BY MARK GOODALE It is unsettling how an experience can rapidly shift from the incongruous to the profoundly moving, from a moment of surprise to the realization that one’s frame of reference, which has been put in place only with great difficulty, is no longer quite so adequate. So there I was, halfway through a [...]
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 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 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 [...]
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 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 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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]