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"Impunity"
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With liberty and justice for some : how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful
\"From \"the most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years\" (Bill Moyers), a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of justice that has emerged in AmericaFrom the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world. Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with the crimes of the Bush era, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud. Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Impunity, human rights, and democracy : Chile and Argentina, 1990-2005
This in-depth study highlights the unique, precedent-setting approach taken by Argentina and Chile to empower human rights advocates while prosecuting the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, whose rise to power during the 1970s and 1980s once appeared unstoppable.
eBook
International human rights and humanitarian law: 'President Biden issues policy on promoting accountability for conflict-related sexual violence'
On November 28, 2022, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. issued a memorandum on promoting accountability for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). It states that the United States \"does not accept CRSV as an inevitable cost of armed conflict\" and emphasizes its \"commit[- ment] to supporting survivors... by invoking all tools available, including legal, policy, diplomatic, and financial tools, to deter such violence, break the vicious cycle of impunity, and provide the necessary services to survivors.\" Though focusing on impunity and accountability, the policy also seeks to \"complement a broader, holistic approach to preventing and responding [to CRSV]... [that] includes advancing gender equity and equality; prioritizing the immediate needs of survivors; and amplifying survivor voices in transitional justice, the provision of services, and peace and political processes.\" Issuance of the memorandum was timed to coincide with the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) conference in London, where the United States joined fifty-three other countries in supporting the conference's political declaration on conflict-related sexual violence and, together with forty other states, made national commitments to preventing CRSV. While states and international organizations have begun to devote greater attention to preventing and punishing CRSV, survivors and advocates argue, and diplomats and UN officials recognize, that \"sexual violence continues to occur in many conflicts across the world, with almost total impunity.\"
Journal Article
Is rape a crime in Japan?
Japan is often said to have one of the lowest rape rates in the world, and Japanese police claim to solve 97 percent of rape cases. But in reality, only 5–10 percent of rape victims report it to police, and police record half or less of reported cases while prosecutors charge about one-third of recorded cases. The result of this process of caseload attrition is that for every 1,000 rapes in Japan, only 10–20 result in a criminal conviction – and fewer than half of convicted rapists are incarcerated. Similar patterns characterize Japan's criminal justice response to other sex crimes. This article shows that impunity for sex offenders is extremely common in Japan, and it argues that patriarchal social and legal norms help explain this pattern.
Journal Article
Workplace violence and its aftermath in China’s health sector: implications from a cross-sectional survey across three tiers of the health system
ObjectivesTo determine the prevalence of physical violence and threats against health workers and the aftermath in tertiary, secondary and primary care facilities in China.DesignA cross-sectional questionnaire study.Setting5 tertiary hospitals, 8 secondary hospitals and 32 primary care facilities located in both urban and rural areas of Zhejiang Province, China, were chosen as the study sites.ParticipantsA total of 4862 health workers who have contact with patients completed a survey from July 2016 to July 2017.Outcome measuresThe prevalence of physical violence, threats and Yi Nao, specific forms of physical violence and their aftermath were measured by a self-designed and verified questionnaire. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to examine the association between perceived organisational encouragement of reporting workplace violence (WPV) and physical violence, threats and Yi Nao after controlling for age, sex, level of facility, professional ranking and type of health worker.ResultsAmong all respondents, 224 (4.6%) were physically attacked and 848 (17.4%) experienced threats in the past year. Respondents in secondary hospitals were more likely to experience physical violence (AOR=3.29, 95% CI 2.21 to 4.89), threats (AOR=1.61, 95% CI 1.32 to 1.98) and Yi Nao (AOR=2.47, 95% CI 2.10 to 2.91), compared with primary care providers. Lack of organisational policies to report WPV was associated with higher likelihood of physical violence (AOR=3.64, 95% CI 2.57 to 5.18) and threats (AOR=2.21, 95% CI 1.76 to 2.78). Among physical violence cases, only 29.1% reported the attack to police mainly because most felt it useless to do so (58.8%). Only 25.7% were investigated and 72.4% of attackers received no punishment. Of all those attacked or threatened, 59.4% wanted to quit current post and 76.0% were fearful of dealing with urgent or severe cases.ConclusionsProper management of the aftermath of violence against health workers is inadequate. Formal guidelines for reporting and managing WPV are urgently needed.
