Accountability for violations of civil and political rights: redress within and beyond the penal frame

Mattia Pinto and Natasa Mavronicola

Chapter 10 in Research Handbook on Accountability for Human Rights Violations, 2025, pp 163-181 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter critically examines accountability mechanisms for civil and political rights violations, challenging the dominance of criminal accountability as the primary response to ‘serious’ human rights breaches, such as torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances. While human rights bodies typically mandate criminal prosecution for such violations, this chapter argues that human rights frameworks (could) support a broader range of accountability measures that require states to account for their compliance with civil and political rights. By analysing the core features of the criminal accountability norm − including states’ obligations to criminalise, prosecute, and punish individuals, and to avoid measures obstructing criminal liability − the chapter demonstrates that prioritising criminal accountability may obscure the multi-layered and multi-faceted accountability mechanisms available in relation to civil and political rights. The chapter concludes by considering accountability for both ‘serious’ and ‘standard’ violations of civil and political rights in more transformative rather than punitive terms.

Keywords: Civil and political rights; Criminal accountability; European Court of Human Rights; Inter-American Court of Human Rights; Guarantees of non-repetition; Transformative reparations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035306923
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035306930.00020 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22074_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().