Peace agreements and human rights / Christine Bell.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [375]-400) and index.

1. Introduction ; 2. Peace processes, Peace Agreements, and Human Rights: What are They? ; 3. From Conflict to Peace? South Africa and Northern Ireland ; 4. From Conflict to Peace: Israel/Palestine and Bosnia-Herzegovina ; 5. Getting to Yes? negotiating Self-Determination ; 6. But What was the Question? Evaluating the Deal ; 7. Building for the Future: Human Rights Institutions ; 8. Undoing the Past: Refugees, Land, and Possession ; 9. Dealing with the Past: Prisoners, Accountability, and 'Truth' ; 10. 'Back to the Future': Human Rights and Peace Agreements ; Appendix: A Decade of Peace Agreements ; References ; Index

"Peace Agreements and Human Rights examines the place of human rights in peace agreements against the backdrop of international legal provision. The book examines the role of peace agreements in peace processes drawing on a comprehensive appendix of over 100 peace agreements signed after 1990, in over 40 countries. Four sets of peace agreements are then examined in detail, those of: Bosnia Herzegovina, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. The human rights component of these agreements are compared with each other - focusing not on direct institutional comparison, but rather on the set of trade-offs which comprise the 'human rights dimension' of the agreements. This human rights dimension is also compared with relevant international law. The book focuses the comparison on three main areas: self-determination and 'the deal', institution-building for the future, and dealing with the past." "The author argues the design and implementation prospects of individual rights protections are closely circumscribed by the self-determination 'deal' at the heart of the agreement. She suggests that the entangling of issues of group access to power with individual rights provision, indicates the extent to which peace-making is a constitution-making project. She argues in conclusion that peace agreements are in effect types of constitution with valuable lessons about the role of law in social change both in situations of violent conflict but also in less dramatic contexts." "The book should be of interest not just to human rights lawyers and those who are involved in situations of conflict, but those who are interested in the connections between legal, political science, and international relations discourses with relation to 'ethnic conflict' and conflict resolution."--BOOK JACKET

eng.