Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda
Cambridge University Press, 12/16/2016
EAN 9781107439221, ISBN10: 1107439221
Paperback, 398 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
In the twenty-first century, fighting impunity has become both the rallying cry and a metric of progress for human rights. The new emphasis on criminal prosecution represents a fundamental change in the positions and priorities of students and practitioners of human rights and transitional justice: it has become almost unquestionable common sense that criminal punishment is a legal, political, and pragmatic imperative for addressing human rights violations. This book challenges that common sense. It does so by documenting and critically analyzing the trend toward an anti-impunity norm in a variety of institutional and geographical contexts, with an eye toward the interaction between practices at the global and local levels. Together, the chapters demonstrate how this laser focus on anti-impunity has created blind spots in practice and in scholarship that result in a constricted response to human rights violations, a narrowed conception of justice, and an impoverished approach to peace.
Introduction
Part I. What Does Anti-Impunity Mean?
1. A genealogy of the criminal turn in human rights Karen Engle
2. Anti-impunity as deflection of argument Samuel Moyn
3. Doing history with impunity Vasuki Nesiah
Part II. How and Where Does Anti-Impunity Operate?
4. The South African Truth Commission and the AZAPO case
a reflection almost two decades later D. M. Davis
5. Anti-impunity politics in post-genocide Rwanda Zinaida Miller
6. Whose exceptionalism? Debating the inter-American view on amnesty and the Brazilian case Fabia Fernandes Carvalho Veçoso
7. The distributive politics of impunity and anti-impunity
lessons from four decades of Colombian peace negotiations Helena Alviar GarcÃÂa and Karen Engle
8. From political repression to torturer impunity
the narrowing of Filártiga v. Peña-Irala Natalie R. Davidson
Part III. Are There Alternatives to Anti-Impunity?
9. Impunity in a different register
people's tribunals and questions of judgment, law and responsibility Dianne Otto
10. Beyond Nuremberg
the historical significance of the post-Apartheid transition in South Africa Mahmood Mamdani.