Implementation of the rights was originally monitored by two organs created by the Convention, the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights, and a body which already existed, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. With the entry into force of Protocol No. 11 in November 1998 this situation changed and monitoring is now carried out through quite different arrangements. It would be wrong to conclude this review of the original institutional machinery of the Convention without making the general point that over the forty years or so in which the arrangements were in operation the Convention proved to be the most effective international system for the protection of human rights that has yet been devised. When Protocol No. 11 came into force at the end of 1998 there was a firm foundation on which to build the new institutional structure.

The interaction of law, politics and financial considerations have proved detrimental for staging criminal prosecutions, even to this day, but ultimately have not negated the criminal liability of perpetrators. This chapter explores the various forms of direct participation in humanitarian law offences. These are: planning and conspiracy; ordering others to commit a crime; incitement and dissemination of hate propaganda; and complicity. The chapter describes the concept of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the adoption of the Genocide Convention, the concept of criminal conspiracies has attracted the attention of the ILC regarding its Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. Draft Article 2 deals with the individual responsibility of participants in international offences. An order is unlawful when it violates international humanitarian law, regardless of its legitimacy under national law.

The chapter recapitulates how the concept of popular sovereignty is fundamentally connected to the state in European history, and makes the case for the concept of popular sovereignty within the framework of the contemporary democratic nation-state. It questions the possibility of sovereignty transfer, and the federal ambitions of central EU institutions to produce sufficient legitimacy to carry a European federal project.

This chapter focuses on the contrast between Roman and non-Roman female characters in Fletcher’s Roman plays. The non-Roman women of the canon display superior dynamism, assertiveness, and complexity than the Roman women, who remain dependent on patriarchal values and male gazes, their roles being limited to those of wives, widows, or prostitutes. More than examples of chastity, virtue, or corruption, the non-Roman women instead wield actual power and accomplish actions that have a significant bearing on reality. Such an evident contrast fosters the impression that Fletcher and his collaborators found the women of ancient Rome hardly adequate for the development of their ideal ‘masculine’ female characters. Scepticism about the value system encoded by Roman female models also seeps from the allusions and appeals to Roman paragons that recur so frequently across the Fletcher canon, their largest share pointing to exempla drawn from the history of the Roman Republic and especially to Lucrece and Portia. The negative judgement of the Roman women’s passivity chimes with the canon’s general tendency either to shun or implicitly criticize the tenets of stoicism as they emerge in such plays as The Little French Lawyer, Valentinian, The Captain, and The Loyal Subject. This also reinforces the idea that Fletcher’s engagement with the Roman past may have influenced his thinking and dramatic craft when writing plays not set in ancient Rome. Just as with Fletcher’s choice of sources, which tends to privilege continental Renaissance publications over the classics and suggests little sense of his having found any solemnity in classical texts, these female exempla cannot be followed or adopted solely by virtue of their antiquity. In fact, it is their very antiquity that keeps them firmly stuck in the past, thereby making them unpalatable and hardly viable as guides for the present and the future.

The statelessness of Kurds in Syria is one of the multiple issues that have been long protracted by successive Syrian governments. In 2011, and parallel to the growing public protests against the Syrian regime, a section of stateless Kurds in the country, who were previously denationalised in an exceptional and exclusionary census in 1962, were re-granted Syrian nationality. This naturalisation process, which was installed through a presidential decree and as part of proclaimed political reforms, targeted Syrian Kurds who were labelled as ajanib [foreigners] while excluding another section of the community who remain categorised as maktoumeen [the unregistered]. By engaging a transitional justice perspective, this chapter interrogates the naturalisation of Syrian Kurds and the implications of the Syrian state’s policy of ‘solving’ this case of in-situ statelessness. The chapter critically engages a discussion of human rights and transitional justice paradigms in the light of the unfolding legacy of statelessness and the incoherence of the Syrian state’s policy. Given the role that ethnic discrimination had played in producing statelessness in Syria, the discussion specifically highlights the identity conflict that is intensely manifest in the naturalisation process when ajanib Syrian Kurds are now officially recorded as Arab nationals of Syria. Finally, the chapter demonstrates the challenges relating to solving statelessness within the currently limited transitional justice process pursued for Syria, suggesting alternative pathways for addressing the issue based on an intersectional and non-hierarchical understanding of human rights and a transformative role of transitional justice.

This chapter outlines the book’s innovative rendering of grassroots development and humanitarianism through a scalar approach (Carr and Lempert 2016). This addresses the problems of partial reach of all forms of humanitarianism, and documents how everyday practitioners devise a range of size-related and geographical scales that allow them to situate their efforts. It extends this scalar approach to social relations, and demonstrate what kind of relations are made, to what purpose, and how they upend conventional narratives of humanitarian objects. Taken together, they furnish an understanding of how its limited reach, and its partiality constitute not an obstacle, but a condition for humanitarian action.