Extrajudicial Executions Research Articles

Perverse Incentives: Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia

Perverse Incentives:Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia Elvira María Restrepo (bio) "[Jacqueline] Castillo was looking for her brother, Jaime, who had disappeared a few months earlier near Bogotá, more than 600km away. His was the last body they pulled out. When he was placed on the ground next to her, Castillo fell to her knees, screaming. The doctors told her he was a member of one of the many guerrilla armies that had been fighting the Colombian state since the mid-1960s and that he had been killed in combat. But Castillo knew that was impossible. Her brother had been a homeless beggar, not a guerrilla insurgent."1 ________ On September 27, 2008, the cover of Colombia's weekly Semana unveiled the existence of extrajudicial killings by the Public Force under the title "Falsos Positivos Mortales?"2 Much of the mainstream media, with some nuances, echoed a scandal that could no longer be hidden. The term "false positives" was adopted because the victims were innocent people extrajudicially killed by members of the Colombian Public Force and then falsely labeled enemy combatants. Today we know that thousands of civilians were lured under false pretenses to remote locations and killed by members of the Public Force. Following the killings, the crime scene was manipulated; victims were dressed as armed guerrillas to pass their deaths off as combat killings. The perpetrators obtained rewards in exchange. The victims—mostly poor, unemployed, and sometimes even disabled civilians—were then labeled to be non-identified buried in communal graves, like Jaime Castillo. He was one of the nineteen Falsos Positivos of Soacha, the case that initially resonated most strongly, thanks to the courageous and dogged activism of the mothers of these victims (Madres de Los Falsos Positivos—MAFAPO) and Soacha's proximity to the capital.3 This paper argues that the cascade of revelations and judicial decisions from the new Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition (CS), born out of the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC, coupled with a vibrant civil society and the existing domestic and international opportunity structures clearly exposed a long-standing Public Force perverse culture in which citizens are seen as internal enemies, while security is equated with the presence of the Public Force.4 It also argues that Colombia's new Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz—JEP in Spanish), one of the three institutions that comprise the CS, introduces a new understanding of accountability in international criminal law that has the potential to shift transitional justice practice. Finally, this paper warns about the perils of leaving the security sector unreformed. Colombia's Public Force is the second largest and [End Page 219] most professionalized in Latin America, and the strongest ally of the United States in a region where political instability looms large and transnational organized crime is rampant. Extrajudicial executions amid protracted conflict: heroes and villains The Falsos Positivos have been documented by CINEP since the 1980s.5 But it was only in the 2000s that these crimes were uncovered more systematically by victims' groups, national NGOs such as Coordinación Colombia-Europa-Estados Unidos (CCEEU), and international organizations.6 While estimated numbers vary and legal ambiguities regarding their crime categorization abound, the atrocities against the Falsos Positivos reached the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) a year before the media scandal erupted due to the impunity that prevailed in Colombia. In October 2007, following the IACHR hearing, the Washington Office on Latin America issued a report urging the US State Department and Congress to pursue stricter enforcement of human rights conditions.7 At the time, Colombia was one of the three largest recipients of U.S. military aid, and Plan Colombia—a U.S. aid initiative aimed at reducing the production of illegal drugs—was as its zenith.8 In February 2021, a decision by the JEP prioritized the investigation of Case 03, related to "deaths unlawfully presented as combat casualties by State agents," and publicized the existence of at least 6,402 cases, not 2,248-the official Attorney's Office count.9 It also stated that 78 percent of the historic Falsos Positivos documented between 1978 and...

Genocide in the human security discourse and rhetoric of Sudan's Darfur : an Asantean view

Genocide is horrible. It is an abomination of the human species, which is totally unacceptable. This is a common denominator among international lawyers, political scientists and other scholars and practitioners with an interest in the study of conflict and its implications on human existence. It is an obscenity, the evil of our time that all people must work to eradicate and this, in itself, is enough to explain why the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is obligatory to all states, including those who are no party to other related international legal instruments such as the Rome Statute of 2002. Thus, genocide is operationally referred to as the general practice of mass extra-judicial executions. To this end, this article seeks to achieve the following two central objectives: (1) interrogate the historical (and/or rhetorical) use of the term ‘genocide’ to refer to the security situation in Darfur region of Sudan during the year 2009 and (2) determine if genocide did take place in Darfur or it was simply a rhetoric. This is informed by the fact that this has been a matter of disagreement among policy makers, academics, political commentators and diplomats. Using the blend of Afrocentric perspective and interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis in its broadest form, we base our argument on the past developments about the Darfur conflict. The major finding of this article partly confirms the Euro-American claim of the occurrence of genocide in Darfur around the year 2009.

