Chapter 18 offers a critical analysis of the types of remedies sought in climate cases and examines their implications within the legal landscape. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of climate lawsuits from around the world, the authors provide insights into the diverse range of remedies that have been sought to address the adverse impacts of climate change. They then shed light on the different considerations and approaches that courts have taken when determining appropriate remedies. In their exploration of emerging best practices, the authors highlight instances where courts have adopted innovative and transformative approaches to remedies in climate litigation. They examine creative legal mechanisms that go beyond traditional compensatory measures and explore the potential of remedies such as injunctive relief, restitution, and declaratory judgments to address the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change.

This chapter reviews the Nazi plunder of art works, Judaica, and other cultural objects during and before the Second World War, showing how it operated as both a top-down and a bottom-up practice. It then traces the diverse efforts around the world to gain restitution or compensation for these plundered goods. Beginning with Allied efforts to locate and return stolen artworks during the closing days of the war (the so-called “Monuments Men”) and continuing through the evasive policies of Germany and Austria after the war, up to the renewed litigation, in Europe and America, starting in the 1990s, the chapter demonstrates the long and difficult road survivors and descendants walked to try to retrieve their stolen property. All too often such efforts failed.

This chapter offers a political and institutional history of the “most expensive endeavor of restorative justice” ever undertaken, though even this monumental effort pales in comparison with the damage inflicted by the Nazis. Focusing on Germany with an eye toward pan-European developments, it traces the procedures and eligibility, as well as efforts to block, both the restitution of lost property and reparations for past suffering. Restitution and reparations were initially conceptualized broadly, though, over time, Jewish victims became prominent among the recipients. Other Nazi victim groups (e.g., Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, etc.) sometimes faced even greater obstacles to legal recognition and successful claims. The chapter emphasizes the challenges faced by all surviving Nazi victims – Jews and non-Jews alike – in claiming due restitution for their suffering and the grievous harm inflicted on them during the Third Reich.

We almost cannot think today about mass atrocities without Holocaust references. Holocaust analogies frame and enflame our ethical debates. Holocaust words dominate our humanitarian lexicon. Yet the deep linkage between the Holocaust and global justice is accompanied by a marked crisis of confidence in international law. Many question whether global legal institutions can ever prevent and properly punish atrocity crimes. The more we invoke the Holocaust, it seems, the less certain we become about the legal world built in its name. This chapter traces this development, from the first discussions of what would come to be called “genocide” in the 1930s, through private litigation geared toward restorative justice. Each legal mode of dealing with the Holocaust has served as a model for how to approach other atrocities, and each has been unavoidably politicized, despite law’s promise to depoliticize the response to political crimes.

This chapter introduces the extraordinary range of archival materials and archives used by Holocaust scholars. It chronicles the efforts of prewar organizations to preserve Jewish papers and artifacts, and the clandestine efforts in ghettos and even in camps to document the unfolding genocide. This is followed by accounts of postwar retrieval efforts, often delayed for decades, and documentation efforts with multiple legal, historical, memorial, and welfare goals in mind. Some lacked a fixed home and dissolved, others followed their organizers to new homes. A fierce battle developed over German government, military, and industrial records and over postwar civilian search records. Since the 1980s, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined Yad Vashem as a central collection point for Holocaust material. Finally, the chapter turns to what constitutes a valuable artifact and to the impact of digitization on the Holocaust archive.

This title explores the principles and mechanisms for the reparation of human rights violations under international human rights law. It discusses the obligation of states to provide full reparation for harm suffered as a result of human rights violations, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. The section examines the legal standards for determining and quantifying reparation, the procedural aspects of reparation processes, and the role of international and national bodies in monitoring and enforcing reparation awards. It also highlights the challenges in ensuring effective and timely reparation, the importance of victim participation in reparation processes, and the impact of reparation on the rehabilitation and empowerment of victims. By analyzing the principles and practices of reparation, this title aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms for addressing the consequences of human rights violations and the importance of reparation in achieving justice and reconciliation.

