Coercive Human Rights

Mavronicola, Natasa; Lavrysen, Luc

doi:10.5040/9781509937905.ch-001

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In what has become an increasing consensus among regional and international organizations since the 2000s, there is a set of serious human rights violations" which must be properly investigated and prosecuted, even during a political transition. That is particularly the case of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocidal acts, which are among the strict range of international "core crimes" -acts that are criminalized directly by international law, through treaties such as the Geneva that the amnesty laws adopted by these countries were incompatible with the American Convention on Human Rights, and ordered states parties to investigate, prosecute, and punish serious human rights violations whose perpetrators had not been prosecuted due to these laws (VEÇOSO, 2016) This growing opposition to blanket amnesties among human rights and transitional justice experts should be read against the background of a broader coercive and carceral turn in human rights law: a commitment to countering "impunity" which places criminal punishment as an unquestionable imperative for addressing human rights violations (ENGLE, 2015;ENGLE;MILLER;DAVIS, 2016;MAVRONICOLA, 2020). In these contexts, demands by victims and their family members, alongside human rights activists, for retributive justice coexist with concerns about the foundational violence of criminal justice systems across the region (a matter to which we will come back in chapter 6).…”

Section: B3 Crime and Truth-seekingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…has come under increasing scrutiny by regional and international organizations over the last decades. This trend is associated with the rise of an "anti-impunity" transnational agenda, which places criminal punishment as an unquestionable imperative for addressing human rights violations (ENGLE, 2015;ENGLE;MILLER;DAVIS, 2016;MAVRONICOLA, 2020). This trend also has effects for the roles attributed to truth commissions: if they have traditionally been imagined either as a less desirable substitute for judicial prosecutions, or as a precedent or supplement to these (REÁTEGUI, 2009), the consolidation of an anti-impunity agenda leads to further questions as to the relation between these extrajudicial mechanisms and potential trials.…”

Section: Recommendations and The Knot Of "Militarization Of Public Se...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such emphasis inserts this truth commission proposal within a broader transnational anti-impunity agenda that has been increasingly consolidated over the last few decades in the field of human rights; and in Mexico, as elsewhere, an attention to the risk of capture of this agenda is needed, in order to ensure that the label does not become subsumed to "redistributed punishment" (MAVRONICOLA, 2020). Fundamentally, this anti-impunity agenda brings together the treatment of "political" and "criminal"…”

Section: Conclusion: Drawing Future Threads Between Criminal and Poli...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Criminal Violence, Political Violence, and the Politics of Line-Drawing in Latin America

SANTOS¹

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This thesis sews together stories from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, in which the line between criminal violence on the one hand, and political violence on the other, has been drawn over the 2000s. It focuses on two dimensions: firstly, the line-drawing practices of governments who justify increasing military roles in public security, as well as of military officials themselves as they implement these operations; and secondly, the practices of governments and civil society organizations establishing truth-seeking mechanisms to clarify patterns and cases of violence in the past and in the present. Two sets of metaphors are mobilized as analytical devices to make sense of these processes, in connection with different meanings of the verb to draw: on the one hand, the act of inscribing a trace over a surface; on the other hand, the act of pulling a thread over three-dimensional space. I argue that the drawing of that line has been central to the treatment of organized violence by governments and civil society organizations, in three countries which have seen both an increase in military deployment against criminal actors and the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms devoted to victims' right to truth, frustrating expectations associated with the standards of "peace" and "democracy" -two trends which have, however, taken place against markedly different historical contexts of democratization and peacebuilding, as discussed in the thesis. The stories gathered here will be informed by an analysis of sources as varied as government documents, truth commissions' reports, interviews with experts and activists of all three countries, and scholarly literature. Attending to how distinctions, connections and (dis)continuities are drawn between criminal violence and political violence in these Latin American countries allows us to critically assess conditions of possibility for the reproduction of violent patterns and the prospects for their positive transformation, as well as the elements and limits of a political imagination for which these "violent peaceful democracies" have emerged as a puzzle in the first place.

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Section: B3 Crime and Truth-seekingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Recommendations and The Knot Of "Militarization Of Public Se...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Drawing Future Threads Between Criminal and Poli...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Criminal Violence, Political Violence, and the Politics of Line-Drawing in Latin America

SANTOS¹

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Human Rights Penality and Violence Against Women: The Coloniality of Disembodied Justice

Tapia Tapia

2023

Law Critique

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Despite the persistence of violence inside and around prisons, and the dubious adequacy of criminal law to respond to victim–survivors, international human rights (IHR) discourse increasingly promotes the mobilisation of the state’s penal apparatus to respond to human rights violations, including violence against women (VAW). Using an anticolonial feminist approach, this article scrutinises the ontological and epistemological commitments underlying ‘human rights penality,’ by analysing features of the Western-colonial register vis-a-vis more relational worldviews. Separateness, abstraction, and transcendence broadly underpin the exclusion of embodied experience, context, and material reality from the juridical field. In the second part, through discourse analysis of Inter-American and European case law, the author shows the deployment of human rights penality, the displacement of experience, and the disregard of context in IHR discourse. VAW is construed as a procedural and penal matter: it is the absence of a penal process that courts regard as failure to protect women, rather than the state’s inability/unwillingness to address structural subordination. Moreover, the ‘virtues’ attributed to the penal system justify its expansion, which facilitates the continuity of penal violence and debilitates alternative approaches to justice. Finally, the author posits penal abolition as an anticolonial praxis, pointing at examples of anti-carceral feminist work.

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Law and Personality Disorder

O'Loughlin

2024

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This book examines how legal and policy actors negotiate the demands of controlling crime and respecting individual rights against a background of uncertain scientific knowledge. Bringing together insights from criminology, psychiatry, psychology, and law, it unpicks competing images of ‘dangerous’ offenders and the dilemmas they present. It does so by tracing the creation of a new group—‘dangerous people with severe personality disorders’—by policymakers in England and Wales in 1999—and by situating contemporary debates about ‘dangerous’ offenders within a historical context. Through a critique of sentencing law, mental health law, and human rights law, this book further examines an alluring narrative: that the state has a duty to protect the public from ‘dangerous’ individuals, but that it can protect the human rights of the ‘dangerous’ by providing them with rehabilitation opportunities. While human rights law is often invoked as a means of curbing the excesses of preventive justice, this book demonstrates that the European Court of Human Rights tends to legitimize coercive measures. Furthermore, the criminal law legitimizes the punishment of offenders with mental disorders by resisting psychiatric evidence that they are not fully responsible for their actions. But the law also has the resources to tackle these seemingly intractable dilemmas, and this book therefore puts forward modest reform proposals.

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Coercive Human Rights

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Criminal Violence, Political Violence, and the Politics of Line-Drawing in Latin America

Criminal Violence, Political Violence, and the Politics of Line-Drawing in Latin America

Human Rights Penality and Violence Against Women: The Coloniality of Disembodied Justice

Law and Personality Disorder

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