Summary Executions Research Articles

The Revolution on Trial: Assassination, Christianity, and the Rule of Law in 1920s Mexico

Abstract The 1928 trial of José de León Toral, assassin of Mexican caudillo Álvaro Obregón, afforded President Plutarco Elías Calles the opportunity to show domestic and international audiences that the revolution had yielded a nation of laws predicated on spiritual principles. Summary executions of Catholics had allowed detractors and even sympathetic observers to question the depth of civic values in Mexico. The article shows how authorities deliberately presented the hearing as the concrete realization of Calles's claim that his administration had established institutions that embodied the principles of the revolution. Although the Christian idioms presented by the prosecution support recent scholarly arguments regarding deist tendencies within revolutionary ideologies, this article points out that the government's emphasis on its spiritual conviction sought to bolster the claim that anticlericalism was not antireligious but rather necessary for the rule of law.

Echoes of Kafka: The “War on Terror”

The issue of international terrorism at the beginning of the 21st century, in the United States in particular, has left populations asking: “who and where is the enemy and how do we bring them to justice?” But a more important question could be “Who is the victim and who is not, and what measures are appropriate while minimising collateral damage?” Peeling away the complex layers in the politics of anti‐terror policy leads to the inevitable conclusion that long gone are the alleged days of “black and white” cases of nation‐wide warfare. Franz Kafka all too often warns of the psychosocial pressure that follows as a result of the hegemonic power dynamic, and though imperialism was no new concept in Kafka’s era, his concerns shine ever brighter in light of the rise of the neo‐colonial anti‐terror initiative. Politics aside, this situation is a powerful echo, prophecy even, of a host of Kafka’s literary works, which warn of a ‘psycho‐dystopian’ world of torture machines on colony‐island penitentiaries, of summary executions and the breaching of basic human rights to achieve a government’s desired end. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how Der Prozeβ (The Trial) – with its parallels to the ethereal nature of law‐ is still relevant to the case of the U.S.‐led “War on Terror” in a world of liberally accessible media and information, spreading discontent and paranoia in the hearts and minds of the very population that the anti‐terror policy is designed to “protect”.

Killing by Drone: Towards Uneasy Reconciliation with the Values of a Liberal State

The occurrence of a terrorist act frequently prompts governments to enact a wide array of preventive measures, some of which grate against human rights norms. Among the most problematic is targeted killing. Developments in drone technology have made drones the principal means by which the United States kills suspected terrorists and have allowed a dramatic expansion of this lethal measure’s use. Since the killing of suspects outside a structured battlefield or within the context of an interstate war is, by its nature, a form of summary execution, it is not self-evidently reconcilable with the human right to life and therefore with the core values of a liberal state. Nevertheless, we conclude that reconciliation is at least theoretically possible if drone (or any other form of targeted) killing is restrained by a process with certain quasijudicial features in which the totality of the relevant international norms are consistently applied. The relevant norms are embedded in the law determining the legitimacy of recourse to force (what lawyers call the jus ad bellum ) and in the body of humanitarian law (essentially the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Rules), as well as in human rights law (above all, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and interpretations thereof by authoritative institutions). Without denying the existence of a number of gray areas, we attempt to illustrate the real-world implications of the normative framework we propose.

“More Human Than Human”: “Flattening of Affect,” Synthetic Humans, and the Social Construction of Maleness

