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The response of an incoming government to past crimes and gross violations of human rights depends primarily on a combination of domestic political, military and socioeconomic factors. However, international influences and institutions play an increasing role in shaping and affecting these processes. International efforts are in turn shaped partly by the perceived success or failure of domestic attempts to deal with the past. This chapter focuses on three areas in which these mutual influences manifest themselves: first, it examines the impact of international and transnational activity on the work of national courts, truth commissions, reparation schemes and political discourses about the past; second, it looks at the possibility of simultaneous actions in multiple arenas, since transnational justice also takes the form of legal actions brought in the national courts of one country against civil or criminal defendants based in another; the third area of influence discussed is the creation of new international institutions for accountability, although the extent to which these international efforts have influenced political or social reconstruction within societies is still unclear. The different sections of the chapter are: Introduction; Human Rights Institutions and Norms; Transnational Justice: The Pinochet Precedent; International Justice: The ‘Ad Hoc’ Tribunals and the ICC (International Criminal Court); and Conclusion.

The chapter argues that on a morally minimalist account of basic human rights, the ongoing allowing and infliction of severe poverty constitutes the systemic violation of a basic human right. It offers an interactionalist account of the duties imposed by the human right to subsistence, but one that takes direct responsibility for violations of these duties to be extremely broadly shared. It argues that conformity with the social institutions, practices, and mores under which the maximization of profit and personal gain is taken to be a normal and legitimate goal, even when it involves allowing or contributing to severe poverty and resisting reforms that would avoid this harm at modest economic cost, constitutes a trade-off between the interests of the affluent and the interests of those whose lives are blighted or destroyed by severe poverty that is morally intolerable. This trade-off, amounts to the discarding of persons’ lives.

Acknowledging hate crime as a human rights violation prompts recognition of such violence as a global indignity and a legitimate international concern. But should we categorize hate crime a human rights violation? The answer depends on how we conceptualize both hate crime and human rights. The chapter begins with a clarification of the concept hate crime; delimiting it in relation to crimes against humanity and arguing why the ensuing discussion focuses on hate crimes committed by private actors. On the basis of a discussion of two conflicting views of human rights, the chapter presents a cluster of reasons to hesitate or even abstain from classifying hate crime as a human rights violation, arguing that doing so is compatible with taking both hate crimes and human rights seriously.