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This title explores the principles and mechanisms for the reparation of human rights violations under international human rights law. It discusses the obligation of states to provide full reparation for harm suffered as a result of human rights violations, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. The section examines the legal standards for determining and quantifying reparation, the procedural aspects of reparation processes, and the role of international and national bodies in monitoring and enforcing reparation awards. It also highlights the challenges in ensuring effective and timely reparation, the importance of victim participation in reparation processes, and the impact of reparation on the rehabilitation and empowerment of victims. By analyzing the principles and practices of reparation, this title aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms for addressing the consequences of human rights violations and the importance of reparation in achieving justice and reconciliation.
This part explores the principles and mechanisms for the reparation of human rights violations and the enforcement of decisions rendered by international human rights bodies. It discusses the obligation of states to provide full reparation for harm suffered as a result of human rights violations, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. The sections examine the legal standards for determining and quantifying reparation, the procedural aspects of reparation processes, and the role of international and national bodies in monitoring and enforcing reparation awards. Additionally, this part focuses on the enforcement mechanisms and challenges in implementing international human rights decisions. It discusses various models of enforcement, including judicial review, hybrid monitoring, and political and diplomatic control. The part highlights the importance of effective enforcement in ensuring the realization of human rights and the accountability of states for human rights violations. By providing insights into the reparation and enforcement processes, this part emphasizes the critical role of comprehensive and effective mechanisms in achieving justice and reconciliation for victims of human rights violations.
This chapter explores the principle of full reparation for human rights violations under international human rights law. It discusses the obligation of states to provide reparation, the forms of reparation, and the challenges in implementing this principle. The chapter examines the legal standards for full reparation, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. It also highlights the role of international bodies in monitoring and enforcing reparation obligations, the importance of victim participation in reparation processes, and the challenges in providing adequate and effective reparation for human rights violations.
Reparations for grand corruption: applies a human rights framework based on the UN Basic Principles on Remedy and Reparations to thinking about reparations for grand corruption on a national level. Under restitution, covers social reuse of confiscated property, and land restitution. Compensation is broken down into categories of damages arising from different corrupt acts, with a focus on loss of opportunity damages. The chapter also considers satisfaction, measures of non-repetition, diffuse harms and issues of causation.
This chapter addresses the place of material culture in the global turn in European history. How did extra-European objects come to be part of, and sometimes even define, the materiality of Europe? Goods from outside Europe have gained attention as objects of historical research through several separate pathways: the focus on global goods in the field of economic history on the one hand, and the growing presence of ethnographic objects and anthropological approaches in historical studies on the other. The thinking about material culture in Europe has profoundly changed with the integration of the global turn. From considering European material culture only from within a tightly bordered European perspective, approaches have shifted to not only identifying the ubiquity of non-European goods within European material landscapes but also recognising the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between European and non-European. European material culture is now understood to be full of traces that lead back to empire, colonial oppression, and the exploitation of labour. It includes objects that that were created elsewhere for European consumers, objects that were brought to Europe by collectors and (scientific) explorers, as well as European-made objects consumed and/or recreated in other parts of the world.
Escalating ground rents in long residential leases (rents that double or are adjusted by reference to an index at regular intervals) have been described as onerous and can prevent property sales. This article considers whether they are legally enforceable under consumer protection legislation. Although litigation would be needed both to clarify the application of key provisions in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to ground rent terms, and to take account of the individual lease terms, the article concludes that escalating ground rent provisions may not be binding where the leaseholder is a consumer. Further, if the rent provisions are held to be unfair it would mean that the leaseholder does not have to pay and can recover sums already paid. This conclusion would therefore also weaken the human rights arguments made against the government’s plans to tackle problematic ground rents.
On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short term restitution. However, from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations which dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and many businesses were lost once again. Drawing on archival sources from government documentation to diaries and newspaper reports, this study explores both the early success and later reversal of restitution policies. In doing so, it sheds light on the postwar treatment of Romanian Jewish survivors, and the reasons so many survivors emigrated from Romania.