We're all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives--flattening of affect, it's called. What I've done ... that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self. Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Philip k. dick's novel, androids are unable to empathize with or feel for others. Their absence of spontaneous emotional response to hypothetical scenarios is the diagnostic used to distinguish them from humans. Androids' disconnection from others and lack of response constitute the affective to which Pris, an android, refers, understood in Dick's novel as a defect that, when unattributable to mental illness, marks one as other than human. Thus, above, Pris lies to her human interlocutor, misattributing the cause of her flattening in order to provide a human explanation for the feature used to identify androids, who are subject to being retired, a euphemism for their summary execution. In this deficit and its implications for human identity, Pris and her fellow androids (andys) are hardly alone. Dick's novel, Ridley Scott's film adaptation, Blade Runner, and (writer) Ronald Moore and (producer) David Eick's recent Battlestar Galactica television series are a few examples of a trend that proliferates from the 1950s onwards. (1) In such science-fiction texts, humans build and often come into conflict with beings that have been created by humans or have evolved from those created by humans. These beings are almost indistinguishable from humans, except, of course, for that all-important lack of emotional connection: that necessary flattening of affect. While critics generally frame such texts as questioning the nature of the human, (2) they represent specifically gendered anxieties. Synthetic humans are distinguished from humans by a particular form of emotional insufficiency. While they usually do feel, they generally lack abilities to know and understand their feelings, feel in relation to others, and/or empathize with or understand the feelings of others. Commenting on the historical shift in the attributes characterizing synthetic humans, Despina Kakoudaki argues that If for Descartes ... automata differ from people because they have ... no reason, by the early twentieth century artificial people differ from real people because all they have is (181). Andys, replicants, and Galacticas Cylons can all have implanted memories, which means that characters can be synthetic without knowing it. Given that the shift Kakoudaki identifies undermines modernity's ideal of the human-as-rational-subject, it is unsurprising that the Galactica character who most persistently questions whether or not he is a Cylon is Gaius Baltar, whom we initially meet as a scientist with an important role in the human Colonies' defense system and who places great stock in his own rationality. Both Baltar's investment in rationality and his sex are relevant; given white, Western maleness's (and normative masculinity's) association with logic, reason, and denying and flattening affect and femaleness's (and normative femininity's) with emotionality, emotional intelligence, and empathy, any sense that emotionality defines the human has gendered implications. Modernity's rational subject, associated with Enlightenment ideals and the Classical traditions they draw on, is one whose maleness, Westernness, and whiteness has historically been used as the measure against which disenfranchised groups, including women, people of colour, and the colonized, have fallen short, judged insufficiently rational and overly emotional. It is therefore his identity that comes into question when reason is no longer a guarantor of human identity. As Alison Jagger notes, The western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional. Instead, reason has been associated with members of dominant political, social, and cultural groups and emotion with members of subordinate groups. …

The Photographic Memory and Impact of the Hungarian 1956 Uprising during the Cold War Era

John Sadovy, a freelance photographer commissioned by Life magazine, witnessed one of the most reprehensible moments of the 1956 Hungarian uprising: the assassination of secret police officers in Budapest’s Republic Square. His iconic photographs of this summary execution were widely redistributed and repurposed in the highly polarized climate of the cold war by the Western media and by the Soviet propaganda machine. The West saw the images as symbols of hatred against tyranny, while the Soviet media used them as evidence of a major threat to the socialist value system. The bloody uprising, which was crushed by the Soviets soon after it began, scarred the country, leading it into the era known as Goulash Communism. Photographs and artifacts from this era attest to the transition from a pre-1956 world shaped by the utopian accomplishments of socialism to the disenchanted spirit of the workers, artists, and intellectuals of the new generation.

La gloire des imposteurs: lettres sur le Mali et l’Afrique par Boris Boubacar Diop, Aminata Dramane Traoré