Militarization of Public Security and Violation of Human Rights in Mexico (2000-2020)

This article analyses the militarization of public security in Mexico from a human rights perspective to observe the main effects of this policy at the national level in the last twenty years (2000-2020). The methodology used is mixed, combining a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The investigation shows that militarization, far from fighting crime, contributes to general growth in violence and human rights violations. Its main result is increasing lethality of security institutions in the use of public force, indicating that an important part of what had been presented as combats with organized crime, are instead extrajudicial executions. This harsh reality is illustrated with a case study based on the events that occurred in Tlatlaya in 2014.

The Drug Menace as Contributor to the Duterte Electoral Victory

Abstract We construct the drug menace as a standard 2×2 collective action problem with two self-interested households A and B, each facing a strategy set (C, D) = (Cooperate, Don’t Cooperate). If the households cooperate, that is attain (C, C), they stop the drug menace; if not, which is the usual outcome of these games under laissez faire, non-cooperation rules instanced by the Nash equilibrium (D, D) and the drug menace overruns the community. We introduce a game transformation via a third party-intervention-by-statute (TPIS) mechanism: a third party promulgates and enforces a statute S which penalizes non-cooperation D, spells out the contribution c of households, the statutory penalty p for, and the likelihood f of being caught, playing D. For certain combinations of c, p and f, the intervention is efficient, that is, attains (C, C) as the Nash equilibrium of the transformed game. The likelihood of an efficient statute rises the lower is c and the higher the expected penalty pf, features associated with a strong and wise third party. The TPIS mechanism is a parable for the role of governments in general: to consolidate and galvanize the local forces to overcome collective action problems. The third party is normally identified with the government in the hands of persons who hold the mantle of government. When the mantle is contestable and the basis of contestability is electoral, there is a vent for good governance in the form of welfare-improving interventions. The perception of households matter in elections and aspirants with a perceived superior track record on or one that promises superiority at solving the most salient community problems will rise to the top of the voting preference. Whether the track record is real or constructed matters little as long as it is perceived by the voter as true. Duterte won the Philippine presidency for a variety of reasons but the most cogent and tailor-made for his persona was the narrative that he got rid of the drug problem by employing a death squad which carried out extrajudicial executions in Davao City. By showing himself capable of bypassing the widely despised corrupt due process was an electoral plus for many poor people. Duterte’s electoral victory was rooted in the narrative that drug menace was a collective action problem number one and that if there was a solution it was inexorably tied to Duterte’s real or imagined persona.

Inhabiting Mourning: Spectral Figures in Cases of Extrajudicial Executions (False Positives) in Colombia

In this article we analyse various forms of emotional management of mourning in the experiences of six female relatives of victims of extrajudicial executions in Colombia. Referencing the concept of the ‘spectral’, we discuss the ways in which family members establish ways of living with mourning that emphasise the impossibility of achieving closure, and explore the ways in which they keep the wounds of their suffering open as a means of organising themselves politically, in pursuit of justice. The article suggests an alternative to a teleology of closure, suggesting that, in contexts of impunity such as the one prevailing in Colombia, mourning becomes a scenario of habitability.

Mob Lynching: A New Form of Hate Crime

Lynching is a form of extrajudicial execution by hanging carried out by mob, which is functioning independently of local police and law enforcement authorities. Indian also faced Indian WhatsApp lynching, which are a spate of Mob-related violence and killing following the spread of rumours, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the WhatsApp message service. They fall under the category of organised hate crimes. According to the source from internet, it has been observed a rise in mob lynching cases related to cow vigilantism by over 10%. It is important to note that India does not have one comprehensive parliamentary law on mob lynching. Strong provisions of law and speedy convictions in mob lynching cases will act as deterrence for the society

Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China: A Review of the Evidence

