Accountability For Human Rights Research Articles

After Atrocity: Optimizing UN Action Toward Accountability for Human Rights Abuses

With the UN's attention to individual accountability for human rights abuses now well into its third decade, this paper appraises the added value of a UN role and the best methods for accomplishing it. The paper argues that human rights fact-finding is an especially important task for the UN and considers, based on past practice, the factors that contribute to successful fact-finding as well as the pitfalls for the UN to avoid in the future. Some of the insights are based on the author's membership in the Secretary-General Group of Experts for Cambodia and the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka. This paper was originally delivered as the John P. Humphrey Lecture in Human Rights at McGill University in September 2014.

The Dance of Truth and Justice in Postconflict Peacebuilding in Sierra Leone

Since the 1980s, many states transitioning from complex political emergencies or conflicts have sought to pursue accountability for human rights abuses as part of their democratisation and/or peace-building process. The challenge though has been how best to manage the consequence of a violent past. Transitional justice has emerged as a tool by which transitional democracies answer to the demands for accountability for past abuses. The policy responses range from the adoption of purely restorative or retributive mechanisms to a combination of both. After 11 years of civil war in Sierra Leone, their government collaborated with the UN to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) to address the baggage of abuses of the conflict. These two mechanisms had the same goal: to facilitate peace and stability in Sierra Leone, but through different approaches. The TRC was a restorative mechanism in that it was to reveal the truth about the conflict for the purposes of forging healing and national reconciliation with no punitive component. The SCSL was to conduct trials and punish those found guilty for the abuses that took place. The following

Putting the Puzzle Pieces Together: Human Rights Advocacy and the History of International Human Rights Standards Website

Human Rights Advocacy and the History of International Human Rights Standards ( http://humanrightshistory.umich.edu ) explores the development and evolution of international human rights policy. This website is a useful teaching tool for instructors and a resource for practitioners interested in the standard setting work of the human rights movement and the intellectual history of human rights policy. It is organized around five thematic areas where human rights organizations have significantly contributed to policy: identifying human rights problems, promoting policy mechanisms within the UN system, establishing accountability for human rights abuse, developing research methodologies, and setting the agenda for future standard setting and advocacy work.

Embodiment of Our National Commitment to Protect Human Rights or Damp Squib? An Assessment of Corporate Accountability Under the UK Government's National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights

This article examines the United Kingdom Government’s National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights and assesses it against the yardstick of corporate accountability. Despite containing statements such as that companies should treat gross human rights violations as a ‘legal compliance issue’, the UK NAP provides few sanctions for non-compliance with human rights principles, focussing instead on soft law standards and voluntary initiatives. Having examined the content of the UK NAP, the article puts forward suggestions for how it might be improved to increase corporate accountability for human rights impacts, which it comes to be re-visited in 2015.

Somalia and Human Rights Violations

This paper analyses different existing options to promote human rights accountability in Somalia. It does that with the purpose of making specific recommendations and suggestions on mechanisms that could be appropriate to the Somali situation.The paper is divided in three parts. The first section analyses the legal framework applicable to Somalia and the crimes allegedly committed in the course of the conflict and which may give rise to individual criminal responsibility. The second part looks at available options to promote accountability. These options are both prosecutorial and non prosecutorial. They can also be instituted within both the international or national systems. The third part gives specific recommendations to promote accountability for human rights in Somalia in the framework of national reconciliation and peacebuilding.

Refining the Rules of the Game: The Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights

The growth of transnational corporations over the past few decades has been paralleled by concerns to find ways of regulating the deleterious impacts on human rights by the ever-increasing number of companies whose corporate tentacles stretch across national boundaries and beyond the reach of traditional corporate control mechanisms. The steady evolution of a global social expectation that companies should respect international human rights standards, combined with the occasional foray by states in adopting an expansive approach to protecting rights, is changing the nature and possibility of developing a firmer basis for corporate accountability for human rights. What we are witnessing is a process of re-regulation whereby state and non-state actors are utilizing a combination of public and private regulation to improve the framework for corporate rights compliance. The regulation of corporate activity with respect to human rights requires a multiplicity of stakeholders and a very nuanced mix of public and private regulation that may be difficult to replicate easily across different sectors, states and cultural boundaries.