chapitres 13 à 16 et 22, 26 et 27 s’apparentent à de longues listes au sein desquelles se succèdent rapidement le récit d’initiatives diplomatiques et de menus complots politiques. On finit par se perdre dans ce dédale de faits trop souvent peu marquants ou captivants. De plus, l’accumulation des noms des personnes impliquées devient source de confusion.De tels chapitres auraient souvent besoin de synthèses plus fournies ou de préambules pour mieux orienter la lecture. Enfin, on rencontre un peu trop de coquilles, dont la responsabilité incombe en partie à la maison d’édition. Southwestern University (TX) Francis Mathieu Diop, Boris Boubacar, et Aminata Dramane Traoré. La gloire des imposteurs: lettres sur le Mali et l’Afrique. Paris: Philippe Rey, 2014. ISBN 978-2-84876-232-6. Pp. 233. 17 a. The “imposteurs” in this epistolary discussion of contemporary Africa include Africans as well as Western leaders, but especially the French. Diop and Traoré decry how African politicians, intellectuals, and the media sacrifice their own people for personal gain. The French invasion of northern Mali is the recurrent theme in the correspondence, analyzed from two opposing perspectives: one clearly details the manipulations and hypocrisy used by France and her allies to organize the operation (122–27); the other states that Mali had no alternative other than to ask for help from the ex-colonial power, as the brutalities and exactions of the“narcoterrorist”jihadists grew intolerable (135). The authors make clear that this military response is not a solution to the problem of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism,whose roots lie in a refusal to understand and treat Mali’s economic and ethnic conflicts. Three other threads traverse the exchanges: the role of Kaddafi, whose aid was accepted along with his eccentricities until Western interests were threatened; the Western manipulations behind the“printemps arabes,”and Cheikh Anta Diop, the great definer and defender of the identity of the Black continent. Both correspondents return to what Diop called Africa’s self-phobia: looking always elsewhere for models and approval rather than valuing and respecting her own culture. Traoré’s letters often deal with those who pay the highest price for Africa’s failings: the poor. Her anecdotes detailing individual suffering are usually linked to her personal attempts to work in local groups, building on Africa’s own resources and sense of community to construct a humane society. The catalogue of Africa’s failures is balanced by textual proofs of France’s continued heavy hand in violating Mali’s sovereignty through economic and political intervention. The subtext of this correspondence between two Muslim writers emphasizes for the Western reader that the horrors committed by the jihadists are in no way based in orthodox Islam. They touch briefly on a major imbroglio: the relation between civil society and Islam and political organizations that have not been able to mobilize majority Muslim populations. In the strongest language and speaking most powerfully to readers from 198 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 199 the United States, Diop denounces the summary executions of Osama bin Laden and the desecration of Kaddafi’s corpse. He laments a Black leader overseeing the dumping of a body into the sea, recalling sickeningly the human refuse thrown overboard during the triangular trade. The comparison of discreet media treatment of the corpse of an American diplomat assassinated in Libya with the repeated exhibition of mutilations of Kaddafi’s body reminds us that what is acceptable for one group of humans is not tolerated for others. The text advances by random steps as each author comments on events (Nov.2012–Oct.2013) and responds to the other’s letters.References to personal friendships and public appearances can be annoying; their insights however are trenchant , balanced, always historically grounded. Independent Scholar Suzanne Gasster Carrierre Dussault, Éric. L’invention de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Paris: Vendémiaire, 2014. ISBN 978-2-36358-078-8. Pp. 251. 22 a. Plusieurs quartiers parisiens ont connu une période de gloire en tant que centre artistique,intellectuel et/ou mondain.Celle de Saint-Germain-des-Prés fut particulièrement brève: une dizaine d’années, celles qui suivirent la fin de...

Psychiatry and efforts to build community in Iraq.

Psychiatry and efforts to build community in Iraq.

Exílio: uma história em três dimensões

No século XX, a ascensão dos regimes fascistas leva ao exílio opositores que procuravam fugir da morte pela execução sumária ou pelo confinamento aos campos de concentração. Portugal conhece um dos mais longos regimes de força, levando seus opositores a um longo degredo que, para uma grande maioria, durou toda a vida. Estes exilados e emigrados políticos buscaram refúgio nas mais diferentes partes do mundo, quer nos antigos núcleos de emigração ou em países onde o Estado democrático favorecia seu acolhimento. E se as histórias de vida exigem a recuperação de diversos "espaços históricos", no caso dos exilados estes "espaços" possuem uma outra dimensão. À dimensão local, origem e formação dos personagens e ao contexto do "nacional", em que estão inseridos num momento de maioridade, podemos acrescentar outro, "supranacional", ou seja, a história dos países de acolhimento, uma base para a compreensão das relações estabelecidas no exílio. Tomando como ponto de partida o caso português, este trabalho pretende ressaltar alguns pontos importantes para a elaboração de biografias de exilados, tendo-se em conta a necessidade de cruzamento dos três espaços citados, a releitura da historiografia já produzida e os problemas da "memória oficial".

A COMPARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE RIGHT TO LIFE IN AFRICA

This article provides a brief study of the constitutional protection of the right to life in Africa. This entails looking at the provisions on the right to life contained in various constitutions of African States, as well as jurisprudence on the matter of the right to life, and a comparison with the relevant international standards (United Nations and African Union). This article is based on a clinical group led by Prof Christof Heyns, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The focus of the clinical group was issues surrounding the right to life as envisaged in his mandate.

