Commission Of Inquiry Research Articles

Nonjudicial Punishments of Political Offenses in North Korea—With a Focus on Kwanriso†

Torture, extrajudicial killings and disappearances, suppression of the freedom of expression and association, and other breaches of fundamental human rights are widespread and systematic in North Korea. The United Nations Human Rights Council established the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 2013, and the Commission’s report confirmed that widespread and grave violations of human rights are being committed in the country. As an effort to analyze the origins of human rights violations in North Korea, this Article examines the country’s penal system by cross-referencing North Korean statutes and defectors’ testimonies. By comparing what the law stipulates with how the procedure is actually practiced, this Article attempts to illustrate how the North Korean penal law system is especially reliant on nonjudicial punishment of political offenses through kwanriso camps, which admit a great number of political offenders and their families without going through the regular judicial process.

The politics of reconciliation in New Zealand

Reconciliation in New Zealand involves recognition, reparations and an apology for past injustices relating to breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. In 1840, Māori and the British Crown signed a treaty that promised a beneficial relationship to both signatories. Almost immediately after the Treaty was signed and continuing through to today, promises inherent in the principles of the Treaty have been breached. However, in 1975, a government-appointed permanent commission of inquiry was established to investigate actions or omissions of the Crown that breach the promises made in the Treaty of Waitangi. The Waitangi Tribunal and the Ministry of Justice provide the institutional mechanisms used in New Zealand to foster reconciliation. This article will discuss how the state has moved iwi from being in Treaty ‘grievance mode’ to one of tino rangatiratanga/Māori self-determination and demonstrates how reconciliation has integrated Treaty settlement iwi into the mainstream New Zealand economy.

North Korea’s participation in the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights

ABSTRACTNorth Korea’s participation in the UNHRC’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR)—a peer review in which states make recommendations to one another for improving human rights implementation—is a notable exception to its rejection of other human rights mechanisms. What explains North Korea’s willing participation in the UPR? This essay analyses North Korea’s participation in the first (2008–11) and second (2012–15) UPR cycles through its written submissions, responses to recommendations, and recommendations to other states. It finds that North Korea has consistently accepted weak recommendations, rejected more specific policy changes, and implemented accepted recommendations on a limited basis, allowing it to claim compliance with human rights at minimal cost. The UPR’s reliance on states’ self-reports and its inability to adjudicate competing factual claims allow North Korea to reject claims of egregious abuses, openly advocate for a radically state-centric vision of human rights, and challenge the legitimacy of human rights mechanisms like the Commission of Inquiry and Special Rapporteur while building support from other states with similar views. Notably, the Commission of Inquiry appears to have motivated North Korea to increase its cooperation with the UPR, demonstrating that the UPR complements but cannot replace other UN human rights mechanisms.

International Commissions of Inquiry and the North Sea Incident: A Model for a MH17 Tribunal?

International Commissions of Inquiry and the North Sea Incident: A Model for a MH17 Tribunal?

Sic utere tuo ut alienam non laedas . From Wanton Destruction of Timber Forests to Environmentalism: The Rise of Colonial Environmental and 'Sustainability' Practices in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1938-1961

Abstract This article examines the roots of colonial Zimbabwe's culture of environmentalism - described, here, as increasing social awareness of the rapid deterioration of the environment and the pressing need to take decisive action to counteract it. It argues that only a one-sided story - namely colonial conservationist discourses and practices especially as they pertained to African reserves in colonial Zimbabwe and other parts of Southern and Eastern Africa - has been the object of myriad historical analyses. Yet, there is a corresponding story that seems to have fallen between the seams of history as it is rarely articulated in Zimbabwean historiography in a systematic and comprehensive way, i.e. the origins of a colonial environmentalism - one focused more on reinforcing white settlers' sustainable uses of natural resources and less on Africans. It chronicles how the once verdant landscapes of colonial Zimbabwe were transformed into near waste in the first four decades of colonial occupation from 1890; highlights how the diverse voices of environmental concern that appeared at the time compelled the colonial Zimbabwean state finally to institute the Commission of Inquiry into the Preservation of the Natural Resources of the Colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1938; and examines how this Commission's recommendations became the basis for the establishment of a number of institutional regulatory systems to initiate an efficiency-oriented approach to the management of the colony's natural resources. It highlights how the notion of 'sustainability' was infused into the Commission's Report and became such a powerful trope that it laid the basis for subsequent institutional and legal environmental resource management in colonial Zimbabwe, surviving intact into the first two decades of postcolonial rule. The article further explores how the farmer-miner conflict unfolded beyond the McIlwaine Commission and how the Natural Resources Board finally led to a successful resolution of the conflict in 1961. The McIlwaine Commission Report attests to rising social and environmental concern at the ongoing ecological decline of the colony's resources, resulting in the realisation of a resolute response in order to guarantee the sustainability and welfare of white settler society.

