Book Notes

Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana, by Human Rights Watch (October 1997).

Based upon a three-year examination of two super-maximum security prisons in Indiana, the report applies international human rights standards in evaluating the conditions and practices within the facilities, and finds them wanting. Particularly disturbing is the significant percentage of mentally ill inmates provided with little or no medical assistance, under conditions that often exacerbate their illnesses. While the report focuses upon these two facilities, a trend toward like institutions nationwide underscores the seriousness of this report, made more troubling by the fact that most of these inmates will be released back into society quite ill-prepared to deal with life on the outside.

Reading Human Rights: An Annotated Guide to a Human Rights Library, by Stephen C. Neff, The Nadesan Centre for Human Rights Through Law, and Interights (1997).

Under a grant from the Ford Foundation, a Sri Lankan human rights center and the London-based Interights have produced a selective guide to significant human rights literature for human rights groups and libraries. The report may be purchased from The Nadesan Centre, 31 Charles Place, Colombo 3, Sri Lanka, or Interights, Lancaster House, 33 Islington High Street, London N1 9LH, United Kingdom.

International Action Against Racial Discrimination, by Michael Banton (Clarendon Press: Oxford 1995).

An important addition to the literature examining the work of the expert treaty bodies. The author, himself a member of the Committee established by the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, reports on the underwhelming achievements of the first expert treaty body in its early years, as well as its more significant contributions beginning in the 1980s and increasing with the end of the Cold War. Many countries ratified the treaty with a view that it was principally focussed upon anti-colonial situations and classic examples of racial segregation and that it was not applicable to their domestic situations. However, the expert body has focussed upon situations of ethnic conflict and relationships with indigenous populations, thereby bringing into play situations within most state parties to the treaty. The more assertive attitude of the Race Committee has been influenced by the work of the Human Rights Committee set up under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the Committee established to oversee the implementation of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and the Presumptions of the American Legal Process, by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. (Oxford University Press: New York 1996).

This volume is part of a series of studies on race and the law in the United States by the eminent jurist who served for many years on the Third Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. The principal focus of this volume is the role of the American legal process in substantiating, perpetuating, and legitimizing the precept of inferiority of blacks. Judge Higginbotham discusses numerous cases, the majority of which will not be familiar to our readers.