Societal beliefs about the use of force in Israël, Italy and France

In the Spring 2014, while in Paris, I happened to enter an exhibition about summary executions of French soldiers during World War I. The soldiers had mainly been executed for mutiny, although in fact they had rarely contravened orders or rebelled. Rather, these soldiers were deeply traumatised young conscripts, operating in unbearable conditions, and often, had simply protested against the conditions, fought in a way that minimised risks to their personal safety, or surrendered to the Germany enemy (so-called Boches in France at the time).

We Love Impunity

A few months ago, an English court convicted an officer of the summary execution of a badly wounded captured Taliban fighter. ‘‘There you are,’’ the unidentified officer Marine A declared eloquently as he pulled the trigger. ‘‘Shuffle off this mortal coil. It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.’’ Then he told his fellow combatants: ‘‘Obviously, this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broken the Geneva Convention.’’ Although military regulations do not authorize taking photos of those you murder, a camera on the helmet of another soldier, Marine B, was there to record the scene. The images were subsequently deleted, but not before they had circulated. Kept as a memento on a Marine laptop, they survived. Withholding both the officer’s name and the images, the judge cited the fear of reprisals. But it seems likely that his decision also reflected a deeper ambivalence in relation to the reporting and indeed the depiction of contemporary atrocity. Just a hundred years ago, during and after what we still call the Great War, great efforts were made to mask not just the scale but the nature of mass slaughter. The Hollywood moguls flown to Belsen and Dachau in 1945 suppressed film of the recently opened camps, on the grounds that the images would cause distress, and prove humiliating to survivors. Nowadays, I suspect, most people would like to say that the argument has been resolved in favor of openness. In much the same way we believe that the state has no right to keep what we regard as our secrets, we tell ourselves that anything capable of reproduction can be shown. I’m not sure that this is an entirely convincing argument. It may indeed be futile to wish to display certain things. It might be better to consider what impact on our knowledge of the world is conferred by visceral, empathetic implication in the slaughter of other human beings. At the least we could agree that when it comes to depicting atrocities, some devices are better than others. Such reflections arise from watching the documentary sensation of the year, The Act of Killing. By my own, not quite reliable reckoning, I have been asked to show The Act of Killing on the BBC at least five times. I have some difficulty in responding to its many admirers—not because my responses are hard to explain but because they appear so out of tune with the prevailing chorus of praise. And I have watched the film repeatedly. After someone whose views I respect told me I should see the film on a big screen, I did so. But I found that I was put off not just by being told by the filmmakers that I would find the experience upsetting, but by the ritual odor of selfapprobation I could sense among members of the audience. Yes, there are people who imagine that the proximity of impunity confers some sort of wisdom. I can understand such feelings, but I am not sure I want to share them. So let me now be as upfront as I can be. I dislike both the aesthetic and moral premise of The Act of Killing. Getting killers to script and restage their murders for the benefit of a cinema or television audience seems to me a bad idea for a number of reasons. I find the scenes in the film where the killers are encouraged to retell their murderous exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance. Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will reliably supply a degraded vision of humanity. But sorry, I don’t feel we want to be doing this. It feels wrong, and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. Something not very good is being done. I would feel the same if mass murderers in China were encouraged to re-create their crimes before themselves being knocked off. (Already, they ‘‘confess’’ on television on the way to the needle, abetted by a glamorous daytime TV host.) I would certainly feel the same if I was told that filmmakers had gone to rural Argentina in the 1950s,

Cyborg Agency and Individual Trauma: What Ender's Game Teaches Us about Killing in the Age of Drone Warfare

Cyborg Agency and Individual Trauma: What Ender's Game Teaches Us about Killing in the Age of Drone Warfare

International Criminal Law with Asian Characteristics?

