Movements of Hope: Abolition and Reparations in these Times

2014

the line between formal and informal justice systems, and this awkward position is the source of ongoing tensions. Like other informal justice practices, the TIRC relies on the State to provide the authority to execute its mission; this dependent relationship generates results that tend to ultimately reinforce State power. Fortunately, social movements maintaining a position outside of the complex have cultivated a number of counterpublics as alternate discursive spaces used to challenge State power. The Article ends with a consideration of two alternative forums for justice-the Survivor's Roundtable and the People's Hearings on Police Crimes.

Ethnicity and …, 2000

Repairing the irreparable: Dealing with the double-binds of making reparatio. Brandon Hamber Ethnicity and Health; Aug/Nov 2000; 5, 3/4; Health Module pg. 215 Ethnicity & Health, 2000; 5(3/4): 215-226 <?4ШЬ Repairing the Irreparable: dealing with the double-binds of ...

Philosophy Public Policy Quarterly, 2000

B ecause of its visibility, Randall Robinson's new book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, may rekindle a broad public debate on repara tions. The issue is not new, nor is public debate abo ut it. In 1969, the civil rights lead er James Forman presented the Black Manifesto to American churches, demanding that they pay blacks five hundred million dollars in reparations. The Manifesto a rgued that for three and a half centuries blacks in America had been " exploited and degraded , brutalized, killed and persecuted " by whites. This treatment was part of a persistent institutional pattern of, first, legal slavery and, later, lega l discrimination and forced segregation. Through slavery and discrimination, the Manifesto went on to contend, whites have extracted enormous wealth from bl ack labor with little return to blacks themselves. These facts constitute grounds for reparations on a massive scale. American churches were but the first institutions asked by Forman to discharge this great debt. The Manifes to achieved immediate notoriety and stimulated debate in newspapers and magazines. Within a short period, however, public excitement died away. The issue of reparations has always found favor within the African American community itself, taking root not long after the freeing of the slaves during the Civil War. It flourished around World War I with the Marcus Garvey movement and later fo und voice in Forman's Black Manifesto. It has recently regained vital-• ity, given new life by a recent precedent, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which Congress authorized payment of reparations to Japanese American citizens who had been interned during World War II. In each

Third World Legal Studies, 2003

2 As for example in the recent settlement of claims arising from the exploitation of forced and slave labor by German companies during the Nazi period. See Edmund L. Andrews, Germans Sign Agreement to Pay Forced Laborers of Nazi Era, NEW YORK TIMES (West Coast edition), July 18,2000, at A3. See also the Canadian government's plan for dealing with the abuses arising from the forcible assimilation of native children through residential schools run by both the

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

In the ongoing debate over reparations for slavery and its legacy in the United States, much of the reparations scholarship pays little attention to the quality of past reparations programs implemented domestically or abroad. 1 Most commentators emphasize the need for former wrongdoers to make apology, recompense, or restitution rather than looking at results-namely the restoration and recovery of victims. 2 The problem is not limited to theorists and scholars. Repeatedly, the political contests over guilt and innocence that precede the development of reparations programs obscure consideration of the critical role that

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2023

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2018

Harvey's Social Justice and the City was published just as a major case of social injustice was unfolding on Chicago's South Side. Starting in the early 1970s and continuing for almost twenty years, police officers under Detective Jon Burge tortured confessions from as many as 200 black men. We use the contrast between Social Justice and the City and the Chicago police torture cases to emphasize the work that geographers have accomplished since the 1970s in theorizing race, space, and place. The torture cases have led to a decades-long struggle for justice and reparations waged by survivors, families, and activists. Here we examine the spatiality of the torture and how racialized practices of policing, housing, and employment operate across scales, sometimes amplifying the effects of each practice. Looking backward from the 1970s it is possible to see the torture cases as an extension of a long history of racial violence rooted deeply in U.S. history. Looking forward, these cases have clear parallels with contemporary events, including recent "blue-on-black" police killings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Our aim, more broadly, is to begin theorizing violence within the larger debate over social justice in the contemporary U.S. city and to examine more closely how violence has been used repeatedly in Chicago and other U.S. cities to enforce social and spatial definitions of "race" and racial boundaries.

Was the project suitably designed to address the problems identified? Was it relevant to the needs of its target group and beneficiaries?

The 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. The 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.

Journal of Law and Politics, 2006

I. Introduction "We will have to repent. .. not only for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." [FN1][FN1] The twentieth century ended with the vindication of many of its most mistreated victims' cries for reparation. [FN2][FN2] Holocaust survivors retrieved over $8 billion in assets frozen in bank accounts or looted by the Nazis; [FN3][FN3] Japanese Americans interned during World War II received compensation from the U.S. government; [FN4][FN4] Chile compensated descendants of Pinochet's victims; [FN5][FN5] Japan redressed Korean "comfort women"; [FN6][FN6] and Canada paid damages to Aboriginals for forced assimilation of their children. [FN7][FN7] Absent from the list was the longest suffering and most visible of groups seeking repair-African Americans. [FN8][FN8] *184 Embarrassed by the satisfaction of these other victims' claims, opponents of Black reparations are left to find a legitimate ground upon which to distinguish the claims of contemporary African Americans. To this end, they construe the 140-year-long failure to offer repair not as the egregiously lengthy omission that it is, but instead as the feature that would render moot any entitlement to redress. [FN9][FN9] Thus, the common rejoinder to pleas for Black reparations has opponents protesting that they never owned slaves, and so they should not be made to pay for those who did. [FN10][FN10] *185 Besides, they continue, the slaves are long dead and the effects of slavery now nonexistent, [FN11][FN11] so there would not be anyone who could legitimately claim compensation anyway. [FN12][FN12] The opposition to Black reparations thus focuses on the temporal dislocation between slavery and the present, but the argument loses none of its force when applied to more recent injustices. After all, "righteous gentiles" in Germany did not exterminate Jews; [FN13][FN13] most Japanese never availed themselves of the "comfort" of Korean prostitutes; [FN14][FN14] and many Chileans ardently resisted Pinochet's rule. [FN15][FN15] If opponents of Black *186 reparations are correct to insist that an individual may be held responsible, and hence liable, only for transgressions in which he participated directly, then none of these reparations programs is justifiable. Supporters of Black reparations, or "reparationists," [FN16][FN16] have largely remained silent in the face of this challenge to their campaign. [FN17][FN17] Instead, the recent reparations literature is rife with internal debates regarding whether legal claims should be framed in the language of compensation or restitution;