Living in a Material World - From Naming and Shaming to Knowing and Showing: Will New Disclosure Regimes Finally Drive Corporate Accountability for Human Rights?

Faced with less than optimal voluntary initiatives and in the absence of binding legislation, what mechanisms can interested stakeholders use as leverage to force corporations to take a more proactive role in safeguarding human rights, particularly due diligence issues in the supply chain? Can new disclosure and procurement requirements provide enough incentives to have a measurable impact on the behavior of transnational corporations based in the United States? This Article argues that federal and state governments should take advantage of the fact firms are adapting to more rigorous transparency and due diligence demands from socially responsible investors, international stock exchange listing requirements, and enterprise risk management processes. Corporations respond to incentives and penalties. Governments can and should require stronger procurement contractual terms for contractors and subcontractors. The contract could require: (1) executive level, Sarbanes-Oxley like attestations regarding human rights policies due diligence on impacts within the supply chain; (2) an audit by certified third parties and (3) suspension or debarment from contracts as well as clawbacks of executive bonuses and a portion of board compensation as penalties for false or misleading attestations. Companies that do not want to participate in government contracting programs will not have to complete the attestation or due diligence process but the benefits of participating will outweigh the costs. The large number of participating firms will likely lead to the practice becoming an industry standard across sectors, thereby forestalling additional legislation, shareholder resolutions and name and shame campaigns thus eventually leading to benefits for all stakeholders including those most directly affected.

The ‘Kafkaesque Accountability’ of International Governance in Kosovo

This article explores the institutionalized and legalized forms of ‘unaccountability’ evident during the United Nation's protracted and extensive administration of Kosovo, which were implemented to protect the UN from liability in case the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo was accused of human rights violations in Kosovo. Two mechanisms were put in place to review the accountability of international governance in Kosovo: the Ombudsperson Institution and later the Human Rights Advisory Panel. This article highlights how the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo systematically restricted and obstructed the operation of these mechanisms, by constraining the space for the independent and meaningful investigation of cases, by invoking immunity safeguards, and by failing to cooperate and remedy human rights abuses caused by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. This article argues that avoiding accountability for human rights abuses can seriously undermine the legitimacy of UN peacekeeping missions, establishing negative practices and losing the trust of the local population, which ultimately encourages undemocratic practices among weak and fragile local institutions. At the global level, any attempt to take on greater international responsibility without accountability harms the prospects for establishing global institutions structured around the principles of democratic governance.

Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope (review)

