It was both cerebral -- How do we define "dignity" in law and human rights statutes?
The majority of those men were the victims of Jon Burge, a disgraced former Chicago police commander who was spared from being convicted of human rights crimes by statutes of limitations and a friendly prosecutor's office that rarely found wrongdoing by cops.
The American Civil Liberties Union represents a host of media, labor and human rights organizations challenging a statute authorizing the dragnet wiretapping of Americans' international communications.
Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch, said by telephone that there were still "glaring human rights shortcomings" in the statute of the Iraqi tribunal.
Governments have made commitments by ratifying human rights treaties and the statute of the international criminal court but, as we know only too well, they commit only to walk away, with South Africa's decision to let the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir leave the most recent, shameful example.
The DRC has voluntarily signed and ratified numerous human rights treaties, including the Statute of the International Criminal Court which encompasses war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Would it not be ludicrous if the Pinochet precedent forced people as different as Messrs Castro and Kissinger to fear, whenever they were abroad, that some judge somewhere might demand their trial under some human-rights statute?Well, no.
The families had sought to make the company the first foreign corporation found liable in a United States court for aiding human rights violations abroad under the statute.
The two statutes allow human rights victims to file for claims in United States courts even if both the plaintiffs and the defendants live in another country.
"It is my turn to ask, 'What have you done with my country?' " Mr. Duvalier, after his return, was charged with corruption; a court last year set aside human rights charges because it said the statute of limitations had expired.
"A single illegal detention of less than a day, followed by the transfer of custody to lawful authorities and a prompt arraignment, violates no norm of customary international law" and was not the type of egregious human rights violation that the Alien Tort Statute was intended to cover, Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court.
