S P O T L I G H T

Hard to Lend a Helping Hand: The Obstacles in Registration and Operation of International Nongovernmental Organizations in China

ONLINE NOTE BY MU HUANG

In the afternoon of May 12, 2008, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit the Sichuan Province in China. More than 87,000 people lost their lives or were missing. Thousands of houses, schools, and hospitals collapsed. After this great tragedy, a significant number of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reacted to provide disaster relief to the affected areas.

China received about ¥76 billion ($11.2 billion) in disaster relief funds from domestic and foreign donors. There have been waves of criticisms about the lack of transparency in the donation process and usage of donation funds. Some foreign donors were concerned about the accountability of international NGOs. Other donors chose not to donate through international NGOs either because they could not determine which organizations were reliable or because they had no way to know how those NGOs handled donation funds in China…
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The Policy Requirement in Crimes Against Humanity: Lessons from and for the Case of Kenya

ARTICLE BY THOMAS OBEL HANSEN

Article 7(2)(a) of the Rome Statute stipulates that crimes against humanity are preconditioned on the existence of an attack on a civilian population “pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack.”1 As noted by Peter Burns, the reference to a state or organizational policy introduces an “extremely cryptic element” to crimes against humanity. Given inconsistent case law and clear disagreement in the literature, crucial questions, such as whether non-state actors can commit crimes against humanity, remain unanswered. (READ MORE)

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Ending Caste Discrimination in India: Human Rights and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Individuals and Groups from Discrimination at the Domestic and International Levels

 ARTICLE BY JEREMY SARKIN AND MARK KOENIG

Dealing with caste discrimination, wherein a group of people are given a “specific social rank, . . . linked to one or more traditional occupations[,]” remains one of the most significant human rights challenges facing the world today. Perhaps no country understands the difficulty of the fight to end caste discrimination more than India, which, even after decades of democracy, has yet to effectively end the practice. Despite efforts to end caste discrimination through international and domestic measures, more than 165 million people in India alone still suffer discrimination and various types of degrading treatment because of their caste associations. In contemporary India, the social structure continues to be… (READ MORE)

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