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) has conducted a detailed examination of the allegations of extrajudicial killing for the harvesting of organs by the Chinese Communist Party and the evidence underlying these allegations. The report was produced by VOC China Studies Research Fellow Matthew P. Robertson, a doctoral researcher whose work using statistical forensics to demonstrate the falsification of Chinese organ donor registry data was recently published in the leading journal of medical ethics, BMC Medical Ethics. The report contributes to the literature and policy discussion on coercive organ transplant practices in China in several ways: it presents new primary documentary research and original datasets, integrates established scholarship on China’s death penalty system, and situates previously published works on organ harvesting within a careful discussion of counterfactual scenarios and scientific inference. It also serves as a roadmap to the debate about and evidence of extrajudicial killing for organs in China, while also critically engaging with how that evidence has been interpreted and received. The report challenges international complacency on the topic by examining the signs of ongoing organ trafficking, highlighting the falsification of official datasets, and analyzing the evidence that Uyghur Muslims may be the latest victims of this form of state predation. In examining the extraordinary growth of organ transplantation and rapid availability of organs in China, the report asks one overarching question: What is the most plausible explanation for the source of the organs? The report examines the evidence of blood-testing and medical examinations of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghurs in custody, and finds that extrajudicial organ sourcing from these populations is the most plausible and parsimonious explanation. As such, readers should adopt it as empirically adequate until either a better explanation or reliable data inconsistent with the hypothesis emerges.

The Politics of Justice From Beloww: Human Rights Defenders and Atrocity Crime Trials in Latin America

This chapter discusses prosecution of past atrocity crimes as a site of political action that increasingly crosses state-non-state and intergenerational boundaries in post-authoritarian and post-conflict Latin America. It shows how the structure and politics of the formal justice field in the region have been made and re-made by relatives, survivors and others pressing for investigation and prosecution of enforced disappearance, extrajudicial execution and torture. In doing so, it contributes to understanding of how close attention to micro- and meso-level activist dynamics and biographies can illuminate interstitial aspects of post-authoritarian polities, complementing analyses focused on structural change, institutional culture, and/or the logic and drivers of collective action or movement politics.

Крымская конференция и Нюрнбергский процесс: уроки истории

The issues of the post-war world order discussed at the Crimean Conference in February 1945 included the qualification of crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime. Along with the idea of full trial, which was defended by the Soviets, other options were considered in Yalta – from "truncated" legal proceedings to extrajudicial execution of high-ranking Nazi officials, proposed by W. Churchill, but rejected by both I. Stalin and F. Roosevelt. The Yalta meeting of three world leaders can be rightfully considered a kind of prologue to the Nuremberg trials on Nazi war criminals (and Nazi ideology itself), which proceeded in accordance with the highest world standards of jurisprudence.

History of Rakhine State and the Origin of Rohingya Muslims

Myanmar is a resource-rich country especially in oil and gas. The country is involved in ethnic conflicts since its independence in 1948. Recently violation of human rights against the Rohingya Muslims become severs. The main cause of Rohingya crisis is a question about its origin. Rakhine (or Arakan) is a State located in the west coast of Myanmar. The population of Arakan State is largely agrarian and more than 43.5% live below the poverty line. The Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group in Rakhine, consider as the most persecuted, vulnerable, and oppressed minorities around the globe. Recently, the persecution on Rohingya Muslims has increased due to Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar. Rohingyas are continued to suffer from several forms of restrictions and human rights violations in Myanmar due to deny Myanmar citizenship. They are victim of various oppressions, such as, arbitrary taxation, land confiscation, destruction of mosques, torture and ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions, restrictions on movements, forced eviction and house destruction, forced laborers on roads and at military camps, and financial restrictions on marriage. Oppression on Rohingya started since 1962, when General Ne Win took power of Myanmar after a coup. Since the 1970s, a number of crackdowns on the Rohingya in Rakhine have forced hundreds of thousands to flee to neighboring countries. Sever Rohingya oppression took place in 2017 and 2018. More than one million Rohingya have migrated in Kutupalong-Balukhali, and Nayapara refugee camps, respectively, in Ukhia, and Teknaaf of Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh. This article deals with the origin of Rohingyas and their citizenship in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.