This part explores the principles and mechanisms for the reparation of human rights violations and the enforcement of decisions rendered by international human rights bodies. It discusses the obligation of states to provide full reparation for harm suffered as a result of human rights violations, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. The sections examine the legal standards for determining and quantifying reparation, the procedural aspects of reparation processes, and the role of international and national bodies in monitoring and enforcing reparation awards. Additionally, this part focuses on the enforcement mechanisms and challenges in implementing international human rights decisions. It discusses various models of enforcement, including judicial review, hybrid monitoring, and political and diplomatic control. The part highlights the importance of effective enforcement in ensuring the realization of human rights and the accountability of states for human rights violations. By providing insights into the reparation and enforcement processes, this part emphasizes the critical role of comprehensive and effective mechanisms in achieving justice and reconciliation for victims of human rights violations.

This chapter explores the principle of full reparation for human rights violations under international human rights law. It discusses the obligation of states to provide reparation, the forms of reparation, and the challenges in implementing this principle. The chapter examines the legal standards for full reparation, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition. It also highlights the role of international bodies in monitoring and enforcing reparation obligations, the importance of victim participation in reparation processes, and the challenges in providing adequate and effective reparation for human rights violations.

Reparations for grand corruption: applies a human rights framework based on the UN Basic Principles on Remedy and Reparations to thinking about reparations for grand corruption on a national level. Under restitution, covers social reuse of confiscated property, and land restitution. Compensation is broken down into categories of damages arising from different corrupt acts, with a focus on loss of opportunity damages. The chapter also considers satisfaction, measures of non-repetition, diffuse harms and issues of causation.

This chapter addresses the place of material culture in the global turn in European history. How did extra-European objects come to be part of, and sometimes even define, the materiality of Europe? Goods from outside Europe have gained attention as objects of historical research through several separate pathways: the focus on global goods in the field of economic history on the one hand, and the growing presence of ethnographic objects and anthropological approaches in historical studies on the other. The thinking about material culture in Europe has profoundly changed with the integration of the global turn. From considering European material culture only from within a tightly bordered European perspective, approaches have shifted to not only identifying the ubiquity of non-European goods within European material landscapes but also recognising the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between European and non-European. European material culture is now understood to be full of traces that lead back to empire, colonial oppression, and the exploitation of labour. It includes objects that that were created elsewhere for European consumers, objects that were brought to Europe by collectors and (scientific) explorers, as well as European-made objects consumed and/or recreated in other parts of the world.

Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

This chapter discusses the account of profits, disgorgement, and other forms of gain-based relief. It will consider the difference between compensation, restitution and disgorgement. It will then consider the account of profits, and the operation of bars to relief and other limiting factors.

The primary rationales of the account of profits have been identified as deterrence and prophylaxis (that is, preventing a defendant from gaining from wrongdoing). Deterrence looks not to the dispute in question, but to the future conduct of the specific defendant (specific deterrence) and the future conduct of other potential defendants (general deterrence). By stripping the defendant of her gain (or part of her gain), the defendant (and other potential defendants) will be deterred from engaging in similar conduct in the future. It is argued that the remedies discussed in this chapter have a deterrent flavour.

A remedy is specific when the plaintiff seeks to get the court to coerce the defendant into doing (or not doing) a particular thing. The word ‘coercion’ is used advisedly. The court orders the defendant to do (or not to do) the particular thing, and if the defendant refuses to comply, the court may use measures such as imprisonment, sequestration and fines to encourage compliance with its order. The two most important examples of specific relief in Australia are the decree of specific performance and the injunction. This chapter will consider specific performance, and the next chapter will consider injunctions. Specific performance relates to ordering the defendant to comply with the terms of a contract, but injunctions may be ordered across private law and beyond. Specific performance is exclusively equitable, and generally operates in relation to a common law cause of action; namely, breach of contract.

The concept of ‘remedy’ used in this chapter encompasses a court order replicating a preexisting right, not a response to civil wrongdoing. Restitutionary remedies responding to unjust enrichment differ from remedies responding to a wrong (breach of contract, tort, or equitable wrong). As noted in Ch 1, they do not fit easily into a division between the primary right and the secondary remedy. It is for this reason that the cause of action and the remedy overlap, and they are notoriously difficult to untangle. Discussions of restitutionary remedies inevitably turn into discussions of the cause of action.