Tag Archives: Issue 15-1

Uncertain Solidarities: The Politics of an Impartial Human Rights Stance in Occupied Palestine

November 8, 2024 by
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Protective accompaniment is a non-violent intervention strategy used by international civil society organisations working in the occupied Palestinian territories. This article explores one accompaniment organisation’s discourse and practice of human rights based impartiality. Firstly, the universalising rhetoric of human rights is shown to be a strategic device which acts to obscure the specifics of a mission to protect Palestinian subjects. Secondly, examining accompaniment as praxis in the West Bank, a ‘non-partisan’ stance is shown to result in an embodied and ideological withdrawal from those being Continue reading → Continue reading →

Not Nuremberg—Histories of Alternative Criminalization Paradigms, 1945–2021: An Introduction

November 8, 2024 by and
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The Western myth of Nuremberg has dominated understandings of the evolution of international criminal law. Enshrining the International Military Tribunal as a critical point of origin, this paradigm has developed a narrative of post-war liberal progress, in which a universal model of externally-delivered, individualised criminal justice was interrupted by the exigencies of the Cold War then rediscovered through various international and hybrid tribunals in the 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Often instrumentalised to protect Western Continue reading → Continue reading →

Criminalizing Nazism and Neo-Fascism: East German Anti-Racial Discrimination Law, Socialist Legality, and Human Rights

November 8, 2024 by
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The East German criminalisation of fascism was about more than atonement for Nazism. While its law makers certainly focussed on outlawing Nazism after the foundation of their state in 1949, they also opened up to international law and new human rights norms in the 1960s. This was not a mere diplomatic move to garner international support for the GDR’s existence as a sovereign state —especially in the Third World—but also became part of an attempt to build a new kind of international legal order grounded Continue reading → Continue reading →

The United Nations War Crimes Commission 1943–1948: A Forgotten Highway to Postconflict Justice?

November 8, 2024 by and
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This article offers a critique of the Nuremberg-inspired paradigm of international criminal justice, which focuses on high-profile, top-down approaches to post-conflict accountability. To this end, it appraises the work of the United Nations War Crimes Commission as a “path not taken.” We discuss the very different approach to supporting post-conflict justice adopted by the UNWCC—from its original support base beyond the major geopolitical powers, to the impact of its more deliberative system, to the role of the UNWCC as a hub in which new practices Continue reading → Continue reading →

Collective Impunity for Transition? Consenso and the International Travels of a Spanish Paradigm

November 8, 2024 by , and
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Before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation, there was the Spanish consenso. The idea of negotiated and peaceful consensus it embodied, as a way to overcome violent pasts after the end of dictatorship, was forged in the work of Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and human rights organisations both internationally and in Spain from the late 1950s onwards. Following the death of Franco and Spain’s successful democratization from the late 1970s, it would then become an influential approach that travelled internationally for two decades. This article highlights the role Continue reading → Continue reading →

Rebel Greed and Postcolonial Governance: Neoliberal Accountings of the Past within Transitional Justice Processes in Sierra Leone

November 8, 2024 by
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This article extends recent academic debates about the sociohistorical entanglements between neoliberalism and human rights by exploring transitional justice processes in Sierra Leone, which followed the country’s decade-long civil war (1991-2002). It analyses the ways both the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SLTRC) drew on ‘economic’ discourses, variously using the concepts of ‘greed’, ‘corruption’ and ‘governance’ to explain the broader context of the human rights violations with which they were concerned. By critically tracing how these Continue reading → Continue reading →