Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 110707987X ISBN 13: 9781107079878

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

In the twenty-first century, fighting impunity has become both the rallying cry and a metric of progress for human rights. The new emphasis on criminal prosecution represents a fundamental change in the positions and priorities of students and practitioners of human rights and transitional justice: it has become almost unquestionable common sense that criminal punishment is a legal, political, and pragmatic imperative for addressing human rights violations. This book challenges that common sense. It does so by documenting and critically analyzing the trend toward an anti-impunity norm in a variety of institutional and geographical contexts, with an eye toward the interaction between practices at the global and local levels. Together, the chapters demonstrate how this laser focus on anti-impunity has created blind spots in practice and in scholarship that result in a constricted response to human rights violations, a narrowed conception of justice, and an impoverished approach to peace.

About this title

About the Authors

Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law, and Founder and Co-Director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the 2016–17 Deborah Lunder and Alan Ezekowitz Founders' Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

Zinaida Miller is Assistant Professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University, New Jersey.

D. M. Davis is Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court of South Africa, and a Judge of the High Court of Cape Town. He is Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Cape Town.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 110707987X
• ISBN 13: 9781107079878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 398
• Editor: Engle Karen, Miller Zinaida, Davis D. M.