The United Nations and reform of the police in El Salvador

This article presents new data on provisions for police reform in peace agreements (PRPA) between 1975 and 2011. The PRPA dataset complements past research on the determinants and effects of specific terms in agreements with detailed data on police reform provisions. The PRPA dataset also adds a quantitative dimension to the thus far largely qualitative literature on post-conflict security sector reform (SSR). It includes information on six subtypes of police reform: capacity, training, human rights standards, accountability, force composition and international training and monitoring. We show that there is currently a high global demand for the regulation of police reform through peace agreements: police reform provisions are now more regularly included in agreements than settlement terms that call for power-sharing or elections. We observe interesting variations in the inclusion of police reform provisions in relation to past human rights violations, regime type, or the scope of international peacekeeping prior to negotiations, and illustrate the implications of police reform provisions for the duration of post-conflict peace. Finally, we stimulate ideas on how scholars and policymakers can use the PRPA dataset in future to study new questions on post-conflict police reform.

Since independence, police reforms have been influenced by the need to expand democratic space and to ensure protection of human rights. Previous studies have attempted to deconstruct the police reforms. However, the studies have not adequately examined the implications of police reforms on human rights in Kenya. This paper examines police reforms between in Kenya between 1978 and 2002 and their implications on human rights. The study was based on a descriptive survey design and targeted senior serving and retired police officers, government administrators, county government administrators and members of the human rights groups in Nairobi County. Purposive sampling technique was used to select 116 study participants. Data was collected through focus group discussion, interview schedule and document analysis and analyzed based on thematic content analysis. The study findings revealed that Moi’s presidency (between 1978 and 2002) was marked by minimal police reforms but heightened human rights violation including arrests without warrants, detention without trial and torture which resulted in injury and death. This implied that in the absence of substantive reforms, the police disregarded human rights. Hence, the period between 1978 and 2002 was marked by curtailed freedom of association, assembly, speech and expression. Keywords : Human Rights, Police Reforms, human rights discourse, Moi era, Kenya DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/103-06 Publication date: November 30 th 2020

Community policing is considered by the leadership of the Albanian police as central to delivering democratic policing in the country. It has been enshrined in the national and local police strategies that call for a close cooperation between police, local authorities and non-governmental organisations in identifying and addressing local policing needs. The implementation of such initiative is an attempt to refocus police reform in Albania towards guaranteeing respect for human rights, which, in turn, influences the relationship between police and the citizens as a cornerstone of democracy. However, there is a gap between the planned reforms and their implementation on the ground. It is also not clear to what extent community policing programmes in Albania tally with local conditions. The experience so far indicates that community policing reform initiatives in Albania, often conceptualised and overseen by Western experts, have been more about exporting an ideology than a change of practice. Whilst the concept can be seen as a useful vehicle to improve police–public relations and encourage police's adherence to human rights, community policing in Albania has been shown to have had little effect on reducing crime rates.

