Suchergebnisse

In 1959, the Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Organization of American States (OAS) took place in Santiago, Chile. At that meeting, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was created by a political resolution rather than by a treaty, as in Europe. Closely related to the question of promoting human rights was the issue of promoting democracy. Article 3(d) of the OAS Charter proclaims that, "[T]he solidarity of the American States and the high aims which are sought through it require the political organization of those States on the basis of the effective exercise of representative democracy," yet the Charter made no attempt to define democracy. In order to fill this gap, the 1959 Declaration of Santiago, also adopted at this meeting, attempted to identify "some of the principles and attributes of the democratic system in this hemisphere" and the one that interests us here is: "Perpetuation in power, or the exercise of power without a fixed term and with the manifest intent of perpetuation, is incompatible with the effective exercise of democracy."

Only parties to the ACHR may elect judges to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the Court) and participate in the development of the jurisprudence of the Court, which to date comprises approximately 450 judgments. An unintended consequence of the lack of English-speaking judges on the Court, given the Court's limited resources, is a time lag in the translation of the Court's judgments into English. The Court's press release of October 6, 2021 indicated that, thanks to the assistance of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Court was able to have seven of its judgments translated into English. The judgment in the case of Paola Guzmán Albarracín et al. v. Ecuador, issued on June 24, 2020, the subject matter of this introductory note, is one of the seven cases recently translated.

Georgia v. Russia (II) is only the first judgment since Bankovic in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has examined the question of jurisdiction in an interstate case involving military operations in the context of an international armed conflict (IAC).

On April 22, 2020, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Commission) issued its first decision on one of the Guantanamo detainees, Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Muslim who was held at Guantanamo for almost 12 years until he was deported to Algeria in 2013, in violation, inter alia, of the principle of non-refoulement. The case was brought on Mr. Ameziane's behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), and the decision is very comprehensive and carefully written, as is to be expected of a decision totaling 70 pages. Although the United States became a party to the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992, it never accepted the first Optional Protocol, which gives individuals the right to bring complaints against the United States before the U.N. Human Rights Committee; consequently, the only international body to which an individual can bring a complaint against the United States for a violation of international human rights law is the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a principal organ of the Organization of American States (OAS).

On September 11, 2019, twelve states parties invoked the Inter-American Treaty on Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), because they considered the crisis in Venezuela to have a destabilizing impact on the peace and security of the hemisphere. Venezuela was one of the twelve, voting in favor; this was because, on April 9, 2019, the Organization of American States (OAS) formally recognized Juan Guaido's representative, Gustavo Tarre, in lieu of Nicolas Maduro's Ambassador. At the OAS General Assembly in June, Tarre's appointment was approved in a much contested and heated session. The OAS has thirty-five member states and approximately one-third of its membership supported the invocation of the TIAR. The TIAR is the OAS's mutual defense pact; it was last invoked following the events of September 11, 2001. Article 5 of the NATO Charter, calling for collective action in the case of an armed attack on one member, is derived from Article 3 of the TIAR. Following invocation of the TIAR, the Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs (the OAS equivalent to the UN Security Council, but without veto power) held its 30th meeting in New York City during the UN General Assembly. The result of that meeting was the adoption of the Resolution under consideration here.

President Guido Raimondi, the president of the European Court of Human Rights (European Court), in his address on January 25, 2019, at the opening of the Court's judicial year, singled out the case of Molla Sali v. Greece, concerning the application of Sharia law by the Greek courts, as one of the leading judgments of 2018. The judgment, he noted, gave rise to erroneous interpretations, with some commentators suggesting that the Court wanted to pave the way for the application of Sharia law in Europe, when in his view, the judgment leads to precisely the opposite conclusion.

On July 18, 2018, the Organization of American States (OAS) adopted a resolution on the crisis situation in Nicaragua, almost thirty-nine years after the date of the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution over the dictator Anastasio Somoza. The crisis started three months earlier, on April 18, 2018, unexpectedly, when pro-government groups violently crushed a protest demonstration against reforms to Nicaragua's social security system announced by President Daniel Ortega's wife, Rosario Murillo. The "reforms" increased the contributions to be paid by workers and pensioners and decreased their benefits, in order to shore up the failing social security system, widely seen as a source of discretionary funds abused by previous governments. Corruption was not unique with Ortega. Arnoldo Aleman, for example, a former president of Nicaragua (1997–2002), was convicted in 2003 of money laundering, fraud, embezzlement, and electoral crimes, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The demonstrators against the social security reform resented paying for the state's mismanagement of the system. Subsequently, as the demonstrations increased, the protesters equated Ortega with Somoza and called for his departure as they had done for Somoza's. Since April 18, some 400 Nicaraguan demonstrators have been killed and over 2,000 have been injured.

Following the events of September 11, 2001, the CIA established "the High-Value Detainee Program," also known as the Rendition Detention Interrogation Program. On December 14, 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a heavily redacted 500-page Executive Summary of the Committee's "Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program." The full Committee Study is more than 6,700 pages long and remains classified. The release of the Executive Summary, however, disclosed new facts and provided a significant amount of new information to the European Court of Human Rights—mostly based on CIA classified documents—about the CIA extraordinary rendition and secret detention operations; their foreign partners or cooperators; as well as the plight of certain detainees, including Abu-Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania is the European Court's first judgment to have taken advantage of the information provided in the Senate Committee's Executive Summary of its Study.

The United States stands alone in its refusal to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty ratified by every other member state of the United Nations, which currently has 196 states parties. Article 37(a) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states: "Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age."

On November 25, 2015, the U.K. Supreme Court dismissed a case in which the British Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs and Defense failed to hold a public inquiry into an atrocity committed in 1948 by British troops in the British protectorate of Malaya, today Malaysia. The case is of particular interest because it concerns the obligations of states for atrocities committed in the past, before their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (European Convention) or a comparable treaty, entered into force. Whereas the principle of the nonretroactivity of treaties protects a state from responsibility for acts committed before the human rights treaty entered into force for that state, the issue in this case was whether the state nonetheless had an obligation to investigate the crimes of the past.