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This chapter examines the delicate balance achieved by apex courts in new democracies when dealing with impunity for rights violations during times of transitional justice. While international law has clearly rejected amnesties for past rights violations, domestic politics sometimes incorporate amnesties as part of larger peace settlements. This puts courts in the difficult situation of balancing the competing demands of law and politics. Courts have achieved equipoise in this situation by adopting substantive interpretations and procedural approaches that use international law’s rights-based language but without implementing international law’s restrictions on amnesties. In many cases, courts do this without acknowledging the necessarily pragmatic nature of their decisions. In fact, oftentimes courts find ways of avoiding having to make any substantive decision, effectively removing themselves from a dispute that could call into question their adherence to international legal norms that transcend politics. In doing so, they empower political actors to continue down the road toward negotiated peace settlements, while at the same time protecting the courts’ legitimacy as institutions uniquely situated to protect international human rights norms – including those they have effectively deemphasized in the process.

The International Criminal Court has institutionalized the concept of individual responsibility for human rights violations. The jurisprudence of international criminal law has developed along with the institution. Affirmative defenses in the mitigation of punishment or avoidance of responsibility are becoming increasingly important in international criminal procedure. We contend that diminished culpability based on advances in neuroscience provides the most challenging set of choices for the international legal community. Of the variety of affirmative defenses, emerging neuroscience-based defense provide the most challenging set of choices for the international legal community. The Esad Landzo case at the ICTY brings these challenges into focus. We discuss the difficult choices the International Criminal Court will have to make to balance the rights and needs of the victims and the due process rights of the accused.

The aim of this paper is to use Rawls's principles of justice to develop a system of global ethics that can be used to govern international business practices.

A critical synopsis of Rawls's political philosophy is provided, his application in prior business ethics literature is reviewed, and a Rawlsian‐inflected ethics for conducting international business practices is outlined.

This paper concludes that Rawls's philosophical insights have significant relevance for the conduct of contemporary international business; that through critical engagement of Rawls's ideas there emerges the potential for international business to be predicated on social justice values.

This paper offers the first substantive attempt to elucidate the conditions under which international business is rendered to be consistent with Rawls's principles of justice.

Global mobility remains one of the most pressing challenges of our times. Countries in the north are turning to major ‘sending’ countries in the south to secure their cooperation in controlling their borders and in repatriation processes. By explicitly linking migration to global security threats and weak governance, these migration control initiatives are justified by development goals and sometimes financed by official development assistance (ODA). By connecting criminology with international development scholarship, this chapter seeks to advance our understanding of the novel intersections between criminal justice, security and development to govern mass migration. Focusing on UK policies and the analysis of specific programmes, it interrogates what does the sustainable development goal (10.7) of facilitating ‘orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration’ concretely entail? And to what extent does the language of ‘managed migration’ legitimise restrictive border controls policies and even conflict with other global development goals?

Hybrid forms of international criminal justice have been lauded for combining the political and procedural legitimacy of international tribunals with increased attention to the local contexts where mass crimes occurred. This work critically examines the hybrid legal structure of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a novel post-conflict institution empowered to draw from both international and Sierra Leonean law. Although formally hybrid, the Court neglects domestic law in practice, suggesting that “hybridity” refers more to a rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimating its work than to its ontological status. By symbolically including and substantively excluding domestic law, the court's legal structure inadvertently resembles a colonial form of legal pluralism rather than a hybrid jurisdiction.

In the globalized world the movement of scholars facilitates the global flow of knowledge and supports the pillars of the knowledge economy as defined by the World Bank. But not all academics are born equal: African scholars face significant barriers with regard to freedom of movement. The purpose of this paper is to describe the processes that African scholars typically have to undertake to participate in the global academic community, to identify some of the potential difficulties in these processes and to articulate the moral concerns that arise from these processes.

Both secondary data analysis to illustrate and support the arguments as well as anecdotal evidence to provide specific examples of African scholars' experiences are used.

Justice is viewed as one of the most important virtues regulating the movement of people in the global knowledge society. It is used as a normative instrument to argue that the international community has a moral and legal responsibility to create a more flexible and fair structure to enable knowledge to flow more freely between African scholars and their counterparts in Europe and North America.

A Global Knowledge Treaty is proposed that will allow African scholars to travel more freely in pursuit of new knowledge and opportunities and platforms to share their knowledge is proposed as a potential solution that seeks to strike a fair balance between rights of nation‐states and the rights of individuals to freedom of movement.

The value of the paper lies in that it highlights a topic of contemporary importance in the knowledge economy that has far‐reaching implications for African scholarship in particular and education and development in African countries in general.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the basis for, and ramifications of, applying relevant human rights norms – such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). In doing so, the paper seeks to contribute to scholarship on the political legitimisation of the IASB’s structure and activities under prevailing global governance conditions.

The paper explores three distinct argumentative logics regarding responsibilities for justice and human rights vis-à-vis the IASB. First, the authors explore the basis for applying human rights responsibilities to the IASB through reasoning based on the analysis of “public power” (Macdonald, 2008) and public authorisation. Second, the authors develop the reasoning with reference to recent attempts by legal scholars and practitioners to apply human rights obligations to other non-state and transnational institutions. Finally, the authors develop reasoning based on Thomas Pogge’s (1992b) ideas about institutional harms and corresponding responsibilities.

The three distinct argumentative logic rest on differing assumptions – the goal is not to reconcile or synthesise these approaches, but to propose that these approaches offer alternative and in some ways complementary insights, each of which contributes to answering questions about how human rights obligations of the IASB should be defined, and how such a responsibility could be “actually proceduralised”.

The analysis provides an important starting point for beginning to think about how responsibilities for human rights might be applied to the operation of the IASB.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contours of police integrity among Chinese police officers. Specifically, this study explores how Chinese police evaluate integrity based on official policy governing interactions, discipline governing infractions, views of seriousness, and willingness to inform when others engage in misconduct.

In total, 353 police officers were surveyed representing those attending in-service training program at a Chinese police university in May 2015. Questionnaires containing 11 scenarios describing police misbehaviors were distributed to officers during classes.

There was a strong correlation between officers’ perceptions of rule-violation, misconduct seriousness, discipline, and willingness to report. Additionally, preliminary results suggest there exists a code of silence among Chinese officers, and that Chinese officers hold a lenient attitude toward the use of excessive force.

This study utilizes a convenient sample, which restricts the generalizability of the results.

The results indicate the existence of code of silence among Chinese officers and their lenient attitude toward the use of excessive force.

Although there has been a growing body of research examining police integrity in both western democracies and transitional societies, China as the largest developing nation in the world and with a unique police system (falls somewhere between the centralized model and the integrated model) is understudied. This study addresses this gap in previous literature by exploring the contours of police integrity among Chinese police officers.