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968.1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate.3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans.8Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization.10Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color.13If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified.14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one.18Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.19The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well.22The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021.28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively.31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts.32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone.35Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color.36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms.37One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police and racial in law Police unions are not always of but even today they do more to than to for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less reason for that is that the of police unions and than police officers of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms by police and the presence of officers of color may in some have police unions to moderate their most of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, as and just as every police in the country to “community policing,” in part because it became a for At its though, community policing was more than a It was a of law enforcement from a and toward a that on and with the public and with other policing had major some of which will be And because community policing was with of it was hard to It though, because it often greatly increased public with the police and made people fear of crime to real reductions in when people felt they out and and to become with more people most community policing also police departments, and it focus beyond crime allowing them to a of other by the communities they It well with policing, which called on officers to work and on an basis, with other agencies and the public to of particular local but not policing to responsible for a disproportionate amount of but not the were officers. community policing, the focus on to and a body of evidence these with significant crime there are that and other forms of policing have helped some cities the national and reduce homicides in community policing and policing also increased attention to low-level, of such as and the Part of the idea was that when these of were left neighborhoods toward people on the and rates of serious this was the of Police on quality-of-life could be too, and the that these were in effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as policing and only when the community and particular in particular crackdowns on quality-of-life as community policing and policing, did not reduce the other of the from quality-of-life policing, policing the of in which the police with community groups and other agencies to particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate of a first and most of which was in the 1980s and called because their most was often threats of consequences at the and groups violence in a particular But the also of social to the same people, and more recent of this more than policing. is growing that these when right, their moreover, community policing and policing their in poor were and not just because they were of from of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. policing and policing police to adopt what the had called the of law kind of policing in to from the of law enforcement in had called the which and the which when community policing and policing were to against life they on the In community policing and policing officers to for neighborhoods to a of other than law enforcement: and so that they had not up to be social but it out they often were at other agencies to more attention to marginalized several different community policing and policing have lost much of their over the past two The terrorist attacks of to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and and local in the early 2000s many departments to community policing and policing as forms of these the crackdowns on and in New York City, helped to community against them in many against the of police And it became increasingly that, even at their community policing and policing had some was that these attention to police This was not in the of either of could have with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police But they Police the of police violence, especially police because they did not the of the This was because the victims were of marginalized groups and or because did not still does on police killings or other forms of police violence, and the advent of body and of these were to It those and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the of police killings the attention it had long lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has over the past half century. for the of the victims, the of killed by a police in the United States during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly Black Americans and The decline in police killings over the course of that to have been to new the use of lethal against In the three decades, in the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant while the rate for white Americans as a the age-adjusted for Americans also In some though, rates to From through 2019, police killings in areas and but by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, because of new on use of violence in some cities has dropped especially In Los Angeles, for example, significant of by the police appear to have been in half between and 2019, and police shootings appear to have by forty by officers increased in 2021 but remained far than in past In on the other of by the police have dropped by percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not a similar Police shootings in between and in and again in and and then dropped over the several years, by to roughly the Los and have been of efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the of by police in these cities over the past are in some reductions in of in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los but in others progress on police shootings in also the in patterns of police violence, as in crime across the United States. The Police by the and the number of of per thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from to the from fifteen to the United States as a had New York rate of police almost Americans have been killed by the police in had New York homicide people have violently that same Police can and have but the victories have been and often

No Silver Bullet in Sight: The Paths and Pitfalls of Police Reform in Mexico Matthias Jäger (bio) Daniel M Police Reform in Mexico: Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2012. 296 p. When Mexico’s president-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, assumes office on December 1, 2012, he will take on a difficult legacy. As America’s neighbor to the south, Mexico was the Latin American country most affected by the international financial and economic crisis1 and, not least due to its strong ties to the U.S. economy, remains in a difficult condition. Politically, the country is perhaps more polarized than ever; many discussions about Mexico’s future center on whether the country should be considered a “failing state,” and whether the conflict between the government and the drug cartels should be classified as a “war” rather than democratic transition. With the number of casualties hitting almost 60,000 in recent years, violence has reached a level hard to imagine for an OECD member state with the potential of Mexico. Expectations are high for Enrique Peña Nieto, since the departing president, Felipe Calderón, has not managed to control the violence during his ending six-year term. In fact, he stirred up a hornet’s nest when, troubled by internal conflicts regarding the legitimacy of his election victory in 2006, he made the decision to pit the Mexican army against the drug cartels when the army was ill-prepared for internal security tasks. Far from offering a solution, this controversial decision increased the brutality of the conflict, transforming it into one that is settled in broad daylight on the streets of many Mexican towns rather than in the desert of Northwest Mexico, and has led to serious human rights violations committed by members of the armed forces against civilians. Of course, public security—or the lack thereof—is not the only issue observers of the country’s democratic development should worry about these days. However, security is the issue which affects all others—from the state’s imperfect monopoly on the use of force and rampant corruption, a new political [End Page 221] pluralism that is at stake, to a high concentration of mass media in the hands of the elite, to name only a few of the challenges. Accordingly, there is probably no issue higher on the policy agenda in Mexico now than police reform, and it is therefore welcome that a new book recently published by Daniel M. Sabet focuses precisely on the obstacles to professionalizing Mexico’s police forces. Not surprisingly, Sabet’s research has already received considerable attention in the policy community. In fact, there is rarely a new study by a young scholar as acclaimed as Sabet’s: The Inter-American Dialogue’s Michael Shifter refers to the book as “a superb, rigorous, careful study,”2 and Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, calls it nothing less than “one of the best books on Mexico written in English in recent years.”3 Daniel M. Sabet is a specialist in governance, policy analysis, and public sector reform research who earned his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University-Bloomington. He currently serves as the director of the Center for Enterprise and Society at the University of Liberal Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh and is a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, which funded his study. Sabet’s research agenda emerged from his earlier work coordinating rule-of-law educational programs for police throughout Latin America as part of the National Strategic Information Center’s “Culture of Lawfulness” project. Some of the findings presented in his most recent book have been previously published as working papers, articles, or book chapters that are already heavily drawn upon in academic discussion.4 Police reform has been high on the Mexican policy agenda since the mid-1990s. Sabet seeks to answer why a decade and a half of reform efforts have failed to produce a more honest and effective police force protective of human rights. Although on other occasions the author has also worked on reform of the...