Policing a riot-torn city: Kolkata, 16–18 August 1946

ABSTRACTCalcutta is now known as Kolkata, but for the purposes of this article, Calcutta is retained throughout. Historical accounts of the Great Calcutta Riots (1946) emphasize their role in making Indian Partition an inevitable outcome of nationalist-religious politics in colonial India. It is seen as a critical event in the religious wars, conventionally known as the Partition riots or communal riots, in the Indian sub-continent in 1945–47. This article, while basing itself on previous historical understanding, views the Great Calcutta Killings as a remarkable event in the mutually constitutive relations between the police and the crowd. The police apparatus built by the colonial state was based fundamentally on the obedience of individuals and individual subjection to the institution of law and order when the feudal form of allegiance was no longer required. Their conduct was now required to demonstrate total and exhaustive obedience to whatever the imperatives of the colonial state were in relation to protection of the economy, commerce, trade, education, health, territory and security of life. The success of the apparatus depended on a smooth interrelation of these imperatives and thus between different functions of the police. The Calcutta Riots showed that there may be moments when the smooth relations break down, when all bounds of obedience are broken, and populations imagine their conduct not in juridical terms, but in other possible frames. In other words, politics will no longer be conducted in a civilian frame, but in the frame of war—one more reason to think of the riots as a moment in a war. In those moments, the link between the reason of state and that of the government may collapse. In this context, the Calcutta Riots further tell us (a) how borders within a city emerge in situations of violence and how an event like the Calcutta Riots dispels the myth that the city is an organic unity unaffected by borders and boundary-making exercises; and (b) how the failure of the Calcutta Riot Enquiry Commission to conclude its findings demonstrated the closure of legal logic.

Bridging the Gap: Hong Kong Senior Civil Servants and the 1966 Riots

ABSTRACTThe 1966 Hong Kong riots were the trigger for wide-ranging changes in relationships between the government and the public which shaped the political future of the colony. However, it is not immediately clear why a relatively small-scale disturbance which was quickly contained should have had such a considerable impact. The explanation, it is argued, lies in a confluence of factors. The riots were the first to be specifically concerned with events in Hong Kong rather than in China and therefore required attention to local causes; urban councillors were demanding more electoral representation and devolution of government functions to the Council; the Commission of Inquiry into the riots held public meetings raising political awareness; and reforming senior civil servants saw the riots as an opportunity for change. Because there was antipathy within government towards elections and to any devolution of functions, the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry were given priority, resulting in administrative rather than public policy or electoral solutions, a decision which retarded the development of democracy.

Sports Direct to appoint full-time nurse after inquiry into employment practices

Retailer Sports Direct is to appoint a full-time nurse at its vast warehouse in response to concerns about health and safety. The firm was the subject of a House of Commons business, innovation and skills select committee inquiry into its employment practices.

Marikana Commission of Inquiry: From Narratives Towards History

The Marikana Commission of Inquiry was established following the killing of 34 Lonmin strikers by South African police on 16 August 2012. This article provides a substantive review of the Commission’s Report, released in June 2015. It highlights the Commission’s assessment that a decision made by top generals the evening before the massacre was ‘the decisive cause’ of the deaths. This and other findings against the police are contrasted with failure to make any recommendations for prosecution. Evidence presented to the Commission is used to draw different conclusions from those in the report. In particular, the article argues that the initial killings, broadcast live on television, were a consequence of planning by the operational commander, rather than a response to workers’ aggression. Culpability for the massacre is also considered. While the narrative presented by the police was discredited, that articulated by workers was largely vindicated. However, this did not restrain the Commission from making comments hostile to the workers, and this antipathy is viewed as a factor leading to errors of judgement. The article was written in honour of Colin Murray. Resonating with his work, it ends by urging historians to take workers’ voices seriously, something that Lonmin, the police, media reporters, and the Commission conspicuously failed to do.

Commissions of inquiry and policy change: Comparative analysis and future research frontiers

AbstractCanadian governments have spawned hundreds of federal and provincial commissions of inquiry (COIs). Many scholars have completed in‐depth analysis of particular COIs but less attention has been paid to policy impact and comparisons across COIs. This study addresses the following questions. What role do COIs play in policy change? Would policy change likely have occurred without the COI? Why do some COIs result in policy change and others do not? This analysis reports on findings from in‐depth case studies of ten COIs. It uses a theoretical framework focusing on ideas, institutions, actors and relations to examine whether and how COIs lead to policy and administrative change.

No Infringement of Personality Rights during Hearing before the Hypo Committee of Inquiry

For the first time, the Austrian Constitutional Court had to pronounce upon the merits of a complaint of a person claiming that her personality rights have been infringed during her hearing as a witness before a committee of inquiry of the National Council. The complainant claimed infringements of her rights to honour and to the protection of her economic reputation due to statements of committee members and the failure of the committee’s officials to intervene. The Court dismissed the complaint as unjustified on the merits, ruling that – in the light of the right to freedom of expression provided for in Article 10 ECHR – there has been no infringement of the complainant’s personality rights.