The debates on the ownership of contested cultural objects bring forth questions regarding the representation of history. But might these debates also lead to the fabrication of history? Previous research has analyzed how the British Museum’s anti-restitution position contributes to its distortion of British (Museum) history. Instead, this article considers if – and, if so, how – history is distorted to argue for restitution. It examines the eulogized publication The Brutish Museums (2020) by Oxford professor Dan Hicks asking whether his claims regarding British mass atrocities in the conquest of Benin in 1897 can be substantiated by the documentary evidence. The investigation shows that this is not the case. The article also scrutinizes what the source material reveals about the death toll of the events of 1897. The results of the inquiry question oversimplified notions about culprits and victims in the wake of colonial conquest. It is argued that an incomplete understanding of the past impairs efforts to repair past wrongs and that questions about the ownership of colonial collections could productively be linked with questions about the representation of history, such as whose and which histories are told – or not – through contested objects.
The so-called “Prakhon Chai Hoard” is one of Southeast Asia’s most infamous cases of looting. The story begins in 1964 when a cache of Buddhist bronzes from Northeast Thailand appeared on the international art market via the auction house Spink & Son, London. They quickly ended up in museums and private collections throughout the US and Europe. The exact findspot was unclear but soon became associated with an unidentified temple in Prakhon Chai district in Buriram province. The moniker “Prakhon Chai Hoard/bronzes” subsequently took hold, becoming commonplace in museum displays, dealer/auction house catalogs, and art historical discourse. However, in 2002, it was revealed the temple in question was Plai Bat II in Lahan Sai district.
This article untangles the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding this act of looting. It does so by reviewing the extant literature in light of information revealed by criminal investigations into the late Douglas Latchford from 2012 onwards, and presenting conclusions drawn from our decade-long documentation of villager testimonies at Plai Bat II (2014–2024).
Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.
This chapter discusses the account of profits, disgorgement, and other forms of gain-based relief. It will consider the difference between compensation, restitution and disgorgement. It will then consider the account of profits, and the operation of bars to relief and other limiting factors.
The primary rationales of the account of profits have been identified as deterrence and prophylaxis (that is, preventing a defendant from gaining from wrongdoing). Deterrence looks not to the dispute in question, but to the future conduct of the specific defendant (specific deterrence) and the future conduct of other potential defendants (general deterrence). By stripping the defendant of her gain (or part of her gain), the defendant (and other potential defendants) will be deterred from engaging in similar conduct in the future. It is argued that the remedies discussed in this chapter have a deterrent flavour.
A remedy is specific when the plaintiff seeks to get the court to coerce the defendant into doing (or not doing) a particular thing. The word ‘coercion’ is used advisedly. The court orders the defendant to do (or not to do) the particular thing, and if the defendant refuses to comply, the court may use measures such as imprisonment, sequestration and fines to encourage compliance with its order. The two most important examples of specific relief in Australia are the decree of specific performance and the injunction. This chapter will consider specific performance, and the next chapter will consider injunctions. Specific performance relates to ordering the defendant to comply with the terms of a contract, but injunctions may be ordered across private law and beyond. Specific performance is exclusively equitable, and generally operates in relation to a common law cause of action; namely, breach of contract.
The concept of ‘remedy’ used in this chapter encompasses a court order replicating a preexisting right, not a response to civil wrongdoing. Restitutionary remedies responding to unjust enrichment differ from remedies responding to a wrong (breach of contract, tort, or equitable wrong). As noted in Ch 1, they do not fit easily into a division between the primary right and the secondary remedy. It is for this reason that the cause of action and the remedy overlap, and they are notoriously difficult to untangle. Discussions of restitutionary remedies inevitably turn into discussions of the cause of action.
The law of civil remedies has frequently been described as a ‘capstone’ private law subject. In other words, it is the culmination of a student’s knowledge of private law, and it is intended to assist all the disparate strands from previously studied private law subjects to come together.
It is for this reason that we will take a generally ‘functional’ approach to the organisation of this book, grouping remedies from across different areas according to the broad functions they perform so that parallels and contrasts can be made.
