The Place of Law in Addressing Internal Regime Conflicts

Abstract

Copyright ? 1997 by Law and Contemporary Problems * Law Program/Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University. This article was written while the author was a Research Fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute, DePaul University. 1. Newspaper's Director on Post-Revolution Trials, ROMPRES, Mar. 16, 1990, FBIS Daily Report (FBIS-EEU), Mar. 22, 1990, at 70, cited in IMPUNITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW AND PRACTICE 137 (N. ROHT-Arriaza ed., 1995). 2. Gyorgy Konrad, The Viewpoint of the Victim, 2 CARDOZO STUDIES IN LAW AND LITERATURE 9, 11 (1990). 3. For the purposes of this article, is defined as institutionalized conflict. Conflict includes of an international character (the four Geneva Conventions 1949 and Protocol I of 1977), of a non-international character (common article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions 1949 and Protocol II of 1977), and purely internal conflict, including tyrannical regime victimization (to which the Genocide Convention, the Torture Convention, and Crimes against Humanity apply). The definition corresponds with The Department of Peace and Conflict Research (Uppsala University, Sweden): An armed conflict is defined as a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths. See Peter Wallensteen & Karen Axell, Conflict Resolution and the End of the Cold War, 1989-93, 31 J. PEACE RES. 33349 (1994). Clearly, deaths through internal regime victimization do not occur within the traditional concept of battle or armed conflict. That is, the victims are usually not or only minimally, have no collective cohesive nature other than that ascribed by the state as perpetrator, and can not be described as an adversary except in the terms of the ideological framework of the state. However, such internal is public (through it being state conducted), institutionalized, and armed, and therefore corresponds to the framework definition stated. 4. The data in this article is based on the preliminary results of a study of from 1945 (post-WWII) to 1996, compiled by the author at the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University, under the direction of Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni.