Chapter 7 argues that law’s framing of accountability results in an inevitably partial and fractured picture of wrongdoing for historical abuse. The chapter argues that despite a focus on accountability for historical child sexual abuse, non-sexual historical abuses, especially those authorised or ignored by law, struggle to achieve modern-day legal accountability against individuals, institutions, or states. Law’s claim to sovereign authority is unable to comprehensively address historical-structural abuses, which may challenge the legitimacy of the legal order created by states and churches. The chapter considers these challenges in the context of accountability mechanisms, including criminal prosecutions, civil litigation, and the use of canon law.

UN Security Council Resolution 1373 is rightly viewed as the most significant international instrument pertaining to countering terrorism. Two features of the resolution are of concern to us: the sharing of security intelligence and other information, and, restrictions to human mobility. These two dimensions of global counterterrorism dovetail within the dark underbelly of the securitization of migration. There have been several high-profile instances where the United Kingdom and Canada have been directly involved in deportation to torture. Victims have faced numerous obstacles securing remedies for human rights violations. Perhaps most significant is the unwillingness of states to disclose relevant information during civil litigation, owing to national security or more broadly public interest privilege.

The United Kingdom has approached this problem by instituting “Closed Material Proceedings” (CMPs), where courts may base decisions on secret evidence, with the benefit of security-cleared Special Advocates mandated to represent the interests of plaintiffs. Canadian authorities have considered similar measures, having a rich history of secret hearings. Clearly, the use of secret evidence raises serious rule of law issues, as well as many practical, professional, and ethical challenges. This chapter explores these issues in the context of civil litigation of state responsibility for torture and other human rights abuses. As part of an ongoing socio-legal study on CMP in Canada and the UK, this chapter presents documentary and empirical findings, including interviews with judges, Special Advocates, and court administrators in both jurisdictions.

Examining changes in the legal rules and procedures that render the courts more or less attractive for rights-claiming helps answer a core question: To what extent and how has civil litigation become an institutional mechanism for rights-claiming in South Korea? The concept of legal opportunity structures pinpoints the relatively stable but not static rules and statutes related to access to the courts, adjudication procedures, and judicial remedies that affect whether individuals and groups will use private litigation to try to enforce rights. This chapter’s analysis indicates that Koreans have benefited from a liberalizing structure of legal opportunities and improved potential for rights protection via the courts in the past two decades. I illustrate how claimants and lawyers are recognizing and using legal opportunities, and sometimes even prying open new opportunities, in pursuit of rights.

Here we consider various examples of legal and regulatory responses to avoidable adverse medication events. There are a wide range of poorly interlinked regulatory processes, regardless of the country examined. Some approaches are proactive while others are reactive, serving mostly to provide compensation or to punish those felt responsible. Regulation can assist in promoting medication safety through influence and through compulsion, but what is really required is the whole-hearted engagement of everyone in the organization in the mission of achieving safe, high quality patient care. This goal will require both physician efforts, through professionalism and self regulation, and those of hospital boards of directors, through setting priorities and driving a just culture. While there is a role for the civil law (compensation for injured and in some degree of declarative retribution), litigation is likely to most effective when it is directed against institutions. The best approaches are based on “full disclosure and rapid compensation” practices. Criminal action in the regulation of safe medication practices in the perioperative period should be reserved for when recklessness is involved or where deliberate malfeasance is a factor.

Used wisely, inside and outside the courtroom, strategic litigation may be an important vehicle for achieving accountability. To show how communities and advocates sparked the life of a movement seeking accountability of corporate actors under international law, this chapter will provide a chronological account of developments and setbacks that the movement has faced. Using Chiquita as a case study, the chapter distils the recent history of corporate accountability under international law. It follows a linear approach, explaining the developments and set-backs in corporate criminal responsibility under international law. It starts with Nuremberg as a milestone, and goes on to analyze subsequent approaches supporting or rejecting the accountability of corporate officers and corporations. Passing through domestic litigation that emanated from Nuremberg precedents, as well as the subsequent developments, the chapter tells the recent history of corporate accountability under international criminal law.

While attention to the “vanishing trial” occupies scholarly attention, empirical work on civil appeals remains comparatively underdeveloped. Whatever is known about the small world of civil appeals is dominated by a focus on traditional appeals; that is, appeals initiated by the party who lost at trial. Comparatively far less is known about the much smaller number of prevailing-party appeals. Exploiting data from one of the largest collections of data on civil litigation in the United States, this chapter explores and describes the general empirical contours of prevailing-party civil appeals. One striking finding involves the asymmetrical distribution of prevailing-party appeals’ success. While traditional appeals favor of defendant-appellants prevailing-party appeals, by contrast, favor plaintiff-appellants. In terms of success with disrupting unfavorable trial court rulings, prevailing-party appeals succeeded at a rate that surpasses the success rate for traditional appeals. The core descriptive findings persist in an array of regression models of the decision to initiate a prevailing-party appeal as well as its success. While results in this study identify important aspects of prevailing-party appeals, particularly their asymmetric distribution of success, data limitations preclude a nuanced assessment of the competing theoretical interpretations of these findings.