In the late nineteenth century, Western Powers launched military campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa resulting in the colonization of vast territories and the spoliation of cultural property. To justify the conquest, they asserted the supremacy of Western culture and disregarded principles of international law in their dealings with African states, communities, and individuals. This article examines colonialist legal justifications such as the denial of statehood of pre-colonial sub-Saharan African societies, the notion that conquest and spoliation were justifiable, and the belief that African legal systems lacked concepts of property. The article details why these arguments contradict well-established nineteenth-century legal principles, particularly state sovereignty and private property, which together form the conceptual basis for the prohibition of spoliation. The universal nature of those principles allows for the nondiscriminatory application and interpretation of historical law and consequently the protection of African pre-colonial states and private as well as public cultural property.
While disputes concerning the return of antiquities and artworks have become increasingly prevalent and receive public attention, the parallel issue of returning unlawfully exported fossils is rarely discussed. The fossils of “Ubirajara jubatus” and Irritator challengeri are prime examples of such disputes: they were taken from Brazil unlawfully, as Brazilian researchers allege, and displayed in German museums. The return disputes were characterized by both parties relying on arguments based almost exclusively on public (international) law. This Article explores private law as an alternative approach to these and similar disputes, discussing whether the fossils are the property of Brazil and could, therefore, be claimed in an action for restitution under German law. It finds that both fossils belong to Brazil since the museums did not acquire good title through a good faith purchase or acquisitive prescription.
Victims’ rights, whether they take the form of a procedural right of access to justice or participation, or a substantive right to reparation, fulfil a number of important functions. Ideally, they allow victims to assert their rights, redress power imbalances manifest in violations, provide a measure of justice and furnish the victim(s) with the means to cope and rebuild their lives. They may also lead to a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing that recognises unlawful suffering, demonstrates society’s respect for, and solidarity with, the victim(s), and affirms the rule of law. In addition, victims’ rights play an important role in contributing to prevention through deterrence (punishment and/or payment of damages or other forms of reparation) and systemic changes to counter violations, such as legislative and institutional reforms. A series of open questions and challenges remain. Do the rights granted in various treaties and declarations translate into a right to reparation under international law, and, if so, does this apply in relation to all or only some particularly serious human rights violations? Who are the rights-holders and what are their entitlements? Recent developments also raise questions of coherence and effectiveness in light of the proliferation of victims’ rights in various bodies of international law.
This chapter analyses how communities of care challenge the status quo of who possesses cultural heritage; it focuses on the way in which the notion of caring for extends across the generations to claims made by the descendants of past owners, communities of origin or states and the multivocality in decision-making. Frequently the question has been asked: who owns cultural heritage? But it is more helpful to consider whether there is a reason to challenge the status quo and to analyse how decisions are made about the appropriate course of action to take. Many UK national museums have prohibitive governing statutes preventing them from acceding to repatriation requests (although these have been eased in the context of Nazi Era spoliation and some human remains). In some cases, a defensive stance is taken to challenges which represents paternalistic care.Some individual museums which have faced repatriation claims in the past for human remains or other cultural heritage objects have developed their own policies and processes in response to this which represents dialogic care.
The Afterword reflects on the peculiarities of the CCP’s politics of historical justice. Placing the results of the volume in the larger context of transitional justice research, it discusses the reasons why the policies of “bringing order out of chaos” (boluan fanzheng) generated short-term cohesion but did not result in meaningful political reconciliation. The party leadership, despite a few alternative statements by high-ranking leaders in the early 1980s, did not allow for multivocal discussions of guilt and responsibility. Instead, it attempted to pacify the populace through financial subsidies, symbolic rehabilitations, and highly selective persecutions of supposed perpetrators. The core strategy under Deng Xiaoping was to overcome the legacies of the past through a focus on economic development and the depoliticization of past conflicts. An increasingly rigid truth regime was installed and enshrined in the 1981 resolution on party history. The contradictions between lived experience and these official formulae resulted in a pronounced shift toward historical amnesia in the following decades, as the legacies of the Mao era have become increasingly incorporated into a larger narrative of national rejuvenation and regaining great power status.