Extrajudicial Killings Research Articles

In Search of Moral Recognition? Policing and Eudaemonic Legitimacy in Ghana

Ghana is widely considered as “a beacon of hope for democracy in Africa” (Gyimah-Boadi 2010, 137). Yet substantive democratic transformations of policing have stagnated mainly because the police continue to act as a handmaiden of the state and powerful elites. Consequently, the reliance on performance in crime control and order maintenance as the bedrock of colonial police legitimacy (as judged by colonial administrators) has survived unscathed. Anxieties about violent crime, mainly in urban areas, have accompanied the pursuit of neoliberal economics and politics. Having staked their legitimacy on performance, the police view these anxieties and doubts about their effectiveness as potentially de-legitimating. They have responded in a highly dramatic but violent fashion, including the extrajudicial killing of suspected violent offenders believed to be the cause of feelings of insecurity. This article examines the nature of this pathway to legitimacy.

Boko Haram and Security Threat in Nigeria: A New Twist of Political Game in Town

Boko Haram insecurity complex which is pervasive and palpable is the most recent of the bones in Nigeria’s throat as a nation. Rumour and speculation of Boko Haram bomb scare have heightened the level of insecurity and impacts negatively on the socio-economic and political equilibrium of our beloved nation. This paper tries to unravel why the sudden Boko Haram religious conflicts take a political dimension in northern Nigeria. Methodologically, it relies on both primary and secondary sources of data. It argues that a combination of politico-economic competition, illiteracy, poverty and the obnoxious police extra-judicial killings are the core drivers of this sudden change. It concludes with a range of recommendations on how Nigeria could mitigate the security threat posed by Boko Haram.

The Establishment of the National Human Rights Commission in Bangladesh: An Account

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in Bangladesh was established by a non-party caretaker Government on 1 September, 2008 in response to repeated calls and pressure from the international community and donors. It has been established in accordance with international conventions and the UN Paris Principles to ensure that it is a truly independent, neutral and people-oriented organization. However, the situation of human rights in Bangladesh revolves around a number of key issues: restrictions of freedom of expression, association and assembly; malevolent use of martial law and emergency and terrorism laws; evidence of rampant institutional corruption; allegations of extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture; frustration over the ineffectiveness of parliaments, judiciary processes and police forces. The NHRC is trying to raise its voice against those issues but to date there is no study on the perceived gap between its objectives and the activities of the commission. This PhD research aims to better understand the human rights situation in Bangladesh, highlight achievements to date, and identify processes likely to promote the effectiveness of the NHRC. To commence this study, online newspapers were reviewed in order to provide an historical account of the development and instigation of the NHRC as it currently stands.

Ivory Coast: Victor’s Justice

Ivory Coast: Victor’s Justice

Advocacy beyond litigation: Examining Russian NGO efforts on implementation of European Court of Human Rights judgments

This article examines the ways in which various Russian NGOs, involved in litigation at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), have worked to advocate for improved domestic implementation of rulings made by the Court. The paper traces these advocacy activities in four key problem areas for Russia's implementation of the Convention: (1) domestic judges' knowledge and citation of the European Convention or ECtHR case law; (2) the execution of domestic court judgments by Russian state bureaucratic bodies; (3) extrajudicial disappearances and killings in anti-terrorist military operations in the North Caucasus; and (4) torture or inhumane treatment in police detention. The author finds that the impact Russian NGOs can have upon domestic implementation depends greatly upon the professional cultures and incentives of the actors involved as well as whether or not prevention of violations is compatible with other high-level Russian government agendas.

Beyond the Call of Duty: why shouldn't video game players face the same dilemmas as real soldiers?

AbstractVideo games are influencing users' perceptions about what soldiers are permitted to do during war. They may also be influencing the way combatants actually behave during today's armed conflicts. While highly entertaining escapism for millions of players, some video games create the impression that prohibited acts, such as torture and extrajudicial killing are standard behaviour. The authors argue that further integration of international humanitarian law (IHL) can improve knowledge of the rules of war among millions of players, including aspiring recruits and deployed soldiers. This, in turn, offers the promise of greater respect for IHL on tomorrow's battlefields.

