accountability

In Simón, the Argentine Supreme Court held that two amnesty laws, adopted in the late 1980s in order to shield authors of serious human rights violations committed during the so-called ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983), were unconstitutional and void. Although the Argentine Congress had already repealed the two laws in 2003, uncertainty about the validity of this parliamentary decision had led to some controversy.

Official apologies and truth commissions are increasingly utilized as mechanisms to address human rights abuses. Both are intended to transform inter-group relations by marking an end point to a history of wrongdoing and providing the means for political and social relations to move beyond that history. However, state-dominated reconciliation mechanisms are inherently problematic for indigenous communities.

This volume aims not to retrace the fairly familiar terrain of establishing the legal character of human rights, or to argue the proposition, now well accepted, that human rights are part and parcel of the discipline of international law, but to consider the influence of human rights and humanitarian law on general international law. Although human rights and humanitarian norms are central to the book, then, it is not a book about human rights and humanitarian law.

Although interest in the consolidation and expansion of the international human rights regime has grown in recent years, little attention is accorded to the formal procedures that allow individuals aggrieved by states to appeal directly to an international audience. Using data for 82 countries between 1976 and 1999, this article examines the political and cultural factors that produce cross-national variation in the propensity of individuals to file allegations of human rights abuse with the Human Rights Committee.

Sociologists empirically and theoretically neglect genocide. In this article, our critical collective framing perspective begins by focusing on state origins of race-based ideology in the mobilization and dehumanization leading to genocide. We elaborate this transformative dynamic by identifying racially driven macro-micro-macro-level processes that are theoretically underdeveloped and contested in many settings. We investigate generic processes by exploiting an unprecedented survey of refugees from the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

Some images stick out in the collective memory of mankind and become icons for a whole generation. Among the most forceful images of our generation are the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, on 11 September 2001. These attacks revealed a new face of terrorism at the dawn of the 21st century, with new targets and new means, intended to produce many indiscriminate victims and without any concern for the offenders to save their own lives.

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory and on related theories of performativity and positioning, this article analyses the public confessions during the 1990s by three prominent state actors in Turkey about their direct involvement in state crimes against Kurds and left-wing political opponents. All three cases received significant media attention at the time. The aim of the article is not only to shed new light on those specific confessions by the perpetrators within the Turkish context, but also to develop further theoretical insights into the phenomenon of public confessions as such.

National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation.

A public sociology that will tackle the public issues of today requires the transformation of sociology as we know it. This is the stirring message of this volume—at the heart of sociology must lie a concern for society as such, the protection of those social relations through which we recognize each other as humans. Thus, the chapters focus on those fundamental human rights that uphold human community, first and foremost, against the colonizing projects of states and markets.

Major national organizations of physicians, psychiatrists, and nurses determined that their ethical obligations prohibited their members from participating in these interrogations, so what was the American Psychological Association doing?