European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

Last updated
European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR)
Formation5 March 2007
Founder Wolfgang Kaleck
PurposeHuman rights organization
Location
  • Berlin
Lotte Leicht, Tobias Singelnstein, Dieter Hummel
Website https://www.ecchr.eu/en/

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights(ECCHR) is an independent, nonprofit non-governmental organization with the aim of enforcing human rights through legal means. Using litigation, it tries to hold state and non-state actors responsible human rights violations. [1] It was founded in 2007 by the German civil rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck together with a group of human rights lawyers, in order to help protect the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as other declarations of human rights and national constitutions, by juridical means. ECCHR engages in litigation, using European, international, and national law to help protect human rights. [2]

Contents

The ECCHR offices are located in a large former soap factory in Berlin, along with Forensic Architecture and other investigative agencies and human rights organizations. [3]

The ECCHR gained public attention in 2017, when it filed a criminal complaint to the German Attorney General against CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel for her alleged involvement in torture. [4] In 2021, it filed a legal case against five Chechen officials for crimes against humanity. [5]

Topics and focus

ECCHR initiates, develops, and supports strategic human rights litigation to hold state and non-state actors accountable for human rights violations. In doing so, ECCHR tries to work on cases that illustrate and highlight legal and social problems, recognizing that human rights violations are committed in specific contexts with a view to achieving certain financial, social, military or political goals. ECCHR often influences debates about these issues from a power-critical perspective.

ECCHR litigates cases but also researches, investigates, and helps to coordinate the development strategies of legal advocacy around cases. [6] The organization conducts work within a network of partner organizations, lawyers and those affected by concrete human rights violations.

ECCHR's work focuses on cases in the following areas:

International Crimes and Accountability

The International Crimes and Accountability Program aims to ensure that grave breaches of international law, such as war crimes, torture and other crimes against humanity, are prosecuted and the perpetrators brought to justice. ECCHR is focusing its work on the following countries and themes: [7]

Migration

ECCHR's Migration program advocates for the fundamental protection and rights of refugees and challenges asylum policies in Europe through strategic case work. Areas of focus include:

Business and Human Rights

The Business and Human Rights program looks at three main areas: transnational corporate activities in authoritarian regimes and conflict zones, working conditions in the global supply chain and business activities that affect economic and social rights. Areas of focus include: [19]

In the Institute for Legal Intervention, ECCHR focuses on critical perspectives on law, particularly concerning dynamics of power. By combining legal theory and practice and through exchange with research institutions and universities, but also through collaboration with activists, artists and partners worldwide, ECCHR aims to contribute to political, legal and societal debates regarding unjust power relations and social justice. [24] At the core of this work lies the understanding of law as an expression of societal power relations and thus an instrument of hegemony, but also the recognition of the emancipatory potential of law.

An important part of ECCHR's work is the Critical Legal Training, in which ECCHR regularly trains and educates human rights activists.

ECCHR's Critical Legal Training offers participants a platform for the theory and practice of international human rights law. It aims to develop and further a critical analysis of contemporary issues of law and society. [25] ECCHR claims that since 2008 about 400 human rights lawyers from more than 40 countries have been volunteers or trainees at the organization. [26]

Public Relations and Advocacy

ECCHR organizes conferences and other public events, conducts media outreach, and publishes web-based and print reports and communications to inform the public about grave human rights violations worldwide. [27]

Related Research Articles

Universal jurisdiction is a legal principle that allows states or international organizations to claim criminal jurisdiction over an accused person regardless of where the alleged crime was committed, and regardless of the accused's nationality, country of residence, or any other relation to the prosecuting entity. Crimes prosecuted under universal jurisdiction are considered crimes against all, too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage. The concept of universal jurisdiction is therefore closely linked to the idea that some international norms are erga omnes, or owed to the entire world community, as well as to the concept of jus cogens – that certain international law obligations are binding on all states.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crimes against humanity</span> Concept in international law

Crimes against humanity are certain serious crimes committed as part of a large-scale attack against civilians. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity can be committed during both peace and war and against a state's own nationals as well as foreign nationals. Together with war crimes, genocide, and the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity are one of the core crimes of international criminal law, and like other crimes against international law have no temporal or jurisdictional limitations on prosecution.

