We describe the mapping and sequencing of mutations within the DNA polymerase gene of herpes simplex virus type 1 which confer resistance to aphidicolin, a DNA polymerase inhibitor. The mutations occur near two regions which are highly conserved among DNA polymerases related to the herpes simplex enzyme. They also occur near other herpes simplex mutations which affect the interactions between the polymerase and deoxyribonucleoside triphosphate substrates. Consequently, we argue in favor of the idea that the aphidicolin binding site overlaps the substrate binding site and that the near-by conserved regions are functionally required for substrate binding. Our mutants also exhibit abnormal sensitivity to another DNA polymerase inhibitor, phosphonoacetic acid. This drug is thought to bind as an analogue of pyrophosphate. A second-site mutation which suppresses the hypersensitivity of one mutant to phosphonoacetic acid (but not its aphidicolin resistance) is described. This second mutation may represent a new class of mutations, which specifically affects pyrophosphate, but not substrate, binding.
This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely been unexamined. That is surprising given that international legal prohibitions against human rights atrocities are designed to be enforced by domestic courts applying domestic criminal law. We argue that domestic criminal laws against genocide and crimes against humanity facilitate human rights prosecutions in post‐authoritarian states by helping to overcome formal legal roadblocks to prosecution, such as retroactivity, amnesties, immunities, and statutes of limitations. Using original data on domestic atrocity laws and human rights prosecutions in new democracies, we find that atrocity laws increase the speed with which new democracies pursue prosecutions, as well as the overall numbers of trials they initiate and complete.
Why do governments take atrocity offenses, like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, from international law and legislate them into domestic criminal law, empowering national courts to prosecute their own, and sometimes other states’, government and military officials? The question is important, because the international community has constructed an international legal regime to prosecute the most serious human rights violations, but that regime is designed to rely primarily on domestic criminal courts to try offenders. To fulfill this role, domestic courts often require specific legislation that defines and criminalizes these offenses in national law. Yet, the adoption of national atrocity laws is puzzling, since in a number of ways, these laws appear to threaten states’ interests. This introductory chapter highlights the puzzle of atrocity criminalization and discusses its importance for the functioning of the international atrocity regime. It then situates this study in existing literatures and highlights the book’s contributions to research on atrocity justice, human rights, and international law. Next, it summarizes the book’s main arguments and details the study’s multi-method research design, which combines quantitative analyses of new, original datasets with in-depth qualitative case studies of Guatemala, Colombia, Poland, and the Maldives.
This chapter presents a new, comprehensive dataset on the global spread of atrocity laws. It uses time-series statistical analyses to systematically test the book’s theory of atrocity criminalization against alternative explanations on global patterns of cases. The results provide strong support for four expectations that follow from the book’s main arguments. First, more democratic governments are more likely than autocratic ones to criminalize atrocities through targeted legislation. Second, on its own, the adoption of a new criminal code in a given state of any regime type greatly increases the likelihood that the state criminalizes atrocity offenses. Third, when governments do adopt new criminal codes, they are more likely to include atrocity offenses if the types of sources from which drafters are likely to borrow favor atrocity criminalization. Specifically, higher rates of atrocity law diffusion among regional legal peers and greater levels of embeddedness in networks influenced by the International Association of Penal Law are associated with greater likelihoods of including atrocity offenses in new criminal codes. Finally, the determinants of criminalization through criminal code reform are different than those of criminalization through targeted legislation, supporting the claim that these two pathways are the products of distinct behavioral dynamics.
This chapter examines three negative cases—cases in which new criminal codes did not include atrocity offenses—to explore why the legal borrowing thesis does not hold in some otherwise favorable cases. The first two cases—Colombia in 1980 and Poland in 1969—shared with Guatemala much that made them prime candidates for the legal borrowing thesis. These included diffusion of atrocity criminalization among regional legal peers and strong ties between criminal code drafters and professional networks linked to the continental European criminal law tradition. This chapter shows that atrocity laws in Colombia and Poland’s draft codes were discarded at the last minute because they became politicized, though for different reasons. The third case—the Maldives in 2014—did not possess characteristics that made it favorable for the legal borrowing thesis. Nevertheless, it was a strong candidate for alternative explanations connecting criminal code reform to atrocity criminalization. This case is revealing, because it illustrates why these otherwise favorable conditions were insufficient for atrocity criminalization. The chapter shows that the drafters of the Maldivian code never considered including atrocity offenses, because their particular professional orientation and the sources they used for guidance did not favor them. Taken together, these three cases underscore the importance of professional-level mechanisms for understanding variation in the inclusion of international norms in new domestic institutions. They also illustrate conditions under which some of the mechanisms in the legal borrowing thesis may fail to obtain.
This chapter traces the history of efforts to domesticate international atrocity law, which provides initial plausibility for the book’s central argument. The chapter locates the origins of atrocity laws in the decades prior to World War II with a community of influential European criminal law scholars, most of whom were leaders of the International Association of Penal Law (AIDP). Following the war, some of these experts helped draft the first international atrocity law treaties, and the enforcement regimes they designed relied on national enforcement through domestic legislation. Four phases of atrocity law adoption then followed. In the first phase (1945–1957), the adoption of atrocity laws was driven mostly by principled norm entrepreneurs who were actively committed to the advancement of an international criminal law regime. In the second phase (1957–1985), professionalization and emulation became central drivers of domestic atrocity criminalization. As national governments all over the world drafted new criminal codes, transnational professional influences conditioned technocratic drafters to see atrocity criminalization as important for a modern criminal code. In the third phase (1985–1998), a new wave of domestic and international attempts to prosecute government officials for past atrocities, coupled with a resurgence of foreign technical legal assistance, helped foster the conditions that made atrocity criminalization salient beyond a specialized community of professional criminal law experts. Finally, in the current phase (1998–present), international civil society groups, inspired by the creation of the International Criminal Court, have undertaken concerted public advocacy efforts to promote the domestication of atrocity law.
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