The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. By Adam Sitze. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 392 pp. $70 hardcover.

The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. By Adam Sitze. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 392 pp. $70 hardcover.SouthAfrica's TruthandReconciliationCommissionhas beena generative exercise at multiple levels particularly in the ways it has given rise to what Adam Sitze notes with some consternation, a industry. By that he refers not only to the political settlement or institutional lives it has cultivated, but we might also add the voluminous output it has encouraged in scholarly reflection. Sitze is of course adding here to this literature, but has managed to do so by offering a distinctive work of meticulously argued criticism that is both deeply and sharply challenging as well as nuanced and fundamentally thoughtful.Self-consciously, the Impossible Machine sets aside much of the existing terms of evaluating the legacy of the TRC from within Transitional Justice. Sitze seeks neither to laud the miracle that has been celebrated and transformed into a modular form of post-ColdWar conflict resolution nor trounce its ineffectiveness in dealing with larger social and economic structural challenges as some Leftcritiques have tended to do (see Meister, 2011). Instead, drawing on what he refers repeatedly to as a genealogical method-distinctive from history (history consoles as he tells us, while disturbs), Sitze locates the TRC in a longer political and conceptual history of jurisprudence, and one that is decidedly less marvelous than the story of law as the highest form of civilization. For Sitze, the central feature that distinguished the TRC from Nuremburg, its formulation of amnesty in exchange for truth, or more accurately, truth defined as political motive, looks much less savory when considered from within the genealogy of a prior jurisprudence on indemnity. A substantive part the book is devoted to a rich and expansive parsing out of indemnity through a consideration of its colonial career in the last nineteenth century. While indemnity was invoked in England to resolve the CivilWar in the late 1600s, Sitze reminds us that by the late nineteenth century it was really only deployed in its Diceyan formulation in the colonies and hardly ever in Europe by then. The implication is evident that it became a way to absolve the violence of imperial at key moments in the wake of anticolonial revolts in the colonies. In a deeply nuanced reading of Diceyan formulations of indemnity, Sitze shows the centrality of indemnity to calibrating or enabling the supremacy of sovereign power over legal prescript- Indemnity was not then simply one among many topics within Diceyan jurisprudence. It was the very keystone of that jurisprudence. Exactly like a keystone held together an arch, the indemnity convention holds together the two pillars of sovereign power, the sovereignty of law (there is no one higher than the law) and the law of sovereignty (salus publica suprema lex esto). In its absence, these two arches would collapse (p. 5). There is, in Sitze's account, a colonial history to the rule of law, or reason of state, ultimately sanctioning violence that trumps rights of citizens and subjects, that is, good over right in a deontological formulation that Transitional Justice seems unwilling to note. The primary procedural mechanism through which this happened in the colonies, he argues, has been through the process of the commission of enquiry, which has legalized illegality. Commissions of inquiry-among those he discusses are the nineteenth century cases of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Cape Colony, and Jamaica-have been the administrative political processes through which indemnity has been made to function politically to legitimate the repression of anticolonial revolts. He names these as tumult commissions. By tracing the relationshipbetween indemnity in its colonial career and amnesty as it is celebrated by Transitional Justice after the TRC, Sitze takes the sheen offthe shine, so to speak. …

Bringing Economics Back into Assimilation: The Select Committee of Inquiry into the Grievances of The Yirrkala Aborigines 1963

This article takes as its starting point Marcia Langton's argument for a clearer understanding of the role of economic history in Australian Indigenous affairs in order to examine the testimony presented to the Select Committee established to respond to the Bark Petitions in 1963. The testimony is discussed in four categories, dealing with questions of (a) land and land use; (b) employment, education and training; (c) infrastructure, water, health and housing, and (d) the distinct perspective of the Indigenous witnesses and those sympathetic to their viewpoint. I highlight the various ways in which the economic dimensions of the Yirrkala community's relationship to land were systematically ignored and suppressed, despite the claim among proponents of assimilation to be seeking the incorporation of Australian Aborigines into mainstream economic activity. I conclude by identifying the light thrown by the Select Committee's testimony on the ways in which Aboriginal Australians have been ignored as economic actors, thus systematically undermining the aims of assimilation policy rather than advancing them.“We would not mind the natives standing on the banks and watching the shovels work if they want to do so.”

