As the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights from 2009 to 2017, Ambassador Robert R. King led efforts to ensure that human rights were an integral part of U.S. policy with North Korea. In Patterns of Impunity, he traces U.S. involvement and interest in North Korean human rights, from the adoption of the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2004--legislation which King himself was involved in and which called for the creation of the special envoy position--to his own negotiations with North Korean diplomats over humanitarian assistance, discussions that would ultimately end because of the death of Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un's ascension as Supreme Leader, as well as continued nuclear and missile testing. Beyond an in-depth overview of his time as special envoy, Ambassador King provides insights into the United Nations' role in addressing the North Korean human rights crisis, including the UN Human Rights Council's creation of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK in 2013-14, and discussions in the Security Council on North Korea human rights. King explores subjects such as the obstacles to getting outside information to citizens of one of the most isolated countries in the world; the welfare of DPRK defectors, and how China has both abetted North Korea by returning refugees and enabled the problem of human trafficking; the detaining of U.S. citizens in North Korea and efforts to free them, including King's escorting U.S. citizen Eddie Jun back from Pyongyang in 2011; and the challenges of providing humanitarian assistance to a country with no formal relations with the United States and where separating human rights from politics is virtually impossible.

This volume presents and critiques the distorted effects of the international human rights movement's focus on the fight against impunity.

This book addresses current developments in transitional justice in Latin America – effectively the first region to undergo concentrated transitional justice experiences in modern times. Using a comparative approach, it examines trajectories in truth, justice, reparations, and amnesties in countries emerging from periods of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law. The book examines the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, developing and applying a common analytical framework to provide a systematic, qualitative and comparative analysis of their transitional justice experiences. More specifically, the book investigates to what extent there has been a shift from impunity towards accountability for past human rights violations in Latin America. Using ‘thick’, but structured, narratives – which allow patterns to emerge, rather than being imposed – the book assesses how the quality, timing and sequencing of transitional justice mechanisms, along with the context in which they appear, have mattered for the nature and impact of transitional justice processes in the region. Offering a new approach to assessing transitional justice, and challenging many assumptions in the established literature, this book will be of enormous benefit to scholars and others working in this area.

North Korea is consistently identified as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. However, the issue of human rights in North Korea is a complex one, intertwined with issues like life in the North Korean police state, inter-Korean relations, denuclearization, access to information in the North, and international cooperation, to name a few. There are likewise multiple actors involved, including the two Korean governments, the United States, the United Nations, South Korea NGOs, and global human rights organizations. While North Korea’s nuclear weapons and the security threat it poses have occupied the center stage and eclipsed other issues in recent years, human rights remain important to U.S. policy. The contributors to The North Korean Conundrum explore how dealing with the issue of human rights is shaped and affected by the political issues with which it is so entwined. Sections discuss the role of the United Nations; how North Koreans’ limited access to information is part of the problem, and how this is changing; the relationship between human rights and denuclearization; and North Korean human rights in comparative perspective.

The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important - yet silenced - subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India, as well as two standalone volumes) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies, detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators. The essays in this volume examine history and contemporary politics to understand the root causes of sexual violence in Sri Lanka. They look at the polarization created around ethnic and linguistic identities during the three-decades of ethnic conflict, but also scrutinize the routine violence of communities towards their own women in daily life. The authors argue that in this transitional post-war phase, Sri Lankan women must not only be treated as victims, but as agents of change. The writers highlight a hitherto unaddressed aspect of sexual violence: that of the structures that enable impunity on the part of perpetrators, be they security personnel and paramilitary forces, members of armed rebel groups, gangs, local politicians and police or ordinary citizens including close family members. They demonstrate how impunity for perpetrators is both a failure of the formal justice process and a product of individual, community and social conditions and indeed the choices that victims and families make that promote silence over truth. At the end of more than a quarter century of conflict that has left some 100,000 dead, 50,000 women-headed households struggling to survive, as well as countless victims and survivors of sexual violence, the calls for justice can no longer be ignored.