Resentimiento como respuesta emocional al daño en dos grupos de mujeres en el conflicto armado en Colombia


 Este artículo de investigación tiene como objetivo contrastar el resentimiento como respuesta al daño en dos grupos de mujeres, cuyos hijos o familiares padecieron actos criminales (desaparición forzada, tortura, ejecuciones extrajudiciales) por grupos armados (reinsertados, paramilitares, Ejército). Un primer grupo está conformado por mujeres que habitan en un barrio popular, ubicado en la zona nororiental de Medellín, que participaron de encuentros para pensar el daño y las respuestas morales para enfrentarlo. El segundo grupo está conformado por mujeres entrevistadas en forma individual, que tienen una larga experiencia de denuncias por crímenes contra sus hijos y familiares a la luz del discurso de los derechos humanos. El resentimiento es una emoción presente en los dos grupos de mujeres, teniendo consecuencias en sus lazos cercanos, en su concepción sobre la sociedad e incluso sobre su propia identidad personal y colectiva. El resentimiento no solo produce un efecto de impotencia, sino que puede servir como un movilizador para la acción política.

The Lure of Novelty: “Targeted Killing” and Its Older Terminological Siblings

AbstractThe concept “targeted killing” has been increasingly adopted in scholarship, policy, and media discourses, particularly in the context of US armed drone attacks. While “targeted killing” is often understood as something new, there are strong historical continuities with more traditional concepts such as “assassination” and “extra-judicial execution,” as well as with the colonial concept “police bombing.” This paper builds on an analysis of over nine hundred Security Council debates, Human Rights Council reports, legal papers, and policy documents. Tracing the conceptual continuities, I argue that the peculiar novelty of “targeted killing” does not mainly stem from the novelty of the practices and claims it describes but from the contradictory modes in which the term has been used, which has problematic repercussions for recent counterterrorism discourses. Posed as a new category that reacts to a new situation, the adoption of the concept “targeted killing” has, I argue, played an important role in the promotion of claims that were long considered unlawful and illegitimate. Demonstrating the importance of language in setting political struggles up in a particular way, the paper contributes to a growing body of critical work on counterterrorism use of force.

Operation Condor and Transnational State Violence against Exiles

This article aims to provide a deeper understanding of Operation Condor and its lethal focus on exiles through an examination of new evidence that offers fresh insights into how the repressive system functioned. Operation Condor targeted persons who had escaped Latin American military coups and dictatorships in their own countries in the 1970s. Condor forces pursued these exiles—many of whom were under United Nations protection—using covert, cross-border abductions and disappearances, "renditions" to home countries, torture, and extrajudicial executions. The article analyzes the military regimes' obsession with political exiles, blending recent research on exile activities with data on Condor's targets and functioning drawn from newly declassified US, Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine archives; Chilean court rulings; the University of Warwick archive on solidarity with Chile; and survivor testimonies.

Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain: The Story of a Secret Brotherhood in Rural China, 1939–1949 by Di Wang

