Band 43, Heft 2-3

“Blanket amnesties” have generally been declared to be incompatible with international law due to the fact that they shield perpetrators of serious crimes from accountability as well as conflict with established principles regarding the applicability of statutory limitations to certain criminal offenses. The repeal of the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws in Argentina set a crucial precedent in the process toward the abrogation of legislation leading to impunity for those responsible for grave violations of jus cogens. Additionally, permitting the prosecutions of Nazi officers Klaus Barbie and Erich Priebke in Europe confirmed the customary principle of the non-applicability of statutory limitations to crimes against humanity. However, for nearly 40 years, Spain's amnesty legislation continues to preclude any investigation or prosecution of the crimes committed during the civil war (1936–1939) and the Francoist regime (1939–1975). Spain's 1977 Amnesty Act has been widely characterized as a blanket amnesty and remains in force today despite allegations of noncompliance with international law and numerous requests from United Nations bodies to repeal it. This article explores the history of Spain's 1977 Amnesty Act, compares and contrasts it with other nations with similar amnesties, and makes the case that a successful transition from an authoritarian regime to a peaceful democracy is feasible without the use of overly broad “blanket” amnesties.

In the post-colonial era, social movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean have empowered citizens to reclaim, redefine and further develop their identity. These movements, combined with a history of colonialism and transatlantic slavery in the region, have yielded a Caribbean culture “too diverse to be labeled.” Indeed, the Caribbean culture is composed of “a bastion of discrete identities as well as quarries of very invaluable raw material that can be used to build the bridges across cultural boundaries.” These distinct but potentially overlapping identities make the Commonwealth Caribbean a truly pluralistic region, at least at the cultural and social level. As modern legal and political systems, however, the states of the Commonwealth Caribbean have, in many ways, failed to sufficiently protect the non-dominant groups within Caribbean. Indeed, attempts to balance the majoritarian demands of democracy against the pluralist notion of minority rights protection have landed largely on the side of majorities.

This article, based on my PhD thesis: “Tax Confidentiality: A Comparative Study and Impact Assessment of Global Interest, “ compares Swedish and US tax confidentiality legislation concerning public opportunities of accessing tax information held by their respective tax administrations. The article concerns itself with the historical development of tax confidentiality legislation, the general legal framework, the reasons behind tax confidentiality, and the main content of the tax confidentiality rules. The overall comparative conclusion is that Sweden provides a high level of tax transparency based on the right of public access to official documents, while the United States offers a high-level of confidentiality and protection of taxpayer information based on the individual's right to privacy. Notwithstanding this overall difference, there are certain similarities, such as public accessibility being source-based. That is, if the individual's tax information is contained in a tax return, then the information is confidential, however, if it is contained in public court records, then the information is public.

This outline is prepared based on the 1995 Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (“The 1995 Constitution”). It is important to acknowledge at the outset that the 1995 Constitution cannot be studied in isolation. Like its forerunners, it is not distinctively Ethiopian, save for the customary and religious laws that it recognized. Ethiopian constitutions, both past and present, have been derived, in part, from foreign constitutions including constitutions from western and eastern countries, including Japan. Although its immediate sources can be traced back to the Charter of the Transitional Government of 1991, this 1995 Constitution was built upon the constitutions that preceded it, the laws that have been promulgated since the 1930s, and the religious and customary laws that predated it.

This Bibliographical Calendar is the second and concluding installment of our bibliographical calendar of diplomacy and international law to official transactions relating to World War One. The first installment, “100 Years Ago: A Bibliographic Calendar of Diplomacy and International Law: In The Years 1914 and 1915, “ was published in Volume 42, Issue No. 3 of the International Journal of Legal Information, Winter 2014. The first installment of the Calendar covered the years 1914 and 1915. The present installment refers to the years 1916 to 1919.

In 2010, the International Journal of Legal Information kindly published a list of English language materials on legal education in China. From the number of downloads and comments regarding that publication, it is clear that this list has been useful to scholars and students alike. In this issue, I have extended the list with more recent materials as well as a few older pieces which have come to my attention. I have not attempted to sort the available items on the basis of quality; sometimes a poorly written article or brief conference paper may yet be useful because it gives useful information about a local situation. All online addresses have been checked: some are still at the same address, some have moved, and (unfortunately) a number of items have been deleted from the 2010 list as they are no longer accessible. Of course, I would not claim to have found every article and every book chapter. No doubt there are more publications even as I write, while others have eluded my amateur search.

It is necessary to guess a new probable future for law libraries and librarians. A future that is based on history, yet accounts for new contemporary backgrounds and data. A future that not only considers the widespread accessibility to the Internet and the incredible development of search algorithms for legal information retrieval on user-friendly platforms, but one that also considers the tremendous increase in the amount of digitized materials available to the average patron. Here, I will take an opportunity to look at the past and present and offer what I foresee as the future for U.S. law libraries and librarians.