. Traditional, if unwritten, norms of states' behaviour developed through centuries of silence and inaction; the prevalent reaction to human rights violations by another state remains the absence of any response. Furthermore, this book probes into evidence of active and passive complicity by reviewing aid to countries in which violations have been taking place and diplomatic initiatives undertaken to shield violators from public opprobrium. Since international law is generated through state practice, the book highlights the ongoing tussle between the pre-1946 heritage of silence and inaction and the 1946-1999 haphazard pattern of responses to violations