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Abstract
Insecurity has worsened in one of the eleven regions of Ethiopia, Oromiya, due to the killings of innocent Amharas. While there is increasing academic attention on the origins, causes, and nature of this threat, the role of the incitement of public officials in the commission of the killings and/or genocide in the region remains understudied. Accordingly, foregrounded by the need to unravel this gap, this qualitative study contributes to the literature through organised empirical research by examining Ethiopia’s public officials’ speeches and/or incitement, which might have helped in the commission of ethnic Amhara genocide in the Oromiya region since 2018. Three critical world events served as the main theoretical foundations for the analysis of incitement to genocide: the Nuremberg Prosecutions, the United Nations Genocide Convention, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It was found that both Prime Minister Abiy’s and Shimelis Abdisa’s speeches have mounted to qualify as incitements to genocide by being concomitant to the context, purpose, and causation. It is thus sufficient to remark that the speeches are used to further instigate genocide against ethnic Amharas. The study’s central argument holds that the causal link between the speech in question and the massacre in the region doubles the synthesis, although the UN Convention does not require a direct causal link.
Abstract
Corporate involvement in atrocity crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, has become an important topic for ngo s, activists and scholars from different disciplines, often focusing on the important question how to achieve a better regulation of and accountability for corporate roles in atrocities. This contribution, instead, is focused on the aetiology of this phenomenon. A theoretical framework is proposed based on, on the one hand, what follows from criminological research on corporate crime, state crime and state-corporate crime and, on the other hand, in-depth case studies of three contexts: Nazi Germany (1933–1945), Apartheid South Africa (1948–1994) and the drc (1996–2016). The proposed framework identifies the motivational drivers, opportunity aspects, and elements of the (lack of) control that, together, can explain why that corporation became involved in atrocity crimes. The framework is intended to—through application to new case studies—improve knowledge about and understanding of corporate involvement in atrocity crimes and to expand the conceptual and theoretical understanding of this phenomenon.
Abstract
The UK’s Human Rights Act 1998 is a target of legislative action aimed at undermining its ability to protect universal human rights. This article sets out to characterise those ongoing assaults as an example of populist constitutionalism. Understanding them as such is, I will argue, a necessary first step in formulating defensive strategies that might effectively protect the future of legal human rights protection in the UK. In order to come up with such a strategy, it is necessary to take a critical look at how the Human Rights Act has been bound-up with social, political, and economic processes that have led to the seemingly inexorable rise of populism across the globe. With those imbrications in mind, I propose some modest but ambitious legal reforms that might empower bottom-up human rights movements to dig-up authoritarian populism at its roots.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore how the European Court of Human Rights has tackled majoritarian will when dealing with ‘hard cases’ of human rights. Under its jurisprudence, the Court has long relied on the existence of a ‘European consensus’ to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the Court has inconsistently shifted between deference to and rejection of internal consensus, which refers to the prevailing view held by the majority in a particular state. On the one hand, the Court has deferred to an internal consensus that favours restrictions on abortion, but on the other hand, in cases concerning sexual minorities, it has rejected the use of internal consensus to restrict rights. At the same time, with the Court undergoing a procedural turn where the assessment of proportionality is focused on the quality of domestic decision-making rather than a substantive analysis, today the Court is more likely to defer to reasoned and thoughtful internal consensus, which indicates a new Strasbourg-style majoritarian approach to human rights.