International human rights law (IHRL) is the body of international law designed to promote human rights on social, regional, and domestic levels. As a form of international law, international human rights law is primarily made up of treaties, agreements between sovereign states intended to have binding legal effect between the parties that have agreed to them; and customary international law. Other international human rights instruments, while not legally binding, contribute to the implementation, understanding and development of international human rights law and have been recognized as a source of political obligation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extradition</span> Transfer of a suspect from one jurisdiction to another by law enforcement

In an extradition, one jurisdiction delivers a person accused or convicted of committing a crime in another jurisdiction, over to the other's law enforcement. It is a cooperative law enforcement procedure between the two jurisdictions and depends on the arrangements made between them. In addition to legal aspects of the process, extradition also involves the physical transfer of custody of the person being extradited to the legal authority of the requesting jurisdiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Ratner</span> American lawyer (1943–2016)

Michael Ratner was an American attorney. For much of his career, he was president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City, and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dublin Regulation</span> European Union (EU) law regarding political asylum

The Dublin Regulation is a Regulation of the European Union that determines which EU member state is responsible for the examination of an application for asylum, submitted by persons seeking international protection under the Geneva Convention and the Qualification Directive, within the European Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International criminal law</span> Public international law

International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetration. The core crimes under international law are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human rights in the Middle East</span> Humans rights situation since World War II

Human rights in the Middle East have been shaped by the legal and political development of international human rights law after the Second World War, and their application to the Middle East. The 2004 United Nations Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) claimed that although Arab-Islamic tradition does hold unique importance for ideas of human welfare, History has proven that "they were not sufficiently prevalent in society to foster a culture based on a political contract, and allow for the legitimacy of differences of opinion, dialogue and transfer of power." Issues of the validity of democracy in the region and human rights are at the very centre of the challenges facing Middle Eastern society today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Kaleck</span> German civil rights attorney (born 1960)

Wolfgang Kaleck is a German civil rights attorney. He is the founder as well as the general secretary for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. He resides in Berlin, Germany.

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The Völkerstrafgesetzbuch, abbreviated VStGB, is a German law that regulates crimes against (public) international law. It allows cases to be brought against suspects under international criminal law provisions, meaning that suspects can be prosecuted even though both they and their victims are foreigners and the crime itself took place abroad.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Legality of Holocaust denial</span> Overview of anti-antisemitic legislation

Between 1941 and 1945, the government of Nazi Germany perpetrated the Holocaust: a large-scale industrialised genocide in which approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered throughout German-occupied Europe. Since World War II, several countries have criminalised Holocaust denial—the assertion by antisemites that the genocide was fabricated or has been exaggerated. Currently, 17 European countries, along with Israel and Canada, have laws in place that cover Holocaust denial as a punishable offence. Many countries also have broader laws that criminalise genocide denial as a whole, including that of the Holocaust. Among the countries that have banned Holocaust denial, Russia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania have also banned Nazi symbols. Additionally, any expression of genocide justification is also a criminal offence in several countries, as is any attempt to portray Nazism in a positive light.

The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) is a US non-profit international human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1998, CJA represents survivors of torture and other grave human rights abuses in cases against individual rights violators before U.S. and Spanish courts. CJA has pioneered the use of civil litigation in the United States as a means of redress for survivors from around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Emmerson</span> British lawyer (born 1963)

Michael Benedict Emmerson CBE KC is a British barrister, specialising in public international law, human rights and humanitarian law, and international criminal law. From 2011 to 2017, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism. Emmerson is currently an Appeals Chamber Judge of the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals sitting on the Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He has previously served as Special Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and Special Adviser to the Appeals Chamber of the ECCC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mónica Feria Tinta</span>

Monica Feria Tinta is a British/Peruvian barrister, a specialist in public international law, at the Bar of England & Wales. She practises from Twenty Essex, London.

International and national courts outside Syria have begun the prosecution of Syrian civil war criminals. War crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government or rebel groups include extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture and imprisonment. "[A]ccountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights is central to achieving and maintaining durable peace in Syria", stated UN Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo.

Anwar Raslan is a Syrian former colonel who led a unit within Syria's General Intelligence Directorate. In January 2022, a German Higher Regional Court convicted him of crimes against humanity under universal jurisdiction. The specific charges against him were 4,000 counts of torture, 58 counts of murder, rape, and sexual coercion. His trial marked the first international war crimes case against a member of the Syrian government during the presidency of Bashar al-Assad.

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References

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