Key recommendations - A note on methodology. -- Background: People, the India-Pakistan dispute, political history, recent developments, and peace talks. - The people of Jammu and Kashmir - India-Pakistan dispute - Political history inside Jammu and Kashmir. -- Legal causes of abuses and impunity. Preventing arrest: Section 45 of the Criminal Procedure Code - Preventing prosecution: Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code - The Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act and Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act -- The Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 -- Legal weaknesses in the Human Rights Protection Act -- Weaknesses in military court jurisdiction. -- The origins of impunity: failure of accountability in Jammu and Kashmir since the start of the conflict. A. Shootings at Gawakadal, Srinagar - B. Death of Mirwaiz Maulvi Mohammad Farooq - C. The Beijbehara killings - D. The killing of Jalil Andrabi - E. Chattisinghpora massacre and ensuing killings. -- Recent abuses and continuing impunity. A. Killings - B. "Disappearances"--C. Torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment - D. Arbitrary detentions. -- Militant abuses. Militant goups and Pakistan's role in the conflict. - A. Politically motivated killings, summary executions, and intimidation - B. Direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians - Militant attacks on schools and recruitment of children. -- Recommendations. To the government of India - To the state government of Jammu and Kashmir - To militant groups - To the government of Pakistan - To the United Nations - To the international community, in particular those states with significant influence on India, Pakistan, and militant groups. -- Acknowledgements.

Drawing on the findings of a comparative research project, this volume tackles a set of intricate questions about the workings of impunity in India. Why does the world's largest democracy condone systematic violations of human rights in its periphery? How do victims of abuse and survivors of sexual violence end up being denied justice? What do those on the margins--those with the wrong sex, wrong identity markers, wrong political leanings--tell us about violence by state and non-state actors? Bringing together senior academics, civil society leaders and fresh voices from the regions, the volume offers analysis--contextual, structural and gendered--and breaks new conceptual ground on the underbelly of 'India Shining'. The volume contains testimonies that were collected during fieldwork in four Indian states.

A deeply affecting–and infuriating–portrait of the life and death of a courageous indigenous leader The first time Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres met the journalist Nina Lakhani, Cáceres said, ‘The army has an assassination list with my name at the top. I want to live, but in this country there is total impunity. When they want to kill me, they will do it.’ In 2015, Cáceres won the Goldman Prize, the world’s most prestigious environmental award, for leading a campaign to stop construction of an internationally funded hydroelectric dam on a river sacred to her Lenca people. Less than a year later she was dead. Lakhani tracked Cáceres remarkable career, in which the defender doggedly pursued her work in the face of years of threats and while friends and colleagues in Honduras were exiled and killed defending basic rights. Lakhani herself endured intimidation and harassment as she investigated the murder. She was the only foreign journalist to attend the 2018 trial of Cáceres’s killers, where state security officials, employees of the dam company and hired hitmen were found guilty of murder. Many questions about who ordered and paid for the killing remain unanswered. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews, confidential legal filings, and corporate documents unearthed after years of reporting in Honduras, Lakhani paints an intimate portrait of an extraordinary woman in a state beholden to corporate powers, organised crime, and the United States.

This book puts forward proposals for solutions to the current gaps between the Mexican legal order and the norms and principles of international criminal law. Adequate legislative measures are suggested for compliance with international obligations. The author approaches the book's subject matter by tracing all norms related to the prosecution of core crimes and contextualizing each of the findings with a brief historical and political account. Additionally, state practice is analyzed, identifying patterns and inconsistencies. This approach is new in offering a wide perspective on international criminal law in Mexico. Relevant legal documents are analyzed and annexed in the book, providing the reader with a useful guide to the topics analyzed. Issues including the following are examined: the incorporation of core crimes in the Mexican legal order, military jurisdiction, the war crimes definition under Mexican law, unaddressed atrocities, state practice and future challenges to combat impunity. The book will be of relevance to legal scholars, students, practitioners of law and human rights advocates. It also offers interesting insights to political scientists, historians and journalists. Tania Ixchel Atilano has a Dr. Iur. from the Humboldt Universität Berlin, an LLM in German Law from the Ludwig Maximilian Universität, Munich, and attained her law degree at the ITAM in Mexico City.

In Head of State Immunity under the Malabo Protocol Kobina Egyir Daniel, offers an insightful legal analysis of Head of State immunities in international law and the role that the asymmetry of the international legal order plays in its contemporary application