Police reform as institutional change: Symbols and dilemmas

Police officers on a peace mission The Dutch police participated in eleven peace missions since 2000. This article describes the experiences of Dutch police officers who carried out police reform during recent missions in Bosnia, Sudan, Kosovo and Afghanistan. In their role as instructor and/or adviser, these police officers taught local constables (basic) policing and management skills. During their mission, they were confronting many obstacles that stem from cultural differences, ethnic tensions, opportunism, unwillingness, corruption and language barriers. Given these limitations, expectations regarding police reform must be tempered. Creating or transforming local police into effective law-enforcement institutions that operate under the rule of law and with respect for human rights, is not a quick fix. However, by means of training and advice, local police officers realize that they should protect and serve.

The primary objective of this article is to assess the Ethiopian federal police reform in relation to Human Rights protection during criminal investigation process since 2015. To conduct the study, the qualitative method and explorative research design has been employed with purposive sampling technique. By using semi-structured in-depth interview with 30 participants from police and attorney, human rights commission, civil societies, and United Nations organization, observation and document analysis as instruments of data collection, the author investigated the ongoing reform processes about human rights protection during criminal investigation. Accordingly, the findings of the study indicated that there are improvements (in terms of decreasing in the incidence of physical torture; allowing human rights experts and researchers to visit police stations and custodies; closing of some police stations where citizen’s human rights were subjected for violations such as Meakelawi. However, some violations such as lack of speedy trial and compelling suspects to produce illegal confessions by putting them at dark places were continued during Criminal investigation process. Finally, the study recommended that the government should re-evaluate police compliance in the process of sustaining police reform to give more focus to Human Rights promotion in allocating conducive environments such as Human Rights related complaints receiving mechanisms and mainstreaming Human Rights in police organizations, especially in the police training centers through developing human rights curricula. Furthermore, the government should set a policy to hold police members accountable for violating Human Rights within the Federal Crime Investigation Bureau. Keywords: Human Rights Protection, Crime Investigation, Police Reform, Crime Investigation Bureau, Ethiopia.

The exercise, respect and preservation of Human Rights - Human Rights - base the personal, social, emotional, psychological, family and cultural development of society; therefore, it is essential that the regulations or public policies in favor of their execution and defense are carry out in reality, so that they guarantee a dignified life or stability to each citizen. In this sense, the main objective that guided the research was "To assess the relationship that exists between the Institutional Regulatory Discourse - DRIand the preservation, exercise and respect of Human Rights - Human Rights in the Educational Institution - IE". The theoretical references focused on Van Dijik's position on discourse and discourse analysis and the regulations were analyzed within the framework of the prevention, regulation and defense of human rights in schools.The methodology was qualitative based on the ethnographic method that allowed the use of instruments such as documentary review, narratives and opinion agendas, developed with teachers, managers and students of 9, 10 and 11 grade of the IE INEM Julián Motta Salas (Morning Session) and IE El Caguán (Afternoon Session). With the results of the field work, it was concluded that both IE are indeed making progress in creating the conditions to minimize the distance between what is proposed in the DRI and what is actually put into practice. The structuring of an alternative proposal very committed to the preservation, exercise and respect of human rights in IE was proposed.


