Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Lucerne, 2010.

It was from Argentina, in the years 1976 to 1983, that the world heard the cries of the families of los desaparecidos, the disappeared--20,000 to 30,000 people made to vanish forever by official sleight of hand. In the years since, the scope and range of governmentally sanctioned kidnappings has spread exponentially, making enforced disappearances a truly global problem. This volume provides an in-depth legal investigation of involuntary disappearances as defined by national and international law. Beginning with a detailed discussion of what constitutes an enforced disappearance, it goes on to consider how various international organizations such as the United Nations view this problem. Using the Multiple Rights Approach, enforced disappearances are examined as a violation of internationally defined basic rights such as the right to personal freedom, the right to protection against torture and the right to a judicial remedy. Viewpoints of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the European System of Protection are scrutinized with special consideration regarding the international laws applicable to the problem. The availability (or lack thereof) of restitution and compensation for material damage, mental and physical anguish, and loss of opportunity is also addressed. Finally, the work considers the need for a comprehensive and coherent framework when dealing with enforced disappearances.

Enforced disappearance is one of the most serious human rights violations. It constitutes an autonomous offence and a crime under international law on account of its multiple and continuing character. It is not a phenomenon of the past, nor is it geographically limited to Latin America: such scourge is widespread today and on the increase in other continents. For more than twenty-five years, relatives of disappeared people worldwide have insisted on the pressing need for an international legally binding instrument against enforced disappearances. 2006 is the year of the adoption of the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, which represents the result of several legislative and jurisprudential developments that are duly analyzed in this book. The Convention has been opened for signature in February 2007.

This pioneering book explores the intersections of law and culture at the International Criminal Court (ICC), offering insights into how notions of culture affect the Court’s legal foundations, functioning and legitimacy, both in theory and in practice.

After having ignored victims, only recently both domestic and international law have begun to pay attention to them. As a consequence, different international norms related to victims have progressively been introduced. These are norms generally characterized by a certain concept from the perspective of victims, as well as by the enumeration of a list of rights to which they are entitle to; rights upon which the international statute of victims is built. In reverse, these catalogues of rights are the states’ obligations. Most of these rights are already existent in the international law of human rights. Consequently, they are not new but consolidated rights. Others are strictly linked to victims, concerning the following categories: victims of crime, victims of abuse of power, victims of gross violations of international human rights law, victims of serious violations of international humanitarian law, victims of enforced disappearance, victims of violations of international criminal law and victims of terrorism.

This book explores, through the lens of the conflict in Syria, why international law and the United Nations have failed to halt conflict and massive human rights violations in many places around the world which has allowed tens of millions of people to be killed and hundreds of millions more to be harmed. The work presents a critical socio-legal analysis of the failures of international law and the United Nations (UN) to deal with mass atrocities and conflict. It argues that international law, in the way it is set up and operates, falls short in dealing with these issues in many respects. The argument is that international law is state-centred rather than victim-friendly, is, to some extent, outdated, is vague and often difficult to understand and, therefore, at times, hard to apply. While various accountability processes have come to the fore recently, processes do not exist to assist individual victims while the conflict occurs or the abuses are being perpetrated. The book focuses on the problems of international law and the UN and, in the context of the many enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions in Syria, why nothing has been done to deal with a rogue state that has regularly violated international law. It examines why the responsibility to protect (R2P) has not been applied and why it ought to be used, generally, and in Syria. It uses the Syrian context to evaluate the weaknesses of the system and why reform is needed. It examines the UN institutional mechanisms, the role they play and why a civilian protection system is needed. It examines what mechanism ought to be set up to deal with the possible one million people who have been disappeared and detained in Syria. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and policy-makers working in the areas of public international law, international human rights law, political science and peace and security studies.

The book provides in-depth insight to scholars, practitioners, and activists dealing with human rights, their expansion, and the emergence of 'new' human rights. Whereas legal theory tends to neglect the development of concrete individual rights, monographs on 'new' rights often deal with structural matters only in passing and the issue of 'new' human rights has received only cursory attention in literature. By bringing together a large number of emergent human rights, analysed by renowned human rights experts from around the world, and combining the analyses with theoretical approaches, this book fills this lacuna. The comprehensive and dialectic approach, which enables insights from individual rights to overarching theory and vice versa, will ensure knowledge growth for generalists and specialists alike. The volume goes beyond a purely legal analysis by observing the contestation, rhetorics, the struggle for recognition of 'new' human rights, thus speaking to human rights professionals beyond the legal sphere.

The book identifies a new human rights phenomenon. While disappearances have tended to be associated with authoritarian state and armed conflict periods, this study looks at these acts carried out in procedural democracies where democratic institutions prevail.

This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the practice of disappearances in Mexico, from the period of the so-called 'dirty war' to the current crisis of disappearances associated with the country's 'war on drugs', during which more than 80,000 people have disappeared. The volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars from Mexico, Argentina and Europe, who focus their chapters on four broad axes of enquiry. In Part I, chapters examine the phenomenon of disappearances in its historical and present-day forms, and the struggles for memory around the disappeared in Mexico with reference to Argentina. Part II addresses the political dimensions of disappearances, focusing on the specificities that this practice acquires in the context of the counterinsurgency struggle of the 1970s and the so-called 'war on drugs'. The third section situates the issue within the framework of human rights law, by examining the conceptual and legal aspects of disappearances. The final chapters explore the social movement of the relatives of the disappeared, showing how their search for disappeared loved ones involves bodily and affective experiences as well as knowledge production. The volume thus aims to further our understanding of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico without, however, losing sight of the historic origins of the phenomenon.

State Crime in the Global Age brings together original writings from leading scholars in the field to explore the many ways that the use and abuse of state power results in grave social harms that outweigh, by far, the consequences of ordinary street crime. The topics covered include the crimes of empire, illegal war, the bombing of civilians, state sanctioned torture, state sacrifice of human lives, and judicial wrongdoing. The book breaks new ground through its examination of the ways globalization has intensified potentials for state crime, as well as bringing novel theoretical understandings of the state to the study of state crime, and exploring strategies for confronting state crime. This book, while containing much that is of interest to scholars of state crime, is designed to be accessible to students and others who are concerned with the ways individuals, social groups, and whole nations are victimized by the misuse of state power.