Following an initiative of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, two high-profile and critical experts on international law have undertaken the task to survey the present state of the ‘UN Human Rights machinery’, as well as to present different perspectives on possible improvements in various areas its future developments. The result of their efforts is an exceptionally dense collection of sophisticated articles, full of critical insights and significant reform proposals. […]

by Juan Pablo Pérez-León Acevedo

The Latin-American scenario was characterized by the presence of several protracted and intense internal armed conflicts as well as widespread and systematic human rights violations committed by dictatorships in peace time. […]

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.

by Roberta Bacic and Elizabeth Stanley

Until the establishment of the Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Polí­tica y Tortura (National Commission for Political Imprisonment and Torture, hereafter the Comisión), the issues of political imprisonment and torture had been neglected in Chile. This is not to say that there has been no movement at all on the issue. In 1991, the Rettig Report acknowledged torture as a recurrent and institutionalised event, and torture was shown to have preceded most of the executions and ‘disappearances’ of victims. Further, in the transition from dictatorship, some torture survivors have been able to receive personal medical assistance from the Government, others were able to regain their civil rights by challenging official documentation that presented them as criminals, while some have been accepted as viable witnesses in human rights court cases. However, these rights were hard to attain and, at an official level, those who survived imprisonment and torture were not generally acknowledged. […]

by Rainer Huhle

In many memorials to the victims of National Socialism (NS), or Nazism, and other places of remembrance of the NS era, using the past as a reference point has become a pressing question. This is due to the growing percentage of visitors who do not experience the emphatic anti-fascist impulse that many members of the first postwar generation experience, because they have grown up in a completely different world, with other important issues. As the 37th Day of Remembrance in Weimar in May 2002 demonstrated, the staff at the numerous memorials respond differently to this challenge, which in the end questions the meaning of historical memorials.

A comprehensive exhibit of the NS buildings and their role in the general system of National Socialism was opened in Nuremberg at the end of 2001on the Party Rally Grounds (Reichsparteitaggelaende) in a section of the so-called Congress Hall designed for this purpose. It was developed from a simple pre-existing exhibition within the “Zeppelin Grandstand” that was only open part of the year. […]

by José Miguez Bonino

A search like many others … and yet with a difference

One of the most infamous chapters in the “Book of Terror” written by our century is the story of the people who disappeared during the military dictatorship in Argentina. In the twenty-three years which have passed since the start of that dictatorship and today, hundreds of thousands of Argentinians have taken to the streets demanding “truth, justice and punishment of the culprits”. […]