 
 
 African traditional societies, including the Amakhuwas of Northern Mozambique, developed believes and traditional practices, in the spiritual as well as in the social field, which evolved over time. Nevertheless, the prevalent trend in research relegates such cultures to a role of subordination. This was the case of colonial as well as missionary literature, and it is so in part until today, with the use of paradigms centered into a supposed modernizing approach, which invites ethnic and linguistic groups as the Amakhuwas to leave their practices, in name of the respect of a set of human rights which those practices, would violate. This research, carried out in Nampula city, tries to show that a similar perspective does not consider a universe of values, believes and practices which have to be understood through an “internal” philosophical and anthropological approach. This approach has not to disregard the respect for human individual rights, as well as for collective rights of a group which built its identity on these believes and practices. This research was focused in particular on two interconnected aspects: the social functions of traditional medicine and the initiation rites, especially of feminine type. As a conclusion, this research shows that traditional practices suffered an evolution, in general going towards the respect for human individual rights, differentiating them in accordance with the localization and the social and cultural environment in which they are practiced. Without drawing definitive conclusions, it seems necessary to carry out a deep reflection regarding the relation between traditional practices and respect for human rights inside the amakhuwa society.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Laura António Nhaueleque, Researcher at the CEMRI – Open University of Lisbon. Professor of Human Rights, Technical University of Mozambique. Email: lauramacua@gmail.com
 
 

In spite of the various police reforms aimed at strengthening the efficiency, security and law enforcement in Kenya since independence in 1963, lately the police force in the country is associated with a myriad of challenges. Initially, both political and economic elites in the country used the force as a tool of domination and currently the police force is linked with increasing crime levels, stress, inefficiency, corruption, disregard of the rule of law, police brutally, and abuse of human rights. This paper critically evaluates the various police reforms in the colonial and the post-colonial Kenya. In particular, the paper focuses on alternative policy, legal and institution reform models required in the improvement of security, law enforcement, and professionalisation of the police force. Thus, the paper enables students understand the history, achievements, challenges, and future lessons of police reforms in a developing economy like Kenya.

Overcoming the legacy of the past is never easy. Add in a brewing ethnic conflict in the south, and the task of supporting the institutional transition from a politicised and autocratic police force into a viable and democratic police service and you begin to understand the daunting task facing the Serbian government and its partner, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the months following the overthrow of the Milosevic regime in October 2000. The OSCE's role as an independent broker was essential in negotiating a path between a demoralised and outdated police force and a sceptical, untrusting public. Now some six years since the start of the police reform process, it is safe to say that the police service in Serbia today is distinctly different from the one that was inherited from the Milosevic government. Much, however, remains to be done for it to be a truly modern, representative and democratic service. This paper provides an ‘inside’ take on the OSCE's engagement with the Serbian police reform process, its institutional strengths and limitations. Through the lens of the years 2000–2004, this paper will critique the ability of the OSCE to support police and security reform processes. As such the article will assess how the OSCE and the Serbian authorities responded to the challenges facing the policing sector in the post-Milosevic Serbia.

Official acknowledgement of the importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) in the work of the United Nations (UN) human rights programmes remains a subject of intense controversy. Warm admiration for the full range of actions by human rights NGOs expressed in the draft text prepared for the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna stands in stark contrast to the more cautious final text that was adopted.' Governments limited their appreciation to some but not all nongovernmental activities by notably excluding human rights monitoring from the list. Further, they declared, international human rights principles and national law protect only those NGOS 'genuinely involved in human rights'. The draft was prepared by members of the secretariat, and the final text was negotiated by government representatives from 171 countries. The differences between the two reveal the gap between, on the one hand, the dependency of UN expert human rights mechanisms on information supplied by human rights NGOs and, on the other hand, government resentment of NGO reports and activism. Many governments, especially those criticised by nongovernmental organizations, persistently labour to limit the formal access and participation of nongovernmental human rights organisations and to challenge the legitimacy of their findings.2 This seeming contradiction of maintaining both dependency and distance reflects certain fundamental characteristics associated with human rights NGOS themselves and the goals that they seek to advance through the United Nations and other international bodies. Yet human rights NGOs are the engine for virtually every advance made by the United Nations in the field of human rights since its founding. NGOS put human rights into the UN Charter That the United Nations addresses human rights issues at all is revolutionary. The initiative to turn the UN Charter into an instrument concerned with promoting respect for the human rights of individuals came from the 42 US organisations invited to be present as 'consultants' to the United States delegation at the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945. Their conviction that respect for human rights and the dignity of the individual was essential to peace and conflict prevention stemmed not merely from deep-seated American 0143-6597/95/030389-16 ?1995 Third world Quarerly

