Search results

Human Rights Violations focuses on denials of human rights, with an emphasis on major assaults on rights. Particular attention is paid to events involving government and other large-scale abuses of rights.

International organizations are becoming increasingly powerful. Today, they affect the lives of individuals across the globe through their decisions and conduct. Consequently, international organizations are more capable of violating the human rights of individuals. But how can they be held to account for such violations? This book studies the procedural mechanisms that may hold international organizations to account for their human rights violations. It establishes a general framework for identifying, analyzing, and assessing the accountability mechanisms of international organizations. This general framework is then applied to three distinct cases: the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy missions, refugee camp administration by the UNHCR, and detention by the International Criminal Court. The overall conclusion is that none of the existing accountability mechanisms across the three cases fulfill the normative requirements set out in the general framework. However, there are significant variations between cases, and between different types of accountability mechanisms.

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? (Original abstract)

This article analyses 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. Adapted from the source document.