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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 Although the Argentine Congress had already repealed the two laws in 2003, uncertainty about the validity of this parliamentary decision had led to some controversy. With its decision in Simón, the Supreme Court puts an end to the legal uncertainty concerning the prosecution of serious human rights violations committed under the military regime and definitively clears the path for judicial actions against their authors. Setting aside deeply rooted national legal principles — such as statutory limitations, the principle of legality and amnesties — the Argentine Supreme Court has confirmed the role of human rights principles and of public international law in general in dealing with the most heinous crimes against humanity.

This study was an elaboration of ideas he first proposed in 1933 in his address to the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law (1933), which argued that attacks on racial, religious and ethnic groups should be considered international crimes. Important for the prosecution of the Nazis, it helped to establish the framework for all subsequent efforts to punish crimes against humanity.

There is a long history of laws responding to terrorism that have been utilized in the United Kingdom. This article outlines the important strands of development, including in the former colonies of the British Empire, in Ireland, and in mainland Britain itself. It offers an overview of contemporary legislation — the Terrorism Act 2000, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and the Terrorism Act 2006. These comprise a formidably detailed and complex code of measures, principally concentrating upon special police powers, offences and criminal processes, the proscription of organizations and the restriction of financial flows to the terrorists. The article then considers thematically some of the main controversies surrounding the laws. The discussion is organized around the following binaries: a rational code not panic legislation; a criminal justice model not a war model; the language of rights not the language of balance; international cooperation not unilateralism; appropriate structures not empty acronyms. The conclusions warn against undue optimism about the impact of the special laws and undue reliance upon the laws to an extent which damages the very values that the laws seek to protect.

Three inescapable observations form the foundation of this report. First, deadly conflict is not inevitable. Violence on the scale of what we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere does not emerge inexorably from human interaction. Second, the need to prevent deadly conflict is increasingly urgent. The rapid compression of the world through breathtaking population growth, technological advancement and economic interdependence, combined with the readily available supply of deadly weapons and easily transmitted contagion of hatred and incitement to violence, make it essential and urgent to find ways to prevent disputes from turning massively violent. Third, preventing deadly conflict is possible. The problem is not that we do not know about incipient and large-scale violence; it is that we often do not act.

The human rights regime adopts a legalist approach to limit the harm the powerful may inflict on the vulnerable The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing ‘war against terrorism’ test the limits of the legalist approach. Human rights constrain state responses to terrorism more directly than they govern the conduct of terrorists. As a result, the international human rights regime is disadvantaged rhetorically and politically. While substantive human rights standards have not changed since September 11, six possible norm developments may occur: (1) alterations in norms governing the use of force may increase the perceived legitimacy of pre‐emptive defensive action, for example with regard to targeted assassinations; (2) reconceptualization of counter‐terrorism as a new species of international armed conflict may displace human rights law and international criminal law, and substitute new rules that are less detailed than those that apply to conventional armed conflicts; (3) derogation principles may be refined, especially in relation to the temporal element and the non‐derogability of the prohibition on arbitrary detention and of fair trial rights; (4) an increase in the commission of extraterritorial human rights violations may spur the clarification of the scope of human rights treaties ratione loci; (5) the targeting of non‐citizens, Muslims and Arabs may clarify non‐discrimination norms; and (6) exclusion from refugee protection may expand. In institutional terms, the ‘war against terrorism’ has not yet had significant effects, but the following issues are notable: (1) integrating human rights into UN counter‐terrorism initiatives; (2) the aggressive campaign by the United States Government against the International Criminal Court; (3) the tendency toward American exceptionalism; (4) leadership by Europe to preserve human rights principles in counter‐terrorism; (5) increased polarization of UN human rights bodies around the Israeli–Palestinian crisis; (6) silencing of criticism of gross violators in exchange for counter‐terrorist cooperation; and (7) marginalization of human rights treaty bodies as effective monitors of counter‐terrorist policies.