Journal Article
Numbers of environmental injustice: The measurement of impunity in Mexico
The Global Environmental Impunity Index Mexico 2020 develops a methodology for measuring environmental impunity levels. Environmental impunity is defined through a thick approach following green criminology and refers to the lack of investigation, prosecution, punishment, and damage reparation of crimes committed against the environment; non-compliance of environmental or climate policy objectives; and the inexistence of intergenerational strategies and policy programs. The results show low performance in Mexican states, as they reach half the maximum score they could achieve. This reflects fragile environmental policies and insufficient institutional capacities to protect ecosystems and guarantee the right to a healthy environment. We focus on the importance of measuring degrees of environmental impunity to operationalize environmental justice problems; we discuss the scope of the concept of environmental impunity; we explain the methodological design of its four dimensions, its forty-two indicators, and the statistical model of the Index; and we analyze its aggregate results. In conclusion, the need to develop more reliable systems of environmental indicators; the explanatory value of institutional capacities; and the complexity involved in measuring environmental crimes and damage are each highlighted.
Journal Article
Addressing Sexual Gender-Based Violence in the Great Lakes Region: Insights from the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region
The Great Lakes Region has a long history of political instability, militarised conflicts, and human rights violations that have contributed to issues of widespread sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), particularly against women and girls, and a culture of impunity. In response to the region’s challenges, the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) emerged as a multilateral framework, with one of its goals being to prevent and combat SGBV. This paper critically examines the role of the ICGLR in addressing SGBV in the Great Lakes Region (GLR) using the human rights-based approach (HRBA) as an analytical lens. It explores the legal frameworks, underlying principles, and practical strategies employed by the ICGLR to protect human rights and promote gender equality in the region. However, the analysis reveals that despite the concerted efforts of the ICGLR, violence against women persists, thus the assertion that the current strategies necessitate a review of the ICGLR’s initiatives to reinforce its effectiveness in the fight against SGBV in the region. The discourse not only identifies the gaps in the ICGLR’s initiatives but also propounds recommendations to strengthen the organisation’s capacity to mitigate the challenges posed by SGBV. Consequently, this paper seeks to contribute to policy formulation and to the critical discourse of the ICGLR’s role in forging a more secure and equitable future for the GLR.
Journal Article
How to 'make law count'
The international community has experimented with a variety of tools for promoting the rule of law in weak states, yet with few successes. An innovative tool is hybrid commissions not supplanting the justice system of the target state but fighting impunity from within it. In this contribution I therefore seek to identify the factors that render this novel mechanism of rule of law promotion effective, arguing that a set of factors - support from the Attorney-General, civil society and powerful donors; as well as the commission's institutional design, its strategy, and the personality of the commissioner - will determine if the changes initiated by the hybrid lead to a deeper transformation of the host state, or if there will be a rule of law rollback as soon as the commission leaves the country.
Journal Article
African resistance to the International Criminal Court: Halting the advance of the anti-impunity norm
The creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998 marked a substantial advance in the effort to ensure all perpetrators of mass atrocities can be brought to justice. Yet significant resistance to the anti-impunity norm, and the ICC as the implementing institution, has arisen in Africa. The ICC has primarily operated in Africa, and since it sought to indict the sitting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2008 resistance from both individual African states and the African Union has increased substantially. We draw on the concept of ‘norm antipreneurs’, and the broader norm dynamics literature, to analyse how resistance has developed and manifested itself, as well as the potential effects of this resistance on the anti-impunity norm. We conclude that the antipreneur concept helped us structure and organise analysis of the case – suggesting it could be usefully deployed in other similar cases – but that this case also suggests that antipreneurs do not always enjoy substantial defensive advantages. We also conclude that African resistance to the ICC has substantially stalled the advance of the anti-impunity norm, a finding that has significant implications for the wider effort to reduce mass atrocity crimes in the contemporary era.
Journal Article