Reviewed by: Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope Carrie Booth Walling (bio) Sonia Cardenas , Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) 248 pp., ISBN 978-0-8122-4197-6. The human rights record of Latin America is decidedly mixed. Plagued by high levels of poverty and inequality, legal impunity, weak democratic institutions, and strong militaries, Latin America has experienced severe levels of human rights abuse. Human rights violations in the region have included torture, extrajudicial killing, forced disappearance, and political imprisonment. Individually and in tandem, authoritarian regimes in Latin America have used repression and state-sponsored terrorism in the name of political stability and national security. Human rights abuse in Latin America, until recently, had been considered among the worst in the developing world.1 The regional experience of human rights has been one of significant political terror; but Latin America is also home to powerful human rights organizations and precedent-setting efforts to secure justice and accountability for government human rights abuse. Indeed, Latin America has displayed extraordinary leadership in the development and proliferation of international human rights norms and institutions. Latin American countries played an important role in securing human rights language in the United Nations Charter, developed and ratified the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man in early 1948 (preceding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and were at the forefront of efforts to ensure state accountability for human rights violations through the development of new human rights standards (protection from forced disappearance, the right to an identity) and the use of transitional justice mechanisms. There is a regional trend toward embracing human rights norms which has been aptly described as a "human rights norms cascade" in Latin America.2 Sonia Cardenas effectively captures this nuanced and complicated history of human rights in a simple but substantively rich introductory text book, Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope. Cardenas' text is an attempt to complicate simple understandings of human rights in Latin America by introducing students to the terror of human rights abuse, the hope of human rights reform, and the challenge of accountability through an examination of regional trends and cross-national dynamics. Cardenas has written her text with two audiences in mind: undergraduate students of human rights and undergraduate students of Latin America. She makes [End Page 1032] human rights concepts accessible for students by examining them within the historical and geographic experience of Latin American countries. This approach reflects a principal goal of the book: to introduce students to the systematic tools and methods for studying human rights while simultaneously introducing them to the lived experience of victims and survivors of human rights abuse. Cardenas invites her readers in "stepping back and getting up close— stepping back to identify key facts and trends, getting up close to hear personal experiences of abuse.3" As a result, the book combines quantitative analysis of human rights trends with qualitative research on the origins of abuse and the dynamics of political reform with personal narratives of survival and official documentation of repression and redress. Cardenas' text is a welcome effort at combining different literatures, analytical approaches and narrative styles, providing students with a rich and multilayered experience of human rights in both principle and practice. Cardenas achieves this by including "Up-Close" text boxes of first-hand accounts and primary documents that function as mini-case studies throughout her scholarly analysis.4 This dual approach cleverly introduces students to the broad content of human rights, perpetrators of abuse, and tools of human rights change. While the book necessarily focuses its analysis narrowly on the violation of physical integrity rights that have plagued Latin America (freedom from torture, extrajudicial execution, forced disappearance, and political imprisonment), it succeeds in introducing students to human rights issues that overlap, but push beyond these particular political and civil rights, hinting at the broad, interconnected, and interdependent character of all human rights. Using "up close" text boxes, Cardenas exposes her readers to diverse human rights issues including femicide, disability rights, sexual orientation rights, labor rights, indigenous rights, and the rights...

Accounting and reconciling in the balance sheet of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

A body of critical academic literature has characterized the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a nation-building enterprise with reconciliation as its core. Although this literature is especially influential within South African scholarship, the association of the TRC with reconciliation has become a far wider orthodoxy. An engagement with the full range of the TRC's hearings, its institutional practice and its seven-volume report demonstrates a more contested perspective, involving a wider range of actors, and contending directions, most notably a drive to establish accountability for human rights’ abuse.

Never Again? The Legacy of the Argentine and Chilean Dictatorships for the Global Human Rights Regime

Widespread forced disappearances, summary executions, and torture practiced by the military regimes in Argentina and Chile came to define human rights abuse during the 1970s and 1980s. Opposition to these practices and their parent regimes helped to shape the contemporary human rights movement and, by extension, human rights norms and institutions. Thomas C. Wright's State Terrorism in Latin America contends that the movement's struggle with the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships resulted in an era of greater deterrence and enforcement power for human rights institutions. Sonia Cardenas' Conflict and Compliance, however, maintains that despite the advance in norms and the creation of supranational structures to promote accountability for human rights abuse, the mechanisms for changing state practice have remained remarkably constant throughout the past three decades. Both in Latin America and elsewhere, domestic forces and cost-benefit analysis—at times aided by international pressure—continue to be the principal determinants of state behavior in the field of human rights.

Towards a Just Institutional Order: A Commentary on the First Session of the UN Task Force on the Right to Development

A novel mechanism that brings together human rights experts with the representatives of the international development, finance and trade institutions was recently established within the United Nations (UN) under the auspices of the Working Group on the Right to Development. At its first session, this High-Level Task Force adopted a range of recommendations on challenges to the Millennium Development Goals and on the importance of human rights impact assessments. In so doing, it took some initial steps towards integrating the international law of human rights, including the framework provided by the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development, into the priority areas of these other international actors. The aim of this commentary is to provide insight into the conclusions adopted by the Task Force and to highlight the contribution of the human right to development to the topics under its consideration. It also seeks to reflect on the significance of human rights law to issues that were tabled, such as, accountability for human rights at the international level, international cooperation, economic growth, and trade-offs in the allocation of resources. In concluding that the Task Force must face head on the impediments to the realisation of human rights posed by the institutional arrangements for the governance of the international economic order, the article ends by offering suggestions for its future work.

