CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Tekle, Fisseha Mengistu |
|---|---|
| Title | Victims Reparation for Derg Crimes: Challenges and Prospects |
| Summary | This research is about challenges and prospects to ensure victims’ reparation for mass human rights violations in circumstances where States fail their obligations to avail remedies. International human rights embodied in conventions and customary international laws set the minimum standards States shall guarantee to the subjects of their jurisdiction. Moreover they stipulate the remedies States shall avail in case of violation of those minimum standards. However, it still remains within the power of States to live up to their obligations, or not. Particularly, this paper explores challenges and prospects for claiming reparation for victims of mass atrocities that occurred in Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991 by the Derg era. The findings indicate that there are challenges such as expiry of period of limitation and non-justiciability of constitutional provisions in domestic Courts. And in the presence of these impediments locally, international mechanisms are also blocked due to the principle of State immunity even if those violations pertain to peremptory rules of international law such as prohibition of genocide, torture and grave breaches of the laws of war. This thesis finds innovative reparation mechanisms in jurisprudences of regional and international tribunals with regard to mass human rights violations. However, victims of the Derg crimes face challenges accessing them due to the intricacies of the international law that are ill-fitting to the regime of human rights laws. Navigating through the experiences of other countries in this thesis reveals prospects too. The Holocaust and Apartheid reparations evince that it is not only the litigation approach that ensured the reparations for the victims of those mass atrocities, but the moral wrong of egregious violations. Even in situations where the States were not bound by international human rights laws, victims have managed to procure reparations from responsible States and they are still pushing for it. The strong and persistent pressing of victims and interest groups has kept the discourse on Holocaust reparation active even after half a century. The same holds true for the reparation claims of South African Apartheid and Rwandan Genocide where the victims persist on for victim reparation, though their outcome is not yet known. This paper concludes that the development in human rights reparation globally cannot operate unless the initiative comes from the victims themselves. Those positive experiences of other countries provide opportunities to be exploited by the victims to ensure the provision of reparation. To do so they have to engage the government, scholars and civic societies in reparation discourse. |
| Supervisor | O'Keefe, Roger |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/tekle_fisseha.pdf |
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