The controversial nature of seeking globalised justice through national courts has become starkly apparent in the wake of the Pinochet case in which the Spanish legal system sought to bring to account under international criminal law the former President of Chile,for violations in Chile of human rights of non-Spaniards. Some have reacted to the involvement of Spanish and British judges in sanctioning a former head of state as nothing more than legal imperialism while others have termed it positive globalisation. While the international legal and associated statutory bases for such criminal prosecutions are firm, the same cannot be said of the enterprise of imposing civil liability for the same human-rights-violating conduct that gives rise to criminal responsibility. In this work leading scholars from around the world address the host of complex issues raised by transnational human rights litigation. There has been, to date, little treatment, let alone a comprehensive assessment, of the merits and demerits of US-style transnational human rights litigation by non-American legal scholars and practitioners. The book seeks not so much to fill this gap as to start the process of doing so, with a view to stimulating debate amongst scholars and policy-makers. The book's doctrinal coverage and analytical inquiries will also be extremely relevant to the world of transnational legal practice beyond the specific question of human rights litigation. Cited in Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya, 2020 SCC 5.

This Research Handbook is of great importance in an era where torture, whilst universally condemned, remains endemic. It explores the nature of the international prohibition of torture and the various means and mechanisms which have been put in place by the international community in an attempt to make that prohibition a reality.

This is the story of one of the most significant examples of human rights litigation in the U.S., presented as a documentary history. The pleadings and documents appear with minimal editing and are supplemented through commentary.

Moving away from conventional approaches to the study of the subject, the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law draws on insights from disciplines both outside of criminal law and outside of law itself to critically examine issues such as international criminal law's actors, rationales, boundaries, and narratives

Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902 and on the other by post–9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of “national security torture,” one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society. Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration. Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire—including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

International criminal law has developed considerably in the last decade and a half, resulting in a complex and re-invigorated discipline. This has impacted directly on the popularity of the study of the subject, particularly on postgraduate law degrees. This textbook serves these courses by providing an introduction to the principles of international criminal law and processes. Written by four international lawyers with experience of teaching international criminal law, it is accessible yet sophisticated in its approach. It covers substantive international criminal law, the institutions designed to enforce it and their procedures, and the international law applicable to domestic prosecutions of international crimes. It will be essential reading for students and teachers of international criminal law. In addition, practitioners and researchers in the field (and in related fields such as criminal law), students of international law and international relations will find this introduction invaluable.

When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantánamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantánamo. What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.

In many ways, the United States' post-9/11 engagement with legal rules is puzzling. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations authorized numerous contentious counterterrorism policies that sparked global outrage, yet they have repeatedly insisted that their actions were lawful and legitimate. In Plausible Legality, Rebecca Sanders examines how the US government interpreted, reinterpreted, and manipulated legal norms and what these justificatory practices imply about the capacity of law to constrain state violence. Through case studies on the use of torture, detention, targeted killing, and surveillance, Sanders provides a detailed analysis of how policymakers use law to achieve their political objectives and situates these patterns within a broader theoretical understanding of how law operates in contemporary politics. She argues that legal culture--defined as collectively shared understandings of legal legitimacy and appropriate forms of legal practice in particular contexts--plays a significant role in shaping state practice. In the global war on terror, a national security culture of legal rationalization encouraged authorities to seek legal cover-to construct the plausible legality of human rights violations-in order to ensure impunity for wrongdoing. Looking forward, law remains vulnerable to evasion and revision. As Sanders shows, despite the efforts of human rights advocates to encourage deeper compliance, the normalization of post-9/11 policy has created space for future administrations to further erode legal norms.

In international law, as in any other legal system, respect and protection of human rights can be guaranteed only by the availability of effective judicial remedies. When a right is violated or damage is caused, access to justice is of fundamental importance for the injured individual and it is an essential component of the rule of law. Yet, access to justice as a human right remains problematic in international law. First, because individual access to international justice remains exceptional and based on specific treaty arrangements, rather than on general principles of international law; second, because even when such right is guaranteed as a matter of treaty obligation, other norms or doctrines of international law may effectively impede its exercise, as in the case of sovereign immunity or non reviewability of UN Security Council measures directly affecting individuals. Further, even access to domestic legal remedies is suffering because of the constraints put by security threats, such as terrorism, on the full protection of freedom and human rights. This collection of essays offers seven distinct perspectives on the present status of access to justice: its development in customary international law, the stress put on it in times of emergency, its problematic exercise in the case of violations of the law of war, its application to torture victims, its development in the case law of the UN Human Rights Committee and of the European Court of Human Rights, its application to the emerging field of environmental justice, and finally access to justice as part of fundamental rights in European law.

With contributions from the most accomplished scholars in the field, this fascinating companion to one of America's pivotal presidents assesses Harry S. Truman as a historical figure, politician, president and strategist. Assembles many of the top historians in their fields who assess critical aspects of the Truman presidency Provides new approaches to the historiography of Truman and his policies Features a variety of historiographic methodologies