The Centre Cannot Hold

Idi Amin ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 239-275
Author(s):  
Mark Leopold
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
North America ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Key Staff ◽  
Almost All

This chapter illustrates how most of the killings, 'disappearances', and other human rights abuses people associate with Idi Amin occurred in the central years of his rule. It was then that Amin's eccentric behaviour and statements came to worldwide attention and the first books about him were published; in effect, it was the time in which his myth was created, and he became Africa's icon of evil. However, this period was also one for which there is little primary evidence. Between 1973 and the end of Amin's regime, contemporary sources of information increasingly fade away. Gradually, almost all Uganda's academics, journalists, writers, and other intellectuals left the country. Some joined the exile groups based in Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia, others went to the UK or North America. The British High Commission, whose records are, despite their bias and prejudices, by far the most important source of contemporary material on Amin's Uganda, was operating under severe limitations from 1973 onwards, with frequent expulsions of key staff, and restrictions on travel outside Kampala. Above all, though, it is important to focus on the severe human rights violations that took place in this period.

3. Human Rights in International Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Dunne ◽  
Marianne Hanson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
International Responsibility ◽  
Duty To Protect ◽  
Theoretical Issues

This chapter examines the role of human rights in international relations. It first considers the theoretical issues and context that are relevant to the link between human rights and the discipline of international relations, focusing on such concepts as realism, liberalism, and constructivism. It then explores key controversies over human rights as understood in international relations as a field of study: one is the question of state sovereignty; another is the mismatch between the importance attached to human rights at the declaratory level and the prevalence of human rights abuses in reality. The chapter also discusses two dimensions of international responsibility: the duty to protect their citizens that is incumbent on all states in light of their obligations under the various human rights covenants; and the duty of states to act as humanitarian rescuers in instances where a state is collapsing or a regime is committing gross human rights violations.

Religious Courts in the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-72
Author(s):  
Michał Rynkowski
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Evangelical Lutheran Church ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Religious Courts

AbstractReligious courts have for centuries been part of the European legal landscape. Almost all churches and religious communities have their own judicial systems, often composed of courts or tribunals ordered hierarchically. The aim of this paper is to present cases from the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, in which a religious court was involved at the stage of domestic proceedings. The twelve cases in question originate from a number of European States, from Italy to Finland and from the UK to Turkey—and in one particular case, Israel. The applicants belonged to many denominations, predominantly Christian. The Court of Human Rights (and before that, the Commission of Human Rights) has been concerned, in the main, with religious courts in terms of compliance with the requirement for a fair hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal under Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The Court has come to various conclusions—for example, it accepted that courts of the Church of England comply with the requirement, it questioned whether the cathedral chapter of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland did so, and it indirectly criticized proceedings before the Roman Rota of the Catholic Church. The most recent judgment from September 2017, Nagy v. Hungary, and in particular many associated dissenting opinions, demonstrate that the matter is worthy of study, particularly in the contemporary context of religious freedom. Nevertheless, the cases are so different that it is difficult to discern a coherent line of jurisprudence, and the Court itself hardly ever refers to its own previous judgments in this field.

International Criminal Prosecution of Physicians: A Critique of Professors Annas and Grodin's Proposed International Medical Tribunal

2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Mason Meier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
International Medical ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Criminal Prosecution ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Physician Participation ◽  
Do No Harm

Society benefits from physicians who seek truth and healing for the good of humanity. Despite ethical admonishments to “do no harm,” however, physicians have caused some of the most appalling human rights abuses of the twentieth century. Physicians, alone or in concert with the state, have willfully abused their medical knowledge and debauched their profession in furtherance of human rights violations. Compounding their crimes, physicians often have been complicit in following oppressive regimes in abusive practices against their citizens. Ironically, it is their knowledge of this healing art that allows physicians to take part in this injurious conduct; and it is this knowledge that states seek to harness in buttressing violative policies. In fact, for nations bent on violating human rights, it is “much easier for governments to adopt inherently evil and destructive policies if they are aided by the patina of legitimacy that physician participation provides.”

scholarly journals Obtaining Damages for Corporate Human Rights Violations in Investment Arbitration Through a Procedural Lens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin S
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Investment ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
International Investment Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Investment Arbitration ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
Investment Law

Over the past decades, transnational corporations have come under increasing public scrutiny for their involvement in human rights abuses, particularly in developing countries. One may think of violent acts against local communities, slave labor, and grand scale environmental pollution. International investment law protects and safeguards the rights of foreign investors but falls short of holding them accountable to societies where they operate. Recently, a few arbitral tribunals have grappled with the question of whether corporations can be held accountable for illegalities that constitute human rights violations inflicted upon the host state or its people. This article discusses the arbitral treatment of corporate human rights violations by investment tribunals in three treaty-based cases: Copper Mesa v. Ecuador, Burlington v. Ecuador and Urbaser v. Argentina and draws on recent scholarly work on causation in investor-state arbitration to evaluate their approaches.