The International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association social responsibility working group and human rights

This chapter describes how the oil and gas industry is responding to one specific challenge to sustainable development – the promotion of human rights. The human rights activities and practices of the industry fall into three categories: direct responsibility, shared responsibility and indirect influence. Specific responses to human rights issues are illustrated through case studies from some of the member companies of the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association. The chapter demonstrates that the oil and gas industry has achieved substantial progress in establishing and implementing human rights policies and practices. However, the debate between industry, representatives of civil society and governments over the roles, responsibilities and accountability for human rights of transnational corporations in general, and of the oil and gas industry in particular, continues. While under international law the responsibility to protect human rights rests primarily with governments, companies and others, including non‐governmental organisations and multilateral organisations, can support human rights. The industry recognises the need to develop measures to help address human rights challenges and that this effort will require co‐operation and shared responsibility among all relevant actors.

Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

The article examines the gender dynamics of the political contradictions in the Maoist revolution in Nepal. It probes the tension between a near critical mass of women in the Maoist movement and a male leadership ambivalent about redefining gender relations. Exploring the emancipatory potential of the participation of women in an authoritarian, militarized movement, this article comments on the transformation of cultural identities and the radicalization of the social agenda in Nepal. What does this mean for the development of freedom? How does it impact gender relations? What questions does it raise about accountability for human rights abuses?

Nonprosecutorial Sanctions for Grave Violations of International Humanitarian Law: Wartime Conduct of Bosnian Police Officials

Addressing accountability for human rights atrocities takes on particular significance in postconflict situations. To the extent that mechanisms for accountability facilitate the pursuit of justice against individual perpetrators, the reform of institutions staffed by perpetrators, and the initiation of reconciliation processes, identifying those who committed atrocities is a fundamental aspect of a peacekeeping mission.The international community has established tribunals to try those who committed atrocities and will not be tried in domestic courts. Such tribunals, however, limit the scope of prosecutions to high-ranking officials, and do not command sufficient resources to pursue the multitude of individuals who participated in atrocities. Domestic courts have jurisdiction to try individuals who participated in atrocities, but judicial systems in postconflict. countries find themselves in disarray and generally unable to cope with sensitive cases, because of both the subject matter and the potential number of cases.

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access ACCOUNTABILITY FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ATROCITIES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: BEYOND THE NUREMBERG LEGACY, by Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997. 368pp +xxxv. ISBN 0-19-826550-6. Robert Cryer Robert Cryer The University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Conflict and Security Law, Volume 3, Issue 2, December 1998, Pages 288–291, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/3.2.288 Published: 01 December 1998

Military Power, Impunity and State-Society Change in Latin America

AbstractThe transition from military to civilian rule in Latin America has thrown a searchlight upon the legacy of military repression from the era of the national security states, and the problem of still-powerful and unrepentant armed forces. These intertwined problems have profound implications for the possibility of fundamental change in a region long characterized by extreme social inequality and political instability. As Rouquié notes, civilianization of the military state does not necessarily mean the democratization or demilitarization of power. How to deal with the perpetrators of state terror is a burning and controversial issue throughout the region. During the process of transition, the major demand of the military in virtually all states was for guarantees against accountability for human rights crimes—widely calledimpunityin the region—a demand that implicitly places the military above the law. This issue strikes at the very heart of the transformation of national security states and the democratization of power. Additionally, despite the transition from military rule, structures of the national security apparatus remain embedded within the civilian regimes. An examination of the question of impunity and those embedded structures exposes the tensions between democratization and persisting military prerogatives and power.