Reviewed by: Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain: The Story of a Secret Brotherhood in Rural China, 1939–1949 by Di Wang Benno R. Weiner Di Wang. Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain: The Story of a Secret Brotherhood in Rural China, 1939–1949. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. 260 pp. $90.00 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). A scholar of the social history of Chengdu and its environs during the late Qing and Republican periods, Di Wang has long wrestled with the specter of the Paoge (跑歌) or “Gowned Brotherhood.” Now, in Violence and Order on the Chengdu Plain, Wang has produced the first monograph dedicated to the Paoge, also known as the Gelaohui (哥老會 Elder Brother Society), a “sworn brotherhood society” whose influence by the first half of the twentieth century had become pervasive throughout the region. To do so, he has marshaled an impressive array of sources, including official reports, newspapers, local gazetteers, novels and other literary sources, wenshi ziliao (文史資料 literary and historical materials), and the canonical text of the Paoge, the Haidi (海底 The Bottom of the Ocean), as well as contemporary scholarly research. Most prominent among the last category is a previously unknown undergraduate thesis that forms the cornerstone of the book. An investigation of an otherwise unremarkable Paoge leader named Lei Mingyuan (雷明遠 dates unknown), the study was written in 1945–1946 by a female Yenching University student, Shen Baoyuan (沈寶媛 1924–). Despite repeatedly noting the author’s academic inexperience and left-leaning political naïveté, Wang states the view that, “no other source brings us so close to [Paoge members] and their organization—to their culture and their real, complicated motives and actions” (164). In Wang’s hands, the two voices, one a representative of “sociological investigators in 1940s China,” the other “a local ‘master’ of a secret society,” blend to “explore larger concepts of morality, laws, governance and disorder, fairness and oppression, and the meanings that these realities projected onto individual lives” (1). Divided into four parts, Wang’s study starts with a particularly sordid affair: Lei’s extrajudicial execution of his eldest daughter and her paramour. In a microhistory consciously crafted in the tradition of Carlo Ginzburg, Wang uses Shen’s description of the unpunished incident as a first foray into a host of topics central to the social world of the Chengdu Plain in the late Republican era, including concepts of social justice, gender norms and transgressions, and the role of actors outside the state in both managing and threatening social order. From here, Wang delves into the history and structure of the Paoge, channeling Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented traditions”1 to briefly outline how an anti-Manchu secret society born of the chaos of the mid- to late nineteenth century morphed, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, into a largely open, loosely affiliated self-protection-cum-criminal organization “innately embedded in Chinese society and rooted in the usual ways of life in the Chengdu Plain” (49). Some of Wang’s most fascinating chapters can be found in part 2, which describes Paoge myths, customs, and practices. Steeped in the folklore of the protector deity Guandi (關帝) and other “specialized rites and customs” (49) of the Chengdu Plain, members of the Paoge, Wang suggests, were considered legitimate actors and mediators of social order when acting within unwritten parameters of behavior and morality in a world in which the state often could not be trusted. Particularly insightful is his analysis of the Paoge’s use of secret languages and symbols, including coded terminologies, secret characters (隱字 yinzi), hand signals, and esoteric but semipublic rituals such as the “arranging tea-cup [End Page E-8] formation” (擺茶碗陣 bai chawan zhen). Previously the “argots” of an underground organization “meant to protect the group at large, to hide it from the public, and to stabilize its membership,” the Paoge’s secret languages, Wang contends, “became more symbolic than practical” after 1911. Even so, he continues, they offer insight into Paoge beliefs and behavior, as well as into “aspects of their organization, regulations, membership, internal dynamics, and their effecting of order both within their ranks and throughout the surrounding locale and state” (61). Wang returns to...

"ШЕСТЬ ЧЕЛОВЕК ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ МНОЮ БЫЛИ РАССТРЕЛЯНЫ": ДОКУМЕНТЫ О РАССТРЕЛЕ ЗАКЛЮЧЕННЫХ В ТАТАРСКЕ 19 НОЯБРЯ 1919 Г

New sources are published about white terror in Siberia: materials of the investigation file of the head of the garrison of the city of Tatarsk, I. A. Mikheev and the chief of police of the Tatarsk district N. I. Stepanova. The published documents shed light on the circumstances of the extrajudicial execution of political prisoners by the Kolchak residents in Tatarsk prison on November 19, 1919. Based on the published documents, it was established who ordered the execution of political prisoners during the evacuation of the prison and who enforced this order, as well as the number of victims of extrajudicial execution was specified. In addition, the published documents contain valuable information about the degree of collapse and disorganization of the Kolchak army and state apparatus after the surrender of the capital of white Siberia, the city of Omsk.

On the Humanity of the Enemy of Humanity

Antony Duff, Marc de Wilde, Louis Sicking, and Sofia Stok offer several criticisms of my “The Enemy of All Humanity,” but central to all of them is concern that labeling people hostis generis humani dehumanizes them, and invites murder or extrajudicial execution. In response I distinguish political, legal, and theoretical uses of the ancient label. I agree with the critics that the political use is toxic and the legal use is dispensable. However, the theoretical concept is crucial in international criminal law, which rests on the assumptions that the moral heinousness of core crimes makes them the business of all humanity. Furthermore, far from dehumanizing their perpetrators, calling them to account before the law recognizes that they are no different from the rest of humanity. This response also offers rejoinders to more specific objections raised by the critics.

