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 violence [...]
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) tribunal, [...]
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 look [...]
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 of individuals [...]
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 gained [...]
BY TONY SAMARA
In 2010 Cape Town, South Africa will host a number of soccer matches for the World Cup, including one of the semi-final matches. That same year New Delhi, India, will host the Commonwealth Games, and Shanghai, China the World Expo. Different as they are, all three cities confront an urban population marked by [...]
BY VANESSA NOËL BROWN
Located at the intersection of Africa and Europe, the kingdom of Morocco has long been a melting pot and a colorful example of globalization. Since the 9th century AD Berbers, Muslims and Jews lived, worked and studied together in this region. Today’s youth bulge in North Africa can be viewed as both [...]
BY JEFFREY W. MANTZ
Nobody likes to hear about blood diamonds, that something venerated as our culture’s highest token of commitment and affection comes to us haunted by specters of oppression, cruelty and murder. It took a 2006 film with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the role of a diamond-embezzling South African mercenary and a $100 million production [...]
BY REUBEN E. BRIGETY, II
It isn’t every day that I find myself in northern Kenya visiting a camp with 150,000 Somali refugees, or hearing an American soldier talk about the strategic importance of vaccinating sheep in Djibouti as part of the Global War on Terror. But neither is it every day that, as a George [...]
BY DAWN C. PARKER WITH MACTION KOMWA
Although HIV/AIDS has no boundaries, the most affected region is sub-Saharan Africa, where 25 of the 40 million people globally living with the virus live. The epidemic has eroded the ability of rural African households to produce food and other agricultural products, generate income, and care for and feed [...]