State Crime by Proxy: Australia and the Bougainville Conflict

For most of the 1990s, the island of Bougainville was the subject of a counterinsurgency campaign administered by the Papua New Guinea state. The denial of humanitarian aid, extra-judicial killings and forced displacement were just some of the egregious tactics employed. Papua New Guinea’s main international benefactor, Australia, publicly remained aloof from the hostilities. However, in reality, the Australian state was covertly sponsoring Papua New Guinea’s counterinsurgency operations. Drawing on interviews with senior Australian and Papua New Guinea state officials, this paper will offer the first scholarly account of Australia’s proxy war. Employing a theoretical framework influenced by classical Marxism and Foucault, particular attention will be paid to the relationships, calculations and strategies that informed Australia’s criminogenic response.

Reporting on Victims of Violence: Press Coverage of the Extrajudicial Killings in Colombia.

This research examines El Tiempo's coverage of the extrajudicial killings in Colombia and in a wider context the media coverage of violence. The literature found in this dissertation suggests that the way in which media report on victims of violence can either harm or help their healing process. The content analysis of one year coverage on the extrajudicial killings in Colombia shows that institutionalized voices, for instance official viewpoints are privileged sources of information; moreover the use of journalistic structures such as writing style and news values prevent the victims and their relative’s testimonies to be heard and exposed to the society. Several challenges are posed when reporting on conflict and victims of violence, therefore media organizations and media workers are encouraged to critically reflect on their own practice in order to report on victims and trauma in a humane and transformative way.

Enabling Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Uganda is hemmed in by areas where conflicts break out sporadically, including South Sudan and the Nord-Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Moreover, the country still lives under the shadow of former president Idi Amin, whose policies included not only torture and hundreds of thousands of extra-judicial killings, but also, in 1972, the wholesale expulsion of tens of thousands of ethnic South Asians. Locally born and raised, this group had constituted much of the country’s merchant and entrepreneurial class. When a team of Bangladeshis led by Ariful Islam arrived in 2005 to set up a local operation for BRAC, a global development organization based in Dhaka, they had a long and difficult road ahead of them. The organization had already pioneered speedy scale-ups in difficult terrain, including in Afghanistan in 2002, where it began its first operation outside Bangladesh, providing development assistance with programs in health care, microfinance, rural livelihood development, and girls’ education. Nevertheless, Uganda’s historical legacy with people of South Asian origin working within its borders would present unavoidable cultural hurdles. Six years later, BRAC Uganda’s success has been remarkable. By most measurable standards the largest nongovernmental organization in the world, BRAC is also the largest in Uganda. As of March 2012, it has over 110,000 microfinance borrowers and a cumulative loan disbursement of $116 million in Uganda, thanks largely to a partnership with The MasterCard Foundation, a private, Torontobased foundation launched in 2006 with a gift from MasterCard Worldwide at the time of its initial public offering. The partnership with BRAC was one of the first major projects of the foundation, which was created to test and scale innovative poverty solutions with a focus on youth learning and microfinance. Begun in 2008, the partnership with The MasterCard Foundation has helped BRAC increase its reach from 60,000 Ugandans in 2006 to 2.8 million today, a number projected to reach 4.2 million, or 12 percent of the country’s population, by 2016. The obvious question is how the partnership accomplished this growth. It is due in part to a strategy to multiply the impact of microfinance by combining it with livelihood development and youth empowerment. The result of the program

Better or Worse? The Impact of Economic Sanctions on Human Rights Revisited

Previous studies presume that economic sanctions increase the likelihood of political repression in targeted states. However, political scientists have failed to investigate the extent to which economic sanctions impact political repression in purely autocratic regimes. Understanding this relationship is important for both the scholarly and policy communities. It is important to the scholarly community because political scientist have overwhelmingly concluded that economic sanctions are ineffective and that they increase the likelihood of political repression. Presenting a study that examines this phenomenon, we analyze the relationship between economic sanctions and political repression in purely autocratic regimes using time-series cross-national data from 1981-2000. The results of this analysis suggest that economic sanctions imposed on purely autocratic regimes significantly decrease levels of political repression when measured in terms of extra judicial killings, political imprisonment, disappearances, and torture. The implications of this analysis suggest that international actors should continue to rely on coercive diplomacy on the international stage when dealing with the most autocratic forms of government. Furthermore scholars studying economic sanctions should revisit the assertion that economic sanctions increase political repression.

Limiting Targeted Killings: A Competition of Paradigms

The US claims that its use of targeted killing of insurgents and terrorists is lawful under the laws of armed conflict. This program has met with significant criticism. However, despite cries of “assassination” and “extra-judicial killing,” this campaign is not so much a break with past policy as it is a change in the methods employed. Indeed, other than its means and possibly its efficacy, the new US policy is not even especially novel. Critics in the international law community base their arguments upon several competing paradigms, including expansive notions of human rights law. One paradigm limits geographic scope of armed conflict, employing law enforcement standards outside of that zone. Another imports procedural protections from the law enforcement paradigm, based upon the international “right to life.” But these emerging paradigms create unclear standards or impose restrictions so great that they will be counterproductive. Better are two functionalist paradigms based on international humanitarian law and its concept of direct participation in hostilities. The functionalist approach lends greater the clarity and flexibility, and will be less likely to lead to rejection or cheating.

