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This book discusses all three species of human rights—moral, international, and national—at length, but it pays special attention to the moral reasons that are relevant to each species. The first part develops an original view of the nature and grounds of moral human rights based on the author’s previous publications in the general theory of rights. If respected, they confer some sphere of dominion on the right-holder in some potential confrontation and are grounded on specifically moral reasons. The second part explains how moral human rights are relevant to both the justification and the interpretation of human rights in international law and identifies several other relevant moral considerations, such as peace and social justice. The third part argues that different kinds of moral and international human rights ought to be incorporated into national legal systems in four distinct ways: in a written constitution, judicial decisions, legislation, and human rights treaties. Finally it explains how the moral dimensions of human rights are relevant to the alleged use of torture in the interrogation of detainees in the Bush administration war on terrorism.

The book explores how new democracies face an authoritarian past and past human rights violations, and the way in which policies of truth and justice shape the process of democratization. Eighteen countries in Central and South America, Central, Eastern and South Europe and South Africa are analysed in detail. The main variables affecting the implementation of truth and justice policies (purges, truth commissions and trials, among other policies) are: the balance between old and new regime forces; the availability of institutional, human and financial resources, the nature of the ideological preferences and commitments of the elites in question; the mobilization of social groups pressing in favour of these policies; and the importance of human rights in the international arena. The duration and degree of institutionalization of dictatorship is also important. A prolonged dictatorship makes it harder for a new democracy to implement truth and justice policies, particularly when repression occurred in the distant past and if repression gained social complicity. The magnitude and methods of repression used against opposition forces in the dictatorship also shape transitional truth and justice: torture, assassination, and disappearances and clandestine repression in general (as in Central and South America, South Africa) require a different response to official institutionalized ‘softer’ repression (as in Portugal, Spain and Eastern Europe). The findings indicate that, with hindsight, there appears to be no direct relation between the implementation of policies of backward-looking truth and justice and the quality of new democracies. Democracy is just as strong and deep in Spain, Hungary and Uruguay, where there was no punishment or truth telling, as it is in Portugal, the Czech Republic or Argentina, which experienced purges and trials. However, such policies are justified not merely on instrumental grounds, but also for ethical reasons, and they symbolize a break with a violent, undemocratic past.

Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, this book tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? The book looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, the book considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and it explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, the book also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, the book illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.

This book gathers fourteen essays on torture, addressing its complexities from the perspectives of psychology, history, philosophy, law, and cultural commentary. It appears in the wake of the American “War on Terror,” and the apparent evaporation of a broad consensus in international law, the U.S. legal community, and public thinking that torture is never an acceptable act, even in war. The chapters of the book seek to understand the historical and cultural roots of torture; to assess its impacts on survivors, their societies, and those who engage in it or with its victims; to consider philosophical arguments about its justification; and to consider how law and lawyers should confront the problem of torture. While there is no single message or thesis running throughout the book, all of the chapters seek to bring out the complexity of torture as a social, psychological, legal and ethical problem. The introductory chapter, by torture survivor Albie Sachs, who went on to become a justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, demonstrates many of the challenges that torture creates for a society, and for conceiving justice in the wake of torture. Many of the subsequent chapters address the possibilities and difficulties for law and social institutions to respond effectively to torture by creating legal frameworks and structural barriers to guard against the temptations that torture offers. While none of the chapters defend using torture, many grapple with the difficulties of explaining convincingly why ethics absolutely prohibits torture.

This book brings together the best contemporary philosophical work in the area of the intersection between philosophy of language and the law. Some of the contributors are philosophers of language who are interested in applying advances in philosophy of language to legal issues, and some of the participants are philosophers of law who are interested in applying insights and theories from philosophy of language to their work on the nature of law and legal interpretation. By making this body of recent work available in a single volume, this book gives both a general overview of the various interactions between language and law, and also detailed analyses of particular areas in which this interaction is manifest. The contributions to this volume are grouped under three main general areas: The first area concerns a critical assessment, in light of recent advances in philosophy of language, of the foundational role of language in understanding the nature of law itself. The second main area concerns a number of ways in which an understanding of language can resolve some of the issues prevalent in legal interpretation, such as the various ways in which semantic content can differ from law's assertive content; the contribution of presuppositions and pragmatic implicatures in understanding what the law conveys; the role of vagueness in legal language, for example. The third general topic concerns the role of language in the context of particular legal doctrines and legal solutions to practical problems, such as the legal definitions of inchoate crimes, the legal definition of torture, or the contractual doctrines concerning default rules.

This is a book of three philosophical chapters on aspects of terrorism, torture, and war. It relates issues in ethical theory to practical ethics. The chapter on torture considers views about what torture is and the various occasions on which it could occur in order to determine why it might be wrong to torture a wrongdoer held captive, even if this were necessary to save his victims. The discussion of terrorism examines whether it is the intention to harm civilians rather than harm to them being “collateral damage” that makes terrorism distinctively wrong, what else might make it wrong, and whether it is always wrong. The third chapter first discusses whether having a right reason, in the sense of a right intention, is necessary in order for starting war to be just. It then examines ways in which the harms of war can be proportional to the achievement of the just cause and other goods war can bring about, so as to make starting war permissible.

This book offers a challenging and original normative approach to some of the most pressing practical concerns in world politics —including the contested nature of the prohibitions against torture and the targeting of civilians in the war on terror. The author’s vision of ‘embedded cosmopolitanism’ responds to the charge that conventional cosmopolitan arguments neglect the profound importance of community and culture, particularity and passion. Bringing together insights from communitarian and feminist political thought, the author defends the idea that community membership is morally constitutive—while arguing that the communities that define us are not necessarily territorially bounded and that a moral perspective situated in them need not be parochial. The book employs this framework to explore some of the difficult moral dilemmas thrown up by contemporary warfare. Can universal principles of restraint demanded by conventional laws of war be robustly defended from a position that also acknowledges the moral force of particular ties and loyalties? By highlighting the links that exist even between warring communities, the author offers new reasons for giving a positive response—reasons that reconcile claims to local attachments and global obligations. The book provides an account of where we stand in relation to ‘strangers’ and ‘enemies’ in a diverse and divided world, and provides a theoretical framework for addressing the relationship between our moral starting point and the scope of our duties to others.

The most feared man in China, Dai Li, was chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service during World War II. This sweeping biography of “China's Himmler”, based on recently opened intelligence archives, traces Dai's rise from obscurity as a rural hooligan and Green Gang blood-brother to commander of the paramilitary units of the Blue Shirts and of the dreaded Military Statistics Bureau: the world's largest spy and counterespionage organization of its time. In addition to exposing the inner workings of the secret police, whose death squads, kidnappings, torture, and omnipresent surveillance terrorized critics of the Nationalist regime, Dai Li's personal story opens a unique window on the clandestine history of China's Republican period. This study uncovers the origins of the Cold War in the interactions of Chinese and American special services operatives who cooperated with Dai Li in the resistance to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and who laid the groundwork for an ongoing alliance against the Communists during the revolution that followed in the 1940s. The book illustrates how the anti-Communist activities Dai Li led altered the balance of power within the Chinese Communist Party, setting the stage for Mao Zedong's rise to supremacy. It reveals a complex and remarkable personality that masked a dark presence in modern China—one that still pervades the secret services on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The book illuminates a previously little-understood world as it discloses the details of Chinese secret service trade-craft.