Crimes against humanity appeared for the first time in a treaty in the 1945 Nuremberg Charter at the end of the Second World War, albeit with a different definition than today. Since the 1990s, crimes against humanity have been codified in different international treaties such as the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1993), the Statute of the International Tribunal for Rwanda(1994) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). The Rome Statute provides the most recent and most expansive list of specific criminal acts that may constitute crimes against humanity. 

     Unlike other human rights violations, war crimes do not engage state responsibility but individual criminal responsibility. This means that individuals can be tried and found personally responsible for such crimes as murder, extermination, enslavement/deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, execution against an identifiable group, enforced disappearance of persons, the crime of apartheid, and other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health. Governments around the world often deny that crimes against humanity have occurred on their territory, thus ignoring the suffering of their people. Thousands of desperate victims are still struggling to get long-waited justice, reparation and recognition. 

     TRIAL International, a non-governmental organization, helps victims to get their voice heard by bringing their cases before domestic courts, as well as before regional and international human rights mechanism like the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights.The organization provides free legal support to victims, from the preparation and submission of their case, to the proceedings and the implementation of the decisions on the ground. TRIAL International fights   impunity   by filing criminal and compensation claims against perpetrators of crimes against humanity. These complaints are brought before international bodies, and before national courts thanks to the principle of universal jurisdiction. TRIAL also pushes national justice systems to investigate situations and prosecute the perpetrators of mass atrocities.

     Recently economists looked at the relationship between pupils’ month of birth and their schoolperformance. It was found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored on math and readingsomewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That can beexplained as a “huge effect.” It means that if you take two intellectually    21      fourth graders with birthdaysat opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older student could score in the eightieth percentile,    22    theyounger one could score in the sixty-eighth percentile. That’s the difference between    23    for a giftedprogram or not. The economists said, “We do ability grouping early on in childhood. We have advancedreading groups and advanced math groups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and firstgrade, the teachers are    24    maturity with ability. And they put the old kids in the advanced stream,where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better;and in the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don’tsee this going on is Denmark.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences byage have      25   . This is because they have a national policy where they have no ability grouping untilthe age of ten.

     Copyright law affects one’s right and ability to use another’s work. Its purpose is to    26      thecreation of works by giving authors’ exclusive property rights. Copyright is one of several categories ofintellectual property protection, designed to    27     the creator’s, owner’s, or holder’s right to claim anoriginal work as their own. As soon as a work is written on paper, recorded digitally, or typedelectronically—or anything that can be heard, seen, read, or touched—the work is    28    copyrightprotection, normally for a limited period of time. However, despite copyright law, which    29    individualsfrom copying, publishing, transmitting, exhibiting, distributing, modifying, displaying, or using (whetherfor profit or not) the original creative expressions of others, copyright    30    —intentional andinadvertent—still can and does occur. Overall, we should respect the originality of an individual’s work.

     The process for awarding host city honors came under intense scrutiny after Salt Lake City had beenawarded the right to host the 2002 Olympic Games. Soon after the host city had been announced, it wasdiscovered that the organizers had engaged in an elaborate bribery scheme to     31   with IOC(International Olympic Committee) officials. Gifts and other financial considerations were given to thosewho would evaluate and vote on Salt Lake City’s bid. These gifts included medical treatment for relatives,a college scholarship for one member’s son and a land deal in Utah. Even IOC president Juan AntonioSamaranch received two rifles    32   $2,000. Samaranch defended the gift as inconsequential since, aspresident, he was a non-voting member. 

     The subsequent investigation has uncovered inconsistencies in the bids for every Olympics (bothSummer and Winter) since 1988.   33   , the gifts received by IOC members from the JapaneseOrganizing Committee for Nagano’s bid for the 1998 Winter Olympics were described by the investigationcommittee as “astronomical.” Although nothing strictly illegal had been done, the IOC feared thatcorporate sponsors would lose faith in the integrity of the process and that the Olympic brand would betarnished to such an extent   34   advertisers would begin to pull their support. The investigation resulted in the expulsion of 10 IOC members and the sanctioning of another 10.New terms and age limits were established for IOC membership, and 15 former Olympic athletes wereadded to the committee. Stricter rules for future bids were imposed, with   35      imposed on the valueof gifts IOC members could accept from bid cities.

     Some economists have pointed out that in a knowledge-based economy, the most valuable commodity is not information, but attention. Michael Goldhaber (1997) proposed that we are not so much living in an information economy, as in an attention economy, where value is created from the exchange of attention and “[w]hat matters is seeking, obtaining and paying attention.” Digital media and the internet facilitate participation in this economy, by creating new channels for distributing attention. In order to get attention, you have to give attention; otherwise, your audience will lose interest and take their attention elsewhere. This is an important point for advertisers, especially those launching social media campaigns. The emphasis is on developing new kinds of relationships with customers, and in many cases, moving towards engaging customers in the design of products for themselves.

    Goldhaber notes that some people (he calls them “stars”) are better at attracting attention than others (he calls them “fans”). Stars are able to command more attention partly because they pay illusory attention to fans; that is, they give the illusion of personal attention even though they are addressing a large audience. Goldhaber illustrates this concept with the example of a presenter at a conference, who, while talking to a large crowd, makes eye contact with individuals in that crowd. In digital media, social media tools like Twitter and Facebook provide opportunities to pay illusory attention.

    If you accept the idea of an attention economy with attention as the valued commodity, then you have to adjust your ways of thinking about certain concepts. For example, our traditional way of thinking of privacy as freedom from the public gaze is not especially appropriate for people participating in an attention economy. People have to be “out there” in order to attract attention. In addition, intellectual property laws that forbid people from copying and distributing a creator’s work also seem out of place. This kind of copying and distributing draws attention to the creator, thus increasing their “wealth” in the attention economy. In other words, wealth comes not from the exchange of “intellectual property,” but from the exchange of attention.