Role of Forensic Medicine Expert in Police Encounters

Police encounter is the term used by the Indian Police Service or Indian Military/Paramilitary forces when explaining the death of an individual at their hands who was deemed by them to be a militant or ‘subject of interest’. It refers to extra judicial killings or executions not authorised by a court or by the law. Such encounters also go by the name of ‘staged encounters’, where weapons are planted on or near the dead body to provide a justification for killing the individual. Common reasons given for the discrepancy between records showing that the individual was in custody at the time of his encounter, is that he/she had escaped 1. The police in Indian metro cities have a very high rate when it comes to encounter killings. Since October 1993: 2,560 cases of police encounters have been brought into the notice of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), of them according to NHRC 1,224 cases have been found fake encounters. It means every second police encounter is fake in the country 2. Human right activists consider these encounter killings, together with torture by police in lock-ups and custodial deaths, to be gross human right violation. The fact that the dead person had a criminal background that does not give a legal authority to police for such encounters, as the law decide on the basis of evidence of such allegations.

The New Counterterrorism: Contemporary Counterterrorism Trends in the United States and Israel

In the first decade of the twenty-first century we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of counterterrorism in several democratic states. This new counterterrorism is ideological–religious in its rhetorical outlook, networked in its organizational structures, increasingly lethal in its operational tactics and more and more brutal in its methods. The shift to an ideological–religious discourse can be traced back to a conceptual transformation about the nature of terrorism, from the notion of terrorism as a “crime” to that as a “war”. The latter, differently from the former, requires ideological justification, which in states with strong religious constituencies, such as the USA and Israel, can partially be sought and acquired on a religious basis. Second, the new counterterrorism is based on normalization of extra-judicial means in the fight against terrorism. This has happened at three levels: by creation of overt and covert extra-jurisdictional domains—or legal black holes—outside of the human rights regimes of democratic states, by legitimization of torture at political, intellectual and popular cultural levels and by increasingly widespread use of extra-judicial killings of terrorist suspects. Third, the tactics used by new counterterrorism agencies are increasingly lethal and lead to disproportionately high number of casualties among innocent civilians. This development is to a large extent due to hardening of traditional counterterrorism targets and use of imprecise technology and intelligence in operations. Finally, the new counterterrorism is networked and often beyond the control of the judicial sovereignty of courts. This is largely due to informal contacts developed within the framework of the post 9/11 extraordinary rendition program and outsourcing and privatization of counterterrorism related activities and the ensuing contractual arrangements between state institutions and private enterprises.

Institutionalizing shame: The effect of Human Rights Committee rulings on abuse, 1981–2007

What motivates compliance with “toothless” international human rights norms? This article analyzes the effectiveness of procedures that allow individuals to petition an international human rights body, the Human Rights Committee, alleging state abuse of their treaty-protected rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Using methodological tools that account for selection biases arising from a country’s decision to authorize petitions and its subsequent propensity to be targeted by abuse claims, I find that basic civil rights and religious freedoms improved after states were found to have violated their human rights treaty obligations, whereas physical integrity abuses such as disappearances and extrajudicial killing were somewhat more impervious to change. These findings are interpreted with reference to the concept of “coupling” as borrowed from organizational sociology, and their implications for treaty design and enforcement are considered.

Arbitrary Executions, Perpetrators and Impunity

Despite the guarantee of fundamental rights in the Nigerian constitution, and in various regional and international legislation, the large scale violations of human rights of Nigerians have recorded groundswell. The alarming rate at which arbitrary executions are being perpetrated by personnel of the Nigerian Police Force and other law enforcement officers saddled with the task of protecting the citizens’ calls for an urgent attention.The most sacrosanct right, which is the right to life, is now being taken arbitrarily by officers of the Force. This violation has taken a worrisome dimension which requires the concerted efforts of several stakeholders. Nigerians have continued to live in perpetual fear and distrust of law enforcement officers because of their cavalier nature. Arbitrary killings have become a common place in Nigeria. In fact, it has reached its apogee in this present democratic dispensation in which the rule of law is supposed to be respected. Regardless of complains from different quarters which has continued to fall on deaf hears the government has failed to take effective measures to curb this ordeal. Apparently, impunity for perpetrators is one of the main reasons why extrajudicial executions continue unabated. Sequel to the above, this paper shall address the various shortcomings in the Nigerian Police Force which has thus exacerbated their criminal acts. Additionally, the failings of Nigerian government in performing its obligations of identifying and bringing perpetrators to justice will equally be considered.In sum, far-reaching recommendations will be made towards combating the menace of extrajudicial killings by law enforcement agents in Nigeria with particular attention drawn to the longstanding issue of impunity.