معوقات التعاون الدولی فی مکافحة جریمة الاختفاء القسری للأشخاص ((دراسة مقارنة))

Enforced disappearance is a grave violation of human rights, one of the most serious crimes against human beings. The act of enforced disappearance involves the abduction, detention or detention of an individual usually a political competitor by members of a state-sponsored military group and deliberate denial by the authorities The victim is removed from the protection of the law, often subjected to psychological, physical and mental torture or extrajudicial execution, and his or her family and friends deliberately deny knowledge of the arrest or detention of the person, and often wait for years and sometimes a Forever, until they are informed of the fate of the victim Enforced disappearances have become a global phenomenon believed to occur in some 94 countries of the world and affect tens of thousands of people. Impunity may be the most important contributing factor to the phenomenon of enforced disappearance, so individuals accused of enforced disappearances should be brought to justice as a measure is crucial in helping to prevent them from happening.Despite of enforced disappearances, the United Nations Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 1992 and the ratification of a regional inter-American convention in 1996, enforced disappearances were not subject to a specific binding international instrument and, as A result, Individuals are held criminally liable for enforced disappearance. On 23 June 2006,the UN Human Rights Counciladopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and considered the adoption of the Convention as a major achievement and an important step towards addressing the phenomenon of enforced disappearance, which is becoming increasingly Widespread and dangerous.

History of Rakhine State and the Origin of the Rohingya Muslims

The Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group in Rakhine, are considered among the most persecuted, vulnerable, and oppressed minorities in the world. Recently, the persecution on the Rohingya Muslims has increased due to Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar. The Rohingya continue to suffer from several forms of restrictions and human rights violations in Myanmar due to them being denied Myanmar citizenship. They are victims of various forms of oppression, such as arbitrary taxation, land confiscation, destruction of mosques, torture and ill-treatment, extrajudicial executions, restrictions on movements, forced eviction and house destruction, forced laborers on roads and at military camps, and financial restrictions on marriage. Since the 1970s, a number of crackdowns on the Rohingya in Rakhine have forced them to flee to neighboring countries. More than one million Rohingyas have migrated to refugee camps in the Bangladeshi district of Cox’s Bazar. This article deals with the origin of the Rohingya, the form of their citizenship, and recent oppression in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.

Popular Art and the Reconfiguration of Police Atrocities in Kenya

ABSTRACTThe government of Kenya has the singular obligation to protect, respect and ensure that its citizens enjoy the right to life1, prohibit all forms of torture2 and protect them from arbitrary arrest and unlawful detention3 as enshrined in the constitution. Paradoxically, Kenya’s law enforcement records paint a bleak picture. Human rights reports such as the report on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions by Philip Alston4 point to a culture of arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and government’s failure to enforce the law to the letter. Proceeding from this perspective, this paper examines how popular art, such as cartoons, popular music and comedies (parodies), reconfigures atrocities occasioned by government agencies, key among them being the police. While contending that popular art originates from a wide range of societal actors and that it transcends socio-economic and socio-cultural confederacies, this paper investigates how popular art represents atrocities committed by the Kenyan police. Couched in both textual and contextual analyses, the paper interrogates creative strategies deployed in the popular art forms to divulge various atrocities in the country. Ultimately, the paper concludes that popular art is at the forefront in of unmasking, speaking out against and archiving police atrocities in Kenya and that its versatility enables it to survive in the gamut of public discourse, from the centre to the periphery.

State homophobia? India’s shifting UN positions on LGBTQ issues

ABSTRACTWhy has India adopted contradictory policies with regard to LGBTQ rights at the UN? From 2004 to 2010, India consistently supported draft language for a UN resolution to allow a Special Rapporteur to investigate extra-judicial executions that would include the term ‘sexual orientation’. More recently, however, India has opposed or abstained from UN votes on LGBTQ rights. While India's conservative posture on LGBTQ issues was catalyzed by the Supreme Court's re-criminalization of homosexual activities in 2013 and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP, we argue that the state's posture is not a reflection of deep ideological commitments or a new strategic realignment. Instead, India's policy reflects a generally uncoordinated foreign policy apparatus that has been unprepared to respond to the rapid ascendancy of LGBTQ issues on the human rights agenda. It is not currently possible to predict India's future posture due to its lack of a clear policy commitments.