This chapter discusses several key aspects and basics of the European Convention on Human Rights. First, it explains two main principles underlying the ECHR system as a whole: the principle of effective protection of fundamental rights and the principle of subsidiarity. In addition, the double role of the Court within the Convention system is set out, which is to offer individual redress or individual justice when Convention rights have been violated on the national level, and to clarify Convention rights standards (which is the Court’s constitutional role). The Chapter further addresses the three main stages of the Court’s review, which correspond to the structure of most of the Convention rights: (1) deciding on the applicability and interpretation of a Convention right; (2) determining if there is an interference with the right; (3) reviewing whether a justification can be given for this interference. Finally, a typology is provided of Convention rights according to the possibilities for restricting these rights, e.g. paying attention to absolute, non-derobable rights and distinguishing between different types derogable rights.

Chapter 8 argues that despite significant munificence to the compensation and redress schemes for historical abuses, the approach taken across a range of states misses the opportunity to transform the relationship between victim-survivors of historical abuse and the states and churches responsible for their harm. If the monetary and material dimensions of reparations are necessarily inadequate to the harms experienced, then the symbolic and communicative dimensions form a critical part of reparations as a response to historical-structural injustice. Rather than act as a form of settlement and closure of claims regarding wrongs, reparations can also serve as an example, to communicate ongoing commitments from states and churches to other aspects of transitional justice, that reflect a desire for a renewed relationship between victim-survivors.

This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973). It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Chapter 3 explains how any evaluation of effectiveness requires the measurement of goal realization. In order to understand what an effective remedy is and could be, it is thus necessary to know the purposes the effective remedy is to serve. The chapter proceeds by explaining how remedies may have different purposes which are connected to different functions in different manners. Further, even though the Court's case law reveals that Article 13 advocates a specific form of access to justice and that the primary purpose of the required redress is to correct individual justice, it remains uncertain to what extent Article 13, also, promotes other functions and purposes, for example, to what extent the access to justice required by Article 13 has independent procedural value apart from being a prerequisite for achieving redress, to what extent Article 13 must promote general and/or individual deterrence, and to what extent Article 13 has a function of promoting and regulating the relationship between the domestic and international levels by promoting, for example, subsidiarity and the rule of law.

Chapter 11 accounts for the redress required by Article 13. The chapter demonstrates that in early case law the Court mostly limited itself to a statement that redress had to be provided, without any further specification. However, increasingly, in some specific contexts, the Court has laid down the form and specific measures required. But the Court's reasoning is very case specific. This makes it hard to deduce general and principled starting-points which can be applied to new cases. For example, the Court has not in a general manner required that the remedy needs to be able to put an end to continuing violations, with possible proportional exceptions, or set out any principled starting-points as to when compensation and/or restitution is necessary. Further, the the case law concerning effective investigations is particularly unclear. Indeed, even though the Court requires effective investigations under Article 13, it is highly unclear how this requirement relates to similar requirements under substantive Articles and to what extent effective investigations is percieved as a form of redress, as such.

In Chapter 5 the definition of political institutions drives us to a discussion of the main ‘institutes’ that constitute them. Individual and atomistic political norms and rules are so many over space and time that a detailed discussion is impossible. While norms/rules identify micro political institutions, with the term ‘political institute’ I identify those clusters of norms-rules that preside over the solution to a functional political problem, namely: norms and rules of selection, responsibility, inclusion, representation, decision, competence, accountability, devolution and redress. In my view, these nine institutes cover and exhaust the field of political normativity. Each of them is discussed analytically and historically in the chapter.

Chapter 9 examines the historical arc of sovereignty and national belonging through the physical sites created for redress and reconciliation at Manzanar. Like other traumatized populations, the move to redress the injustices of incarceration occurred at a temporal distance after the event, initiated in the USA mainly at the insistence of Sansei, the college-aged children of incarcerees, demanding to know what had happened in “camps.” This Nisei leadership of the postwar redress movement included many extraordinary “unquiet” women, at a time when the patriarchal structure of Japanese American communities prevailed. Sue Kunitomi Embrey’s legacy as thirty-year Chair of the Manzanar Committee is the creation of the National Park Service’s Manzanar National Historic Site.

One of the most important questions that must be tackled in defining a benchmark of accountability is to identify its purpose, objective or rationale. The first challenge is to identify the underlying purpose or rationale for accountability. After all, we cannot hope to say whether an amount of accountability is ‘ideal’ unless we can indicate what an ideal status quo position looks like. This chapter identifies the overarching goal of accountability as being to reinforce the legitimacy of government. In a more concrete sense, that overarching goal is supported through five rationales. The first is transparency, which is concerned with providing the public with a means to scrutinise government decisions and operations. The second is control, which is concerned with providing the public with a means to ensure that the government complies with relevant requirements. The third is redress, which is concerned with providing redress to individuals harmed by government wrongdoing. The fourth is desert, which is concerned with condemning wrongdoing, and the fifth is deterrence, which is about encouraging improved processes going forward.

This chapter provides a survey of poetic reactions to human rights violations in the contemporary world. Theodor Adorno declared in 1949, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” a sentiment symptomatic of the shock that made literature seem inadequate in dealing with the scale of human injustice revealed by the Holocaust. However, the human capacity for wrongdoing remains endemic to our times. Wherever human rights violations have proved irresistible, poets have sought redress through the symbolic action of poetry, giving proof of how we might invert the sentiments of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In the teeth of modern barbarism, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, poetry continues to remind humanity of what will keep us humane and human.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.