Contemporary Sources of Human Rights Violations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmood Monshipouri
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Human Rights Abuse ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Prevalent Form

Given the systematic threats facing humanity, there is an urgent need for new thinking about the human rights project. The most prevalent form of global abuse exists in the form of violence against women and children. Sexual violence has been considered the most pervasive, yet least recognized human rights, abuse in the world. Equally prevalent among the modern sources of threats to physical integrity rights are the pervasive practice of torture and the issue of poverty and the threats it poses to human dignity and human rights. Individual civil-political rights and the rights of minorities, including women, ethnic and religious minorities, and indigenous people have been protected at times and violated at other times by states. Moreover, some observers argue that group rights should be properly understood as an extension of the already recognized collective rights to self-determination of people. But this broad spectrum of human rights violations can be organized into two categories: domestic and international. The domestic sources include both local and national sources of human rights abuses, and international sources entail international and global dimensions. These analyses are interconnected and reinforcing, but they can be contradictory at times. Understanding such complex interrelations is a necessary condition for describing factors and processes leading to abuses. In an applied sense, this understanding is essential for suggesting how we should proceed with the protection of basic human rights. Although there is agreement on the most pressing problems of human suffering, there is no consensus over the answers.

Revisiting the Causal Links between Economic Sanctions and Human Rights Violations

2020 ◽  
pp. 106591292094159
Author(s):  
Ryan Yu-Lin Liou ◽  
Amanda Murdie ◽  
Dursun Peksen
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
National Data ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Government Capacity ◽  
Causal Mediation Analysis ◽  
The Government ◽  
Cross National

There is some consensus in the literature that economic sanctions might prompt more human rights abuses in target countries. Yet, the causal mechanisms underlining the sanctions–repression nexus remain little understood. Using causal mediation analysis, we examine the processes through which sanctions might deteriorate human rights conditions. We specifically propose two indirect mechanisms driving human rights violations: increased domestic dissent and reduced government capacity. Sanctions are likely to trigger domestic dissent, and this instability would further induce the government to employ repression. Reduced government capacity caused by sanctions will harm the government’s ability to screen and oversee its security agents, which would subsequently lead to increased human rights abuses. Results from a time-series, cross-national data analysis indicate that sanctions-induced dissent, particularly violent dissent, plays a significant mediating role in the sanctions–repression link. Likewise, we find strong evidence that diminished fiscal capacity triggered by sanctions is likely to result in more repression. There is also some modest evidence that corruption as a proxy for poor governance mediates the sanctions–repression relationship.

Are stronger states more humane? A re-evaluation of ‘exemplary villains’

2020 ◽  
pp. 002234332091390
Author(s):  
Seung Hoon Chae
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Logistic Regressions ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

In general, the human rights scholarship finds stronger states to be more humane. In particular, Englehart’s recent book and article assert that ‘petty despots’, rather than ‘exemplary villains’, are the real culprits behind the abuse of human rights. However, some exemplary villains are truly exemplary; providing them with greater powers will only intensify human rights abuses. Indeed, the idea that even dictatorships would better protect rights when stronger contradicts some of the most well-known cases of mass-murder that occurred in powerful authoritarian states. In an attempt to resolve this puzzle, this article argues that, while state capacity does matter, it matters differently for dictatorships and democracies. In both regimes, there are certain types of human rights violations that, from the government’s perspective, happen unwittingly. These unauthorized human rights violations are perpetrated by petty despots trying to benefit from the state’s principal–agent problems. Yet, unlike a democracy, a dictatorship can authorize the violation of certain types of human rights to accomplish its objectives. Whereas state capacity can reduce ‘unauthorized’ types of abuses, it would not necessarily diminish such abuses that are ‘authorized’ by the state. The net effects of state capacity, therefore, will not be as positive for autocracies as they are for democracies. To validate this argument, this article conducts 18 ordered logistic regressions with a time-series cross-sectional dataset that encompasses no less than 142 countries from the period of 1981 to 2002. The empirical analysis provides solid support for the theorized relationship among human rights, state capacity and regime type. As predicted, state capacity improves human rights in democracies but not necessarily in autocracies.

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