The history of international criminal law has been, for the most part, a European tale. Though it was American insistence that prevented the summary execution of hundreds or thousands of German officers after the Second World War — an approach favoured by Churchill and seriously contemplated by Stalin — the United States subsequently backed away from serious engagement in international criminal law. Auschwitz and Nuremberg are the touchstones, with modern counterparts in Bosnia and The Hague. In the official record, the non-European experiences of international criminal law have tended to be in the form of poorer and more troubled siblings. Lack of resources has bedevilled African tribunals in Rwanda and their hybrid counterparts in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. In Asia, political tensions have been far more of a feature — whether one is considering the International Military Tribunal for the Far East or the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. Such an account highlights the difficulties facing international tribunals, which are often burdened with unrealistic expectations of punishing the guilty, resolving societal conflicts, deterring future misconduct, and providing an authoritative history of a traumatic period. Yet that account also overlooks some of the important legal developments that have taken place outside Europe. There is, I would submit, much to learn from closer study of the Asian experiences of international criminal law in particular. Not all of it is positive. But as my former colleague Thomas M. Franck used to say: no one is completely useless; one can always be a bad example. International criminal law “with Asian characteristics” is not quite that bad, though it offers a provocative and under-utilised lens through which to view the possibilities and limitations of this relatively new set of laws and institutions. To that end, I first survey briefly the European history of international criminal law before considering how the notion of prosecution for international crimes developed in Asia in the international tribunals established after the war, the more recent experiments with hybrid institutions, and a few cases of domestic prosecutions.

Paine memorial: a visual essay

Paine is a small agricultural community located 40 km south of Santiago, Chile's capital city. At the time of a military coup that overthrew the elected government and imposed a lasting dictatorial regime in September 1973, one thousand people lived here. Violent repression against supporters of the overthrown government was unleashed across the country. When it reached Paine, it resulted in the selective arrest and subsequent execution or disapperance of 70 local men. They were the husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons, and brothers of those who remained and those who were still to come. A survey was conducted by the Association of Relatives of Disappeared and Executed Political Detainees of Paine in order to find out how many and who they were; the survey found that there were 1,400 relatives of victims across the generations. Built in 2004 to commemorate the 1973 victims, the Memorial de Paine is found on a narrow stretch of land located next to the highway that connects Paine with Santiago. One thousand wooden posts of various heights stand forming a topography that suggests the diverse nature of the area's landscape and people. Among the one thousand, 70 posts are missing. In the empty spaces, the widows, children, grandchildren and other relatives of the victims have created personal mosaics as part of a project of collective memory.1 Sara Ramírez, one of the memorial's guides, had not been born when her father, Pedro Luis Ramirez Torres, was murdered by the military. This visual essay is constructed from still images and fragments of an interview with Sara Ramírez conducted in Paine in 2010.2 The essay's images and text seek to elicit a reflexive and aesthetic response in the reader, calling their attention to the traumatic experience of the relatives and communities of political detainees who became victims of selective kidnapping, torture, summary execution, and disappearance. The visual-textual arrangement particularly focuses on the complex tension between no memory and re-constructed memory in the second and third generations of victims, who have grown up in a disfigured social landscape fatally marked by loss, silence, lack, fear and guilt. Of special significance for debates regarding ‘postmemory’ is the category ‘unborn children’, which emerged in the course of the interview, as used by Ramírez to refer to children of executed or missing political detainees born after their parent's death or disappearance.3

Indústria da notícia e execuções sumárias: Gaye Tuchman e jornalismo criminal

This article aims to discuss the spread of ideas of the American sociologist Gaye Tuchman in the area of Communication, in Portuguese speaking countries, especially in Brazil. Therefore, we conducted a literature search of her studies in Portuguese and of publications about her. We will discuss her concepts and we will use it to analyze the news coverage of summary executions of criminal suspects and accused of rape and murder of children and women.

The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man's Gate

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The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794-1854, by Carolina Armenteros.

"The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794-1854, by Carolina Armenteros.." Canadian Journal of History, 47(3), pp. 640–641

Evaluating the Impact of Human Rights Work: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Reduction of Extrajudicial Executions in Colombia

