Alston and Heyns on Unlawful Killings: A Compendium of the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions from 2004-2016
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Description
This Compendium is being published almost forty years after the United Nations first appointed a Special Rapporteur for dealing with what might, in common parlance, be called unlawful killings. In its current formulation the official mandate, dating from a 1982 resolution of the UN Commission on Human Rights, covers extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and in the early years of the mandate’s existence a lot of effort went into defining the various terms. Even today, the range of practices falling within the scope of the overall mandate as well as the applicable normative frameworks continue to be debated. But over the past four decades a great deal of attention has been given, at both the domestic and international levels, to developing a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling jurisprudence around unlawful killings in general. As a result, endeavours to characterise killings in terms of any of the three different categories have become much less important than the overall interpretative practice that has evolved as a result of the interplay between the Special Rapporteurs, governments, courts, other human rights bodies, civil society and other actors on violations of the right to life. Between 2004 and 2016 the two of us, in our roles as successive holders of the mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, placed a particular emphasis on developing an understanding of the normative aspects of the mandate. During the twelve years of our successive mandates, emphasis was placed on developing the jurisprudential analysis through the reports on country visits and in the communications letters sent to governments alleging violations, in addition to the thematic reports. For a range of reasons, this was a period in which an array of relatively novel issues were tackled and careful attention needed to be paid to providing in-depth legal analysis to support the views expressed. Our predecessors – Special Rapporteurs Amos Wako (1982-1992), Bacre Waly Ndiaye (1992-1998), and Asma Jahangir (1998-2004) – were deeply involved in winning acceptance for the mandate’s procedures and in establishing the place of the mandate within the overall UN human rights system. Their important contributions to reporting on current developments and to setting out and developing the international law set the foundations for the mandate, and are reflected in the extensive citations to their work in this Compendium. This Compendium brings together, in an accessible and systematic format, the main results of our efforts to develop the part of international human rights law that seeks to regulate the ways in which lethal and potentially lethal force may be used, the positive obligations on governments to respect, protect, and fulfil the right to life, and to spell out the obligations of governments and other actors when killings of any sort occur. In the course of our mandates, we worked closely with a range of colleagues and advisers, both from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and from our respective institutional bases at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law and the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria. We are particularly indebted to Sarah Knuckey, now the Lieff Cabraser Clinical Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Thomas Probert, now Head of Research for the Freedom from Violence project at the Centre for Human Rights, both of whom were especially instrumental in much of the work that we undertook during this period and in bringing this book together. In addition, Philip Alston would like to acknowledge the exceptional contribution made to the work of the mandate by William Abresch and Hina Shamsi, and the important research by others including Jason Morgan-Foster and Jonathan Horowitz. Christof Heyns would like to recognise the sterling work done by his research assistants including Gus Waschefort, Romi Brammer, Tess Borden, and Thompson Chengeta. He is indebted to the expertise shared on a constant basis by colleague Stuart Maslen. Both would like to express gratitude for the first-class support provided to their mandates by the various staff members at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, including Cecile Aptel, Orest Nowosad, Ulrich Garms, Eric Mongelard, Neal Gilmore, Lydie Ventre, Ugo Cedrangolo, Brenda Vukovic, Irina Tabirta, Alice Viviane Mauske, and Vanessa Asensio Perez, among others.
Publication Date
2020
Recommended Citation
Alston, Philip G.; Heyns, Christof; Knuckey, Sarah; and Probert, Thomas, "Alston and Heyns on Unlawful Killings: A Compendium of the Jurisprudence of the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions from 2004-2016" (2020). Faculty Books & Edited Works. 745.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-books-edited-works/745
