Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice
Books / Hardcover
Books › Political Science › Civil Rights
ISBN: 1565845978 / Publisher: New Pr, May 2000
Explains how the identification of a crime against humanity, first defined at Nuremburg, has become the key that unlocks the closed door of state sovereignty and that holds political leaders responsible for the evils they visit upon humankind.
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The controversial story of how the human rights idea has come to dominate world politics, from Kosovo to East Timor. For centuries it seemed an impossible dream that international institutions could ever tell nation-states how to treat their own citizens. But after a century in which 160 million lives have been lost to war, genocide, and torture, the human rights movement is gathering popular and political strength, as evidenced by the war-crimes trials for Bosnia and Rwanda, the Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court, the arrest of General Pinochet, and the NATO attack on Serbian sovereignty to punish the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo. Crimes Against Humanity is the first work to weave disparate strands of history, philosophy, international law, and politics into a comprehensive and engrossing account of this increasingly significant movement. Geoffrey Robertson, one of the world's leading human-rights lawyers, reveals with passion and precision how human rights have penetrated the legal armor of the sovereign state. He explains how an identification of the crime against humanity, first defined at Nuremburg, has become the key that unlocks the closed door of state sovereignty, and that holds political leaders responsible for the evils they visit upon humankind.
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