The Role of UN Commissions of Inquiry in Developing Global Human Rights

In international human rights issue areas, investigation has been increasing exponentially in last 20 years, not just in the international realm but also in domestic politics, and not just by official governments but also by many nongovernmental civil society actors. The most representative trend is the increase of UN commissions of inquiry within the UN Human Rights Council. This paper is devoted to explaining the meaning and context of the recent rise and diffusion of UN commissions of inquiry, and I attempt to answer the following two questions. First, why is the number of UN commissions of inquiry increasing? In other words, what is the context under which UN commissions of inquiry increase and diffuse? Second, how can we evaluate the activities of these UN commissions? What are their achievements and what problems and challenges remain? I argue that the rise of UN commissions of inquiry can be understood within the context of the diffusion and development of global investigative norms in the field of human rights. Despite some diversity and limitations of the activities of these commissions, these activities represent the rise of global investigative norms and this new trend contributes to the development of human rights.

Levinasian thoughts on witnessing: Forgiveness, guilt, and reconciliation

The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that operated in South Africa in the mid-1990s represented an exceptional political effort to overcome the country’s intricate blood-stained history using a mechanism based on foundations of forgiveness in a Christian sense, public trial in a symbolic sense, and commissions of inquiry in a political and legal sense. These commissions constituted one of the most daring and impressive attempts in the history of world politics to transform the national social agenda and to facilitate a shared life for the different groups in South Africa. This article engages in a philosophical discussion of a few major aspects of these commissions via the prism of Levinasian philosophical thought and the philosophical and ethical meaning it assigns to the act of bearing witness.

Reconceiving commissions of inquiry as plural and participatory institutions : a critical reflection on Magidiwana

Reconceiving commissions of inquiry as plural and participatory institutions : a critical reflection on <i>Magidiwana</i>

An Interview with David Dabydeen on Literature and Politics

Professor David Dabydeen is a Guyanese-born writer, critic and academic at the Centre of Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. In 1993 he became Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is still a member of their Executive Board. He has been Guyana's ambassador to China since 2010. Professor Dabydeen has also won several international and national prizes such as the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Quiller-Couch Prize, and the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India). Among his works are Slave Song (1984), The Intended (1991), Disappearance (1993); and Our Lady of Demerara (2004). He also co-edited The Oxford Companion to Black British History in 2007.

Assessing 30 years of Westminster policy advisory system experience

With the 30th anniversary of the policy advisory systems concept on the horizon, it is an appropriate time to reflect further on the concept’s utility, particularly in helping to understand the dynamics of system change and their implications for policy-making. This article provides diachronic analysis of the policy advisory systems in the classic Anglo-Saxon ‘Westminster’ family (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand). Analysis focuses on five advisory units: the public service and central agencies, partisan ministerial advisers, external consultants, commissions of inquiry, and select special advisory bodies. The principle research aim is to compare these cases to shed light on advisory system dynamics through identification and analysis of shared and country-specific patterns of PAS change. We argue that the leading dynamics of politicization and externalization often used to characterize how advisory systems change masks idiosyncratic country patterns. We argue that differences in the tempo, intensity, and sequencing of advisory unit (de)institutionalization are clear in these cases and that attention to these dimensions of advisory system change add precision to understanding the organization, operation, and evolution of these systems.

The Essential Need for Research Misconduct Allegation Audits.

Nearly 90 % of allegations of biomedical research misconduct in the United States are dismissed by responsible institutions without any faculty assessment or auditable record. Recently, members of the U.S. Congress have complained that the penalties for those against whom findings of research misconduct are made are too light and that too few grant funds associated with research misconduct have been recovered for use by other researchers and taxpayers. Here we discuss the laws that empower federal agencies that can oversee investigations of biomedical research misconduct: the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), both located within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Research misconduct investigations pertaining to U.S. physical sciences funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) are overseen by the NSF’s OIG. While OIGs may provide some improvement over the ORI in the handling of research misconduct, we have found that a much more serious flaw exists which undermines an ability to conduct performance audits of the effectiveness by which allegations of research misconduct are handled in the United States. Specifically, sufficient data do not need to be retained by U.S. research institutions funded by HHS or NSF to allow effective audit of why allegations of research misconduct are dismissed before being seen by faculty inquiry or investigative committees. U.S. federal Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS/Yellow Book), if applied to the research misconduct oversight process, would allow a determination of whether the handling of allegations of biomedical research misconduct actually functions adequately, and if not, how it might be improved. In particular, we propose that independent, external peer review under GAGAS audit standards should be instituted without delay in assessing the performance of ORI, or any other similarly tasked federal agency, in handling allegations of research misconduct.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11948-016-9798-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The ACNC, the Senate, the Commission of Audit and the Not-for-Profit Sector

The article discusses the implications of the Australian Government's plans to replace the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) and to create the Centre for Excellence for the not-for-profit sector. Topics discussed include the National Commission of Audit (NCoA) and the Senate Economics Legislation Committee Inquiry into the ACNC Repeal Bill, taxation of business income of not-for-profit entities, and the Senate Repeal Inquiry.