This book analyses the use of the expression 'serious violations of human rights', and similar ones, such as 'gross' or 'grave', in international practice. It highlights some of the recurring responses and consequences to such violations and suggests that a new special regime - eponymous to the above-mentioned expression - was formed. This special regime is understood as substantively limited to a very specific issue-area of human rights violations. Within this regime, a series of monitoring mechanisms and procedures are in place to highlight, document, and record such violations; specific measures are taken to enforce compliance; and certain consequences arise focused on remedying the victims of such violations. As such, this special regime is comprised of at least four thinly interconnected components: the substantive, the monitoring, the enforcement, and the remedial ones. This monograph constitutes a first step towards the recognition of such a regime, allowing far more constructive and coherent elaboration in the future. Practice around this category of violations may well evolve in a different direction than the one suggested here. However, what becomes apparent from this work is that the serious violations of human rights are a key notion in the international legal order as it allows the international community to depict those factual situations requiring its attention and action.

This book seeks to contribute to the analysis of the serious violations of human rights in Mexico during the processes of democratic transition and the "War on Drugs" by taking bodies and territories as archives of the crimes committed by the Mexican State in the last decades. The text presents an analysis of the disappearance of persons, forced internal displacement, and gender violence as systematic expressions of State violence. These fields of research allow us to point out tensions between social practices and the institutional fragility that systematically denies human rights violations while at the same time ratifies and celebrates them. The thematic knotting between bodies and territories is anchored in the processes of shaping a memory that expresses State violence and presents the silenced resistances of minority social groups that elude the traditional forms of registration, control and collection of data. From these coordinates, body-territories are approached as scenarios where intersectionally-knotted violences unfold. The theoretical approaches considered are mobilized through a critical approach to capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy in order to analyze public policies and narratives related to the protection of bodies-territories, as well as the responses to the needs, interests and preferences of different groups and individuals whose lives are marked by the experience of serious human rights violations. Finally, this approach also considers the new ways in which crimes against humanity unfold in situations of democratic transition, as well as the forms of symbolic exchanges in the transmission of meaning and community bonding. Bodies, Territories and Serious Violations of Human Rights in Mexico will be of interest to academic researchers and graduate students in different fields of knowledge, such as criminology, sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and the interdisciplinary field of human rights studies.

This volume analyses the legal grounds, premises and extent of pecuniary compensation for violations of human rights in national legal systems. The scope of comparison includes liability regimes in general and in detail, the correlation between pecuniary remedies available under international law and under domestic law, and special (alternative) compensation systems. All sources of human rights violations are embraced, including historical injustices and systematical and gross violations. The book is a collection of nineteen contributions written by public international law, international human rights and private law experts, covering fifteen European jurisdictions (including Central and Eastern Europe), the United States, Israel and EU law. The contributions, initially prepared for the 19th International Congress of Comparative law in Vienna (2014), present the latest developments in legislation, scholarship and case-law concerning domestic causes of action in cases of human rights abuses. The book concludes with a comparative report which assesses the developments in tort law and public liability law, the role of the constitutionalisation of the right to damages as well as the court practice related to the process of enforcement of human rights through monetary remedies. This country-by-country comparison allows to consider whether the value of protection of human rights as expressed in international treaties, ius cogens and in national constitutional laws justifies the conclusion that the interests at stake should enjoy protection under the existing civil liability rules, or that a new cause of action, or even a whole new set of rules, should be created in national systems.

Justifies a two-track approach that includes individual and systemic remedies in both domestic and international human rights law.

Promoting Accountability under International Law for Gross Human Rights Violations in Africa is pre-eminently a study on the work and contribution of the first international judicial mechanism, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), devoted exclusively to challenging impunity for serious international crimes committed in Africa. This volume is dedicated to the eminent international jurist Justice Hassan Bubacar Jallow, the Tribunal’s longest serving Chief Prosecutor and the first prosecutor of the United Nations Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals. The noted scholar and practitioner contributors discuss various aspects of the law, jurisprudence and practice of the Tribunal over its twenty year existence, while also drawing lessons for current and future international courts such as the International Criminal Court. Themes covered include the role of the international prosecutor; the prosecution of sexual and gender-based crimes; the relationship between national and international courts; the role of other international institutions in challenging impunity; and the role of African languages in international criminal trials. Given its wide ranging substantive coverage, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in criminal justice, human rights and humanitarian law whether in Africa or other parts of the world.

This Liber Amicorum is published at the occasion of Judge Lucius Caflisch’s retirement from a distinguished teaching career at the Graduate Institute of International Studies of Geneva, where he served as Professor of International Law for more than three decades, and where he has also held the position of Director. It was written by his colleagues and friends, from the European Court of Human Rights, from universities all around the world, from the Swiss Foreign Affairs Ministry and many other national and international institutions. The Liber Amicorum Lucius Caflisch covers different fields in which Judge Caflisch has excelled in his various capacities, as scholar, representative of Switzerland in international conferences, legal adviser of the Swiss Foreign Affairs Ministry, counsel, registrar, arbitrator and judge. This collective work is divided into three main sections. The first section examines questions concerning human rights and international humanitarian law. The second section is devoted to the international law of spaces, including matters regarding the law of the sea, international waterways, Antarctica, and boundary and territorial issues. The third section addresses issues related to the peaceful settlement of disputes, both generally and with regard to any particular means of settlement. The contributions are in both English and French.

This book examines what makes accountability for previous abuses more or less possible for transitional regimes to achieve. It closely examines the other vital goals of such regimes against which accountability is often balanced. The options available are not simply prosecution or pardon, as the most heated polemics of the debate over transitional justice suggest, but a range of options, from complete amnesty through truth commissions and lustration or purification to prosecutions. The question, then, is not whether accountability can be achieved, but what degree of accountability can be achieved by a given country.

This book guides civil rights lawyers-and informs judges, legislators, and academics-in the effective use of international law in U.S. federal and state cases. The author highlights many concrete areas in which international law can enhance human rights protection both in the U.S. and abroad, such as: Death penalty Lethal force by police and military authorities Extraterritorial privacy protection Gay and lesbian rights Government liability for foreseeable harm Compensation for unintentional false imprisonment. This eminently practical approach-based on model briefs developed for and used by leading U.S. civil rights lawyers and organizations-presents an extremely rare treatment of international human rights law. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.