Understanding Human Rights

The Shelter City Project

In many countries around the world, human rights defenders are persecuted for their work and convictions. They are put under surveillance, threatened, harassed, and detained arbitrarily; often, they face enforced disappearance, torture, and even death. One of the organizations concerned with the protection of human rights defenders is the Dutch NGO Justice & Peace. In 2012, the organization founded the program Shelter City. Under the program, human rights defenders are offered temporary protection for three months in a Dutch city. In this time, they can recover and resume their work in peace.

Social Rights

Climate Change as a Social and Political Issue: What Happens to Those Displaced by Climate Change, and Who Are They?

In 2013, a family from the small Pacific Island country of Kiribati left their home in Tarawa, Kiribati and headed to New Zealand. Ioane Teitiota and his family became the first to apply for refugee status due to the impacts of climate change – stating that climate change had created unsuitable living conditions in Kiribati and had devastated the island so much that it was no longer safe for them to live there. A primary concern of Teitiota and other I-Kiribati is sea level rise, seeing as the islands of Kiribati sit only 2 – 3 meters above sea level. Kiribati is just one country and community out of many impacted by climate change in this way. The story of Kiribati is familiar in nearby islands, including Tuvalu, Fiji, Tonga, and others. The Pacific islands make up only 0.03% of global emissions, yet they continue to bear the brunt of the impacts, and they remain as one region in the forefront of the climate crisis. In turn, people are displaced from their communities either by force or necessity – and this phenomenon is not unique to the Pacific.

International Criminal Law

Towards a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the former Yugoslavia

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the need for, and the prospect of, establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the former Yugoslavia. The ratio for such a commission has much to do with the failings of the Yugoslav Tribunal to realize its didactic purposes to its fullest potential, a consequence of anti-Tribunal propaganda and the inability to generate a form of truth that would serve as an adequate basis for post-conflict reconciliation. Following the outlining of these shortcomings, this paper shall assess some of the past and more recent attempts aimed towards the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission within the former Yugoslav states.

Regions

The right to truth and justice – why do the archives of Chile’s National Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture remain secret for 50 years?

This question is examined by Chilean laywer Felipe Téllez, who draws the conclusion that the law which imposes the restriction of access needs to be changed, at least in order to grant judicial bodies access to relevant information in order to help with their investigations.

Projects

From Nuremberg to The Hague – The Road to the International Criminal Court

The stony path from The Nuremberg Trial 60 years ago, when those primarily responsible for the war and war crimes in Germany had to answer for their actions, to finally establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 is presented in an exhibition, which was inaugurated on October 2, 2006 in The Hague.