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This section is the text of an address delivered by Nelson Mandela to the Kosovo Commission's final seminar. It focuses on Africa's need for international attention and assistance to fight gross violations of human rights and promote economic development in places of former and on‐going conflict such as Burundi.

This paper describes the reparations programs implemented in Chile from 1990 to 2004. These programs target the victims of human rights violations committed during the military regime (1973-1990). These include the relatives of the missing and executed persons; people who were dismissed from their jobs for political motives; peasants who participated in land reform and were expelled from the land for political reasons; and Chilean exiles returning to the country. Political prisoners and torture victims were considered only in 2003. The creation of the Commission for Political Imprisonment and Torture (2003-2005) was followed by a law which provides pensions to political prisoners and torture victims identified by the Commission. Created with different kinds of victims in mind, these programs were based on pensions, social services, educational benefits, and public recognition of the violations of the victims’ rights, monuments, sites of memory, and health assistance, mainly in the form of mental health services. The Program for Reparation and Integral Health Assistance for Victims of Human Rights Violations, created in 1991 and reinforced by a law at the end of 2004, has been the reparation measure for all kinds of victims of human rights violations, including third-generation relatives.

Truth commissions were created to investigate human rights violations as a result of political negotiations in both El Salvador and Haiti. The commissions included in their reports recommendations designed to secure reparations for the victims. However, despite the gravity of the events and the formal commitment of the governments, neither El Salvador nor Haiti has implemented these recommendations. Two case studies provide an opportunity to examine the economic, social, and political factors that explain non-compliance with truth-commission recommendations on reparations. This paper examines the experiences of El Salvador and Haiti, and presents some conclusions and lessons learned. The first and most important conclusion is that in order to ensure that reparations programs will be put into practice, a correlation of political forces that favors such programs is necessary. The construction of such a correlation depends on the existence of sufficiently powerful and influential players to promote and defend it.

This paper explores the reparations debate in post-apartheid South Africa and outlines the recommendations for reparations made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Although reparations were discussed at the multi-party negotiations at the end of apartheid, the new democratic constitution that came out of those negotiations did not provide for reparations. The legislation that created the TRC, however, established a special committee (the Committee on Reparations and Rehabilitation or CRR) to formally examine the reparations issue and make policy recommendations to the President. The CRR made its recommendations — widely considered to be one of the world’s most ambitious and comprehensive reparations policies — in the TRC’s 1998 Report. However, the South African government did not respond to these recommendations, arguing that since the work of other committees within the TRC was not yet finished, it could not consider the CRR’s proposed policy. Victim groups and civil society disagreed, and an acrimonious conflict ensued over the perceived slow pace of government action on reparations. Victims also pursued lawsuits for reparations against multinational corporations that conducted business with the apartheid government. In 2003, the government finally enacted a reduced version of the CRR’s original reparations policy.

Malawi’s five methods of paying reparations — court awards, the government’s Disaster Preparedness, Relief and Rehabilitation program, civil service grants, special payments to the political elite, and the National Compensation Tribunal (NCT) — have not brought public closure to past rights abuses and the antipathy they engendered. NCT procedures, which included neither public truth-telling nor the identification of perpetrators, have not fostered democratic consolidation. Growing out of a political compromise during the transition, the NCT has received nearly 20,000 claims and paid interim awards to less than one-third. Eligible are Malawians of any age who, between July 6, 1964 and May 17, 1994, were born in detention or exile, were subjected to wrongful imprisonment, forced exile, personal injury, lost property or business, lost educational opportunities, and/or employment benefits. An autonomous body within the judiciary, the NCT has been consistently underfunded and has limited the bulk of its payments to symbolic “condolences”. While the public is generally ignorant of the NCT, claimants are frustrated by its procedures, its “trivialization” of their pain and suffering, its “favouritism” as well as its failure to offer them full compensation, information about future payments, or a “sincere apology”. The existence of the NCT has allowed politicians to counter periodic public demands for a truth commission by asserting that the NCT is addressing the past and nothing more is needed.

In the aftermath of the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the UN Security Council determined that Iraq was liable under international law for any direct damage resulting from its unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait. The United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) was established to process the claims against Iraq. Since 1991, the UNCC has received approximately 2.6 million claims, which it has subdivided in six categories, depending on the status of the claimant, the type of loss, and the amount claimed. For certain claims, the UNCC has established fixed compensation standards, rather than assessing the exact amount of the loss. Other innovative features include mass claims resolution techniques and methodologies such as data matching, grouping, and sampling. The reparation process was funded through oil exports under the oil-for-food program. A share of originally 30% and later 25% of the proceeds was reserved for compensation. The oil-for-food program was terminated after the new war in Iraq in 2003, and the share of oil revenues dedicated to reparation was lowered to 5%. As of June 2005, the UNCC has decided nearly all claims.

This chapter examines the patterns of long-term institutional change which are typical for a number of important institutional rules governing the decision-making process in the European Union. It discusses five institutional rules: the European Parliament's role in legislation; the presidency of the Council; the Parliament and the Investiture of the Commission; the composition of the Commission; and controlling the implementation powers of the Commission. These rules are scrutinized in the light of the theoretical explanations outlined in Chapter 3. This is done to assess which theory offers the most plausible explanation for the institutional change in a particular period of time and to ascertain whether perhaps several factors derived from different theories interact with each other in explaining the outcome.

