BY HUGH GUSTERSON In the fall of 2007, I received an interview request from the New York Times journalist David Rohde, who was writing an article about the U.S. Army’s newly announced Human Terrain project – a program to embed anthropologists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and send them out to “map the [...]
BY JO-MARIE BURT In spring 2008, the Transitional/Transnational Justice Working Group, a group of Mason faculty and graduate students interested in issues of global justice and human rights, launched the Human Rights, Global Justice and Democracy Project. The project’s central concern is to examine how societies that experienced mass atrocity cope with the legacies of [...]
BY TRICIA D. OLSEN, LEIGH A. PAYNE, AND ANDREW G. REITER Despite the recent proliferation of transitional justice practices and scholarship around the world, we know very little about whether and how it achieves its goals of strengthening democracy and reducing human rights violations. Findings from the Transitional Justice Data Base (TJDB) fill that gap [...]
BY GITANJALI GUTIERREZ In the wake of September 11, 2001, the United States parted from its traditional adherence to fundamental legal principles, including domestic and international prohibitions against torture, kidnapping, disappearances, and arbitrary detention without trial. Legal memorandum from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and other government documents disclosed through the Freedom [...]
DAVID BACKER INTRODUCTION The last 65 years have exhibited competing currents and ongoing debate with regards to accountability for human rights violations.1 After World War II, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals convened by the Allied powers, as well as parallel legal processes in a number of countries, established key precedents for the prosecution [...]
BY STEPHEN A. LAMONY Over the past two decades, Uganda has witnessed an increasing number of fundamental discussions on accountability for mass human rights atrocities at the local and national level. Interestingly, however, there has never been any local form of criminal prosecutions for grave human rights violations. To explain this reality, one has to [...]
BY MARK DRUMBL Several African atrocities have become judicialized internationally. Cases include Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda. An ad hoc tribunal created by the United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), prosecutes individuals suspected of high-level involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. A hybrid (mixed) [...]
BY SUSAN BENESCH Once unimaginable, prosecutions for state-sponsored atrocities are multiplying rapidly. They continue to deliver new milestones, both by expanding transnationally and by reaching previously untouchable defendants. Some trials astonish even their own proponents, as this symposium illustrated: Peru’s conviction of its former head of state Alberto Fujimori in April left Ronald Gamarra Herrera [...]
BY HUGO VAN DER MERWE In 1995, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) introduced a mechanism that offered a morally compromised form of accountability: amnesty in exchange for public disclosure of truth. While this was a bitter pill to swallow for the South African public and an unacceptable deal for many victims, it [...]
BY RONALD GAMARRA HERRERA On April 7, 2009, the Peruvian Supreme Court’s Special Criminal Court handed down a unanimous sentence against former President Alberto Fujimori in the four cases of human rights violations for which he was on trial: collective assassinations in Barrios Altos and La Cantuta, and the abductions of journalist Gustavo Gorriti and [...]