Introduction by Philip Alston, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University School of Law and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, 2004–2010. The least well developed dimension of human rights practice and scholarship is evaluation. Human rights practitioners will often assert that their actions or interventions – ranging from mere advocacy, through attempts to embarrass or shame perpetrators, to major campaigns to ensure that prosecutions are brought and wrongdoers are punished – have been ‘successful’. But two questions always arise in response. The first is how to define success, and the second is how to demonstrate some degree of causal link between the actions of the practitioners and the response on the part of the relevant governmental or other actors who are said to have changed their attitude or conduct. Neither question is easy to answer convincingly, which explains why so few sustained and sophisticated attempts have been made at evaluation. Christian Salazar's study of the impact of the extended and intensive efforts by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Colombia to expose and at least reduce, if not eliminate, extrajudicial executions by the Colombian armed forces stands as a clear and important exception to this reluctance to engage in evaluation. In this case it is self-evaluation, which raises another standard problem in the area. Evaluation is ideally undertaken by objective and impartial external experts. But all too often the outsiders have neither the requisite expertise nor the access to enable them to do other than a superficial assessment. The insiders, for their part, generally do not have the incentive or the necessary degree of detachment, to enable them to undertake a compelling evaluation of the work with which they have been engaged. While there is generally no perfect solution to this dilemma, two principles can assist. The first is that internal and external evaluations both have an important place. Whether they reinforce, complement, or contradict one another, they nonetheless make it easier for observers to arrive at their own conclusions based on the available evidence. The second is that neither an internal nor an external evaluation is guaranteed to be convincing, and the real test lies in the strength of the methodology used, of the research undertaken, and of the degree of persuasiveness of the conclusions reached when measured against all available evidence. Seen in this light, Salazar's study is exemplary. As Director of OHCHR's largest field office in the world from 2009 to 2012 he was uniquely placed to understand and be able to situate what was going on. By adopting a carefully nuanced methodology based around a concept of causality that he describes as ‘plausible attribution’ he provides a deeply insightful analysis of the Office's impact in relation to one of the most troubling episodes in Colombia's long-running internal conflict. Even more importantly, his study arrives at a number of conclusions which must be taken very carefully into account by all those engaged in establishing and maintaining international human rights field presences in the future. Many important stakeholders who participated in the fight against extrajudicial executions in Colombia have repeatedly mentioned that the presence and the interventions of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) were crucial to their reduction. Hence, the question the present study will try to answer is: What role did OHCHR play in the reduction of extrajudicial executions and what was its impact? For the purpose of this study, ‘impact’ was defined as a plausible attribution to the work of OHCHR in Colombia of certain outcomes within the fight against extrajudicial executions. The study tries to establish these ‘plausible attributions’ based on an analysis of OHCHR's relations with the government and references to the influence of other actors. Important sources for this study are 22 interviews with key stakeholders who participated in the fight against extrajudicial executions since 2002. The interviewees were direct witnesses, close observers, or decisive actors. Thus, the words of these insiders are fundamental for the endeavor to establish OHCHR's role and impact in the process.

Abolishing Obsolete Crown Prerogatives Relating to: Martial Law, Conscription and Billeting

This article indicates that there are various rights, or privileges, of the Crown (so - called ‘Crown prerogatives’) which still exist under English law and which are at variance with modern society and human rights. Indeed, one would assert the Crown prerogative is the biggest impediment in English based legal systems to an extension of human rights at present, since it is so ample in scope and yet so indeterminate in nature.This article argues that martial law - that is, the right of the Crown to apply military law to civilians (which often resulted in their summary trial and execution in past rebellions) - should be abolished. It is unnecessary and contrary to modern human rights. Also abolished should be the right of the Crown to billet members of the armed forces on the public - now governed by legislation. Finally, the Crown prerogative to forcibly conscript able-bodied male subjects into the army and navy should be abolished. It was replaced by legislation during World War I and II since it was thought to be too uncertain, legally.In conclusion, if these Crown prerogatives were abolished throughout the Commonwealth it would remove much old law and help human rights. It would also allow legislation enacted by Parliament to cover the field, as and when required in the case of martial law.

Death and the Rise of the State: Criminal Courts, Indian Executions, and Early Pacific Northwest Governments

In the decade after the Oregon Treaty (1846) formally divided the Pacific Northwest between Britain and the United States, the territorial and colonial governments of Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, and Oregon Territory used capital punishment to combat violence and demonstrate government authority, especially over indigenous peoples. The reliance on legal proceedings coupled with the use of the death penalty marked a shift from earlier attempts to curb interracial violence in the region, which had relied on swift action and summary executions. The use of the legal system, rather than overt violence and direct reprisal, to punish natives who killed whites was not without its problems. The governments had limited resources, judge and juror had to be pulled from a small and widely dispersed population, and they faced plaintiffs who not only did not speak English, but whose capture often had to be negotiated with gifts and promises of justice. While the Indian tribes may not have understood or interpreted the events surrounding trials and executions in the way the government intended, at the very least they were given a preview of how the new government would react to future homicides.