The three key conditions for the existence of a state, according to the theory of state and law, are geographical territory, population and organized political power in that area. However, during the twentieth century in some African and Asian countries, due to various political, economic and other factors, problems began to appear in performance of their basic functions: ensuring public order and peace, providing health services, education. Modern science has introduced the term failed states to describe such countries. This scientific phenomenon has been the subject of numerous researches, and international organizations have been publishing annual indices of fragile, failed or unsuccessful world states for years. The first index of its kind was created in 2005 by the American non-profit organization The Fund for Peace in cooperation with the magazine Foreign Policy, which initially included 76 countries. The original term failed state was considered politically extremely incorrect, even when it referred to countries like South Sudan or Somalia, noting that such a term originated in the political terminology of developed countries by which all other countries at a lower level of development were considered to be failed ones. Therefore, in 2014, a new notion of a fragile state was created, and accordingly the existing index was renamed the Fragile State Index (FSI). This parameter determines the degree of fragility for each country on an annual basis, assessing four basic indicators: cohesion (functionality of the state apparatus), economic (overall economic situation), political (legitimacy of the state, availability of public services, respect for human rights and freedoms) and social (demographic structure of the community, number of displaced persons and refugees, external interventions). Based on the values of these indicators, countries are positioned in four groups: sustainable, stable, endangered and alarming. The paper also discusses Bosnia and Herzegovina as a potentially fragile state. Although it enjoys sovereignty and political independence, the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement still provides for the strong participation of the international community in the performance of its basic state functions. Examples include the presence of international military and police forces from the early post-war years to the present (EUFOR), with a special emphasis on the position of High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The peace agreement gave him the status of his supreme interpreter, as well as the well-known Bonn powers that he used on several occasions to remove Bosnian political officials and the imposition of laws (Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Law on the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Law on the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina) due to the inability of domestic parliamentary bodies to pass them independently. In addition to the extremely complicated constitutional structure, the functioning of Bosnia and Herzegovina is hampered by the inability to reach an agreement between political representatives on key issues in the country. In the first place, these are much-needed changes to the constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina that would in the future allow members of minorities (Jews and Roma) to elect their own representatives in the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this regard, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 2009 in the case of Sejdić-Finci assessed that the impossibility of minority participation in political decision-making is a gross violation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Numerous international organizations, primarily Human Rights Watch, have been warning for years about other problems in the country: national segregation of children under two schools under one roof, numerous attacks on Bosniak returnees in Republic of Srpska without adequate sanctions and extreme slowness in war crimes proceedings and the administration of transitional justice with the emergence of increasingly frequent denials of war crimes and victims. Although more than 25 years have passed since the end of the war, the participation of the international factor is still noticeable, and in some cases necessary.

A fundamental aspect of human rights is that they protect human dignity and integrity. The international community has developed a number of human rights instruments setting out the various principles and norms. International humanitarian law defines minimum standards of protection in emergency situations where the rule of law has generally collapsed. This chapter explains three types of governmental obligations: to respect human rights, to protect human rights, and to fulfil human right. The United Nations (UN) human rights system works through three different types of mechanisms: treaty based mechanisms, non-treaty-based mechanisms, and specialised agencies of the UN. Regional human rights monitoring mechanisms are in place in Europe, the Americas and Africa and are directly linked with corresponding regional human rights treaties. Human rights may be protected through a constitutional bill of rights or by other laws of the country.Keywords: bill of rights; human rights monitoring mechanisms; international humanitarian law; United Nations (UN) human rights system