Intelligence operations as terrorism: Emerging state terrorism in Botswana

Botswana is considered one of Africa’s credible democracies. Its economic performance and good governance over the years distinguished its statehood from its African counterparts. The stable political landscape backdating to independence also made it a regional security exception. However, the security landscape has changed over the last three years. Using a historical procedure, the article illustrates how the changing political landscape resulted in the creation of a securitized state controlled by intelligence agencies. It also employs a survey procedure—using interviews and other qualitative sources—to illustrate how incidents of incidents of intellectual repression, communication surveillance, extra judicial killings and politicized covert operations have changed the country. The article interrogates the magnitude of security threats as well as the competence of the intelligence security outfits. Having proven the existence of common denominators of state terrorism in Botswana, which point to emerging state terrorism, the study proceeds to make recommendations for structural and operational reform. Key words: Botswana, Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DIS), state-terrorism, extrajudicial killings, surveillance

Does Foreign Military Intervention Help Human Rights?

This article examines the effect of foreign armed intervention on human rights conditions in target countries. It is argued that military intervention contributes to the rise of state repression by enhancing the state’s coercive power and encouraging more repressive behavior, especially when it is supportive or neutral toward the target government. Results from bivariate probit models estimated on time-series cross-section data show that supportive and neutral interventions increase the likelihood of extrajudicial killing, disappearance, political imprisonment, and torture. Hostile interventions increase only the probability of political imprisonment. The involvement of an intergovernmental organization or a liberal democracy as an intervener is unlikely to make any major difference in the suggested negative impact of intervention.

9/11—100 Years On

The events of September 11th 2001 have undoubtedly had a considerable impact in the past ten years, in the United States, in the Muslim World, and elsewhere, in the fields of politics, religion and culture. It will be interesting, however, to see how they are remembered in 100 years' time, and almost certainly it will be the consequences of the event, as much as the events themselves, which will be remembered, in terms of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombings in several European cities, and the extra-judicial killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011. This paper investigates the legacy of these events, and the questions which they and what has followed from them raise.

The Prohibition of Amnesties by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has proven a particularly active defender of human rights in Latin America. The Court has developed an innovative and creative jurisprudence with respect to all kinds of human rights violations, including forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, violations of indigenous peoples' rights or those of undocumented migrants. Legal scholars have praised the Inter-American Court for its effective protection of human rights and even the International Court of Justice has drawn on the judgments of the Inter-American Court. The Inter-American Court has, however, also been criticized for adopting an overly broad standard of review, exceeding the competences conferred on it in the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR, Convention) and for its detailed reparation orders which encroached on the states' internal domestic affairs. Put differently, the Court was blamed for being a too active judicial lawmaker. It has therefore been suggested that the Inter-American Court would be well advised to pay more attention to national sovereignty and the consent of the regional community of states when exercising its adjudicative function.

Trampling Democracy: Islamism, Violent Secularism, and Human Rights Violations in Bangladesh

This study highlights various totalitarian and undemocratic practices in which Bangladesh’s current Awami League-led coalition regime engages. It shows that since its inception in early 2009, the regime has tried to mobilize and manipulate public support from within through—among other means—creating the discourse of “war crimes” and to obtain international support through the discourse of “Islamism” and terrorism. Although “a secular plan” to combat and replace “Islamism” may soothe the nerves of many in the international community, its deployment in Bangladesh has paradoxically produced a dangerous culture of disappearances and extrajudicial killings, infringements on freedom of speech and the stifling of dissenting voices, and the interception of opposition programs and the torture of opposition leaders and activists. The regime has also made a mockery of the law and the country’s judicial system. Many commentators believe that the country’s law courts are now simply an extension of the regime’s political clout. In these circumstances, political repression continues unabated, and victims of persecution are left with inadequate legal recourse. In the name of combating “Islamic terrorism,” Bangladesh’s ruling regime has resorted to a reign of terror that is in many respects tantamount to what we know as fascism.