This chapter examines how three consequences of entrepreneurship induced diminishing returns for the European Commission. These are increased workload, shift to activities of comparative disadvantage, and intensifying demands of interest associations. It is shown that while individual instances of policy entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial activities of individual Directorates-General may promote discrete policy objectives, the aggregate consequences of many individual acts of entrepreneurship may cause problems for the Commission.

The book concludes that a plausible case can be made that Edward I had Domesday Book in mind when he commissioned the 1279–80 hundred roll inquiry, but that it evolved into something different as the commission was translated into articles and the articles were interpreted by the different commissioners. Findings about chronology, procedures, the nature of the surviving returns and the uses to which they have been put are summarized.

‘The House of Peers throughout the war/Did nothing in particular/And did it very well.’ The Levellers and the case for an elected parliament. The Lords since 1909. Remaining conditional vetoes. The Lords and the landed interest. Evolution of the Salisbury–Addison convention. Its fall since 1999. Mackay Commission. Wakeham Commission. Weakness of arguments for an unelected house. Contradictory votes in the Commons. The effectiveness (but doubtful legitimacy) of the post‐1999 Lords. Powers and composition of a (predominantly) elected chamber.

Surveys proposals for amending the 1947 Constitution. With the end of the Occupation in 1952, critics were free to propose amendments to the constitution. In its hearings, the Commission on the Constitution (1956‐1964) produced a host of arguments in favor of revision, but the conservative parties have never had the two‐thirds majority in the Diet required to pass an amendment. The 1991 Gulf War again stirred debate on the antiwar clause (Article 9) and stimulated a national debate on revision. In 1999, both houses of the Diet established commissions on the constitution and two years later, in May 2001, announced that public hearings would begin.

In the field of electoral systems, Britain has long held out as a bastion of stability, as the country seen as least likely to undergo fundamental electoral reform, but this picture was rudely shattered in the late spring of 1997, with the election of a new Labour government. The central argument of this chapter is that the current debate over British electoral reform should be viewed as part of a wider process of the coming of age of British politics. A review of the historical debate reveals a series of failed initiatives to reform the electoral system, suggesting that the matter has never been entirely put to rest, and that there has always been the prospect of its re‐emergence. The current episode, dating from the election of the new government in 1997, provides reason to expect that electoral reform may really happen this time, and indeed already has happened in a number of British electoral arenas (European Parliament; London mayor; Northern Ireland, Scottish, Welsh and London Assemblies). The chapter is arranged as follows: the first section summarizes the historical record from 1860 to 1970, and provides evidence of a political elite willing at least to countenance the idea of experimenting with change, even if not yet prepared to embrace it; the second section explores possible explanations for why the issue re‐emerged in the 1990s and describes the reforms implemented in that period (up to 2000); this is followed by an outline of the deliberations and proposals of the Independent Commission on the Voting System for the British House of Commons (the Jenkins Commission), which was established by the new Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, in December 1997, whose report was published in October 1998 and suggested ‘alternative vote plus (AV+)’ as the new electoral system; the concluding section discusses the current prospects for electoral reform in the UK.

The political problem of backlash is analogous to the economic problem of producing from a common pool. When a society has an asset that it uses in common, overusing it can destroy its value, and private economic incentives militate toward overusing a commonly-owned asset. To keep claims on the polity from overly destabilizing production, political deals that work, like economic common pool deals that work, may not be pretty and may not be efficient when compared to the ideal. These problems are best illustrates by the destructive drilling in the East Texas oil fields in the 1930s.

The relationship between the European Commission and the various lobbying groups in Brussels is explored, and it is argued that there is now a ‘mature’ institutionalized policy-making style governing interactions between the Commission and interest groups. The formal and informal rules by which the Commission receives and seeks to organize lobbyist’s views, and interest groups influence the Commission’s development of legislative proposals are catalogued. It is found that there has been a steady evolution of some formal, but more often informal, rules and procedures for lobbying organizations. These include: willingness to participate in early discussions; presenting rational/technical arguments based on reliable data; viewing European policy as an opportunity, not a threat; formulating European, not national or particularistic, solutions; understanding the problems and perspectives of other stakeholders in the process; and investing in the entire policy-making process. This development of a stable system of interest group representation for the European Union (EU), sited in Brussels, impinges heavily not only on policy processes and outcomes but also on how democracy in the EU will be conceived and debated.

The chapter first discusses the logic of lobbying of the European Commission by interest groups. The rest of the discussion is divided into three parts. The first section highlights the organizational and cultural characteristics of the Commission bureaucracy and the implications of these characteristics for groups seeking to develop effective lobbying strategies. The second section examines in detail recent attempts by the Commission to structure and institutionalize interest group consultation; this analysis highlights the increasing importance of both ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ consultative structures. The concluding section briefly considers the utility and limitations of group pluralism within the Commission and asks whether the neo–functionalist predictions have, in the event, turned out to be surprisingly accurate.