Unfair Trials Research Articles

Problematika Persidangan Perkara Pidana di Masa Kahar

This study is aimed at finding a model for the implementation of online criminal trial after the publication of SEMA Number 1 of 2020. This is an empirical legal research. Interviews were done with related parties to find models for the implementation of online trials and the obstacles faced by law enforcement institutions. Online criminal trials are meant to keep the defendants from the possible spread of COVID-19 in detention centers or prisons. However, the trials are legally weak. Data collection techniques include interviews and observations. The interviews were conducted using free guided techniques. The findings show that there are differences in the implementation of online criminal trials because the procedural law mechanism policy is very dependent on the ability of each institution. These constraints caused unfair trials, in other words, violate the principles of fair trial.

Revenging Vestments: On the Chasubles of the Bishops Ildefonsus and Adaulfus (Toledo and Compostela, Tenth–Twelfth Centuries)

This article will analyze the miracle of St. Ildefonsus’ chasuble (606–667) from the point of view of miracles of punishment. In comparison to previous studies, on this occasion, the Toledan story will be reconsidered not only together with that of St. Bonitus of Clermont (620–700), but also in light of the similarities with the miracle of the bishop Adaulfus II of Compostela (ninth century), and the possible late antique inspiration of both from the Libellus Precum and from Gregory of Tours´ hagiographies. The stories that involve Ildefonsus and Adaulfus have strong similarities in the development of their sainthoods and in the importance that is given to liturgical vestments. Both are sanctified as prelates, which is due to their miraculous possession of external attributes because of their merits when facing unfair trials.

Simply Unconvincing: The High Court on Probative Value and Reliability in the Uniform Evidence Law

Exclusion of evidence when its probative value is exceeded by its risk of creating unfair prejudice has long been a fundamental safeguard against unfair trials and wrongful convictions. In 2016, IMM v The Queen (IMM) curtailed that safeguard by holding that trial judges should assess probative value on the assumption that the evidence is reliable and credible. The IMM majority placed emphasis on the capacity of the evidence. In doing so, it provided a mysterious qualification: some evidence may lack probative value not because it is unreliable, but because it is ‘simply unconvincing’. The majority illustrated unconvincingness with the example of an unreliable eyewitness identification. Courts and legal scholars criticised the majority judgment for its harmful implications and for its apparent incoherence. From a review of almost 4 years of post- IMM jurisprudence and deeper exploration into one particular case, we find that ‘simply unconvincing’ has accentuated the confusion and inconsistency in Australian evidence jurisprudence.

Empathy-based tolerance towards poor norm violators in third-party punishment.

Third-party punishment (TPP) plays an important role in fairness norm enforcement. This study investigated how the economic status of proposers could modulate third parties' behavioural and neural responses to unfairness. Participants played a TPP game as third parties deciding whether to punish proposers after observing the offers from proposers while behavioural and electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded. The proposers were of either high economic status or low economic status, and the recipients were middle class. The behavioural results indicated that participants reported decreased punishment for poor-proposed unfair offers compared to rich-proposed unfair offers, and this effect was stronger for highly unfair offers. Neurally, greater P200, a component involved in empathy processing, was observed in response to highly unfair offers (i.e. 90:10 and 80:20) proposed by the poor, suggesting that when the targets of severe punishments were poor proposers, participants showed greater empathy for poor norm violators in highly unfair trials. Taken together, these findings help to elucidate that the third-parties tend to tolerate the norm-violating behaviours conducted by the poor and provided further neuroscience evidence for the influence of economic status of proposers on TPP.

Amnesty International dan Penghapusan Hukuman Mati di Malaysia

Malaysia is a country where the death penalty is still present and frequently practiced. It is due to different understandings of the death penalty itself. The absence of the Malaysian government in various international human rights treaties also increases unfair trials on death row inmates. The high number of death row inmates in Malaysia represents a severe human rights violation. The abolition of the death penalty is one of the current global human rights agendas. It goes against the right to live regulated by various international human rights instruments, such as the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and the Declaration of Human Rights. One of the INGOs actively advocating the abolition of the death penalty in Malaysia is Amnesty International. This study looks at Amnesty International’s transnational advocacy tactics in encouraging the death penalty abolition in Malaysia from 2015 to 2018. The method used is descriptive research by collecting primary and secondary data and using transnational advocacy networks by Keck and Sikkink. The results of this research show that the efforts used by Amnesty International in this advocacy include information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics, and accountability politics.

The ‘Soul of an Army’: A Defence of Military Court Trials for Violations of the Law of Armed Conflict

Military justice as a body of law was subject to much criticism in the preceding decades before undergoing significant reforms to ensure that fair trial rights could be achieved. However, modern military justice systems are appropriate mechanisms for addressing law of armed conflict (LOAC) violations committed by service members. It is argued that the goals of military justice are consistent with LOAC, and that military justice has a valid legal basis to try violations. Such trials have a large body of precedent. The purported disadvantages of military trials are sufficiently mitigated to prevent cover-ups and unfair trials. Furthermore, military justice offers several benefits that cannot be achieved in a civilian or international forum. It is concluded that although military legal systems are imperfect, their role in the enforcement of international criminal law is worthy of further debate.

The cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying norm-enforcement behaviors under social observation.

Abundant evidence has revealed that social observation could enhance people's norm-enforcement behaviors to norm violators. However, whether such enhancement is strategically reputation-based without changes on awareness of social norms or it is accompanied with strengthened perception of norm violations remains unclear. We aimed to test these two hypotheses using a modified Ultimatum Game (UG). Participants played the UG as responders in the fMRI scanner after being instructed the rules of the game and how the observers monitored their performances during the task. Behavioral results showed that unfair offers were perceived more unfair (decreased fairness ratings) and rejected more often under the condition with social observation than that without observation (the control condition). The changes in fairness ratings predicted the increase of rejection rates between two conditions, which provided more evidence for the latter hypothesis. Neural results demonstrated that right insula and anterior cingulate cortex associated with processing norm violations and/or negative emotions were more activated in response to unfair treatments under social observation relative to the control condition. Furthermore, bilateral anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and right amygdala (an emotional processing structure) showed increased activations with the reduction of fairness ratings under social observation. Besides, compared to the control condition, rejecting unfair trials under social observation induced more left anterior insula activation. These findings indicated that the increase of norm-enforcement behaviors in the UG under social observation was more than a behavioral strategy for social desirability, but a result of enhanced sensitivity to fairness norm violations and unfairness-related negative feelings.

Iran's Forgotten Kurds

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 43, No.2, Winter 2020 Iran’s Forgotten Kurds Michael M. Gunter* Introduction Although the approximately 8 million Kurds in Iran are second in numbers only to those in Turkey and constitute maybe 11 percent of Iran’s entire population, they have become all but forgotten. Unlike the Arabs and the Turks, the Persians are closely related to the Kurds. This ethnic affinity at times has possibly served to moderate Kurdish national demands in Iran. Nevertheless, the Kurds in Iran at the least have long pursued their separate cultural and social identity in one form or another. In addition, most of the Kurds in Iran are Sunnis, which creates problems with the Shiite Iranian government. The purpose of this paper is to explain why the Iranian Kurds (Eastern Kurdistan or Rojhelat) are largely forgotten compared to their kin in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, but in so doing also analyze their current situation. This will be done against the backdrop of change and continuity in Kurdish-Iranian relations. A significant number of Iranian Kurds live in the northwestern province of Kordestan, the only province in all pan-Kurdistan that bears this Kurdish ethnic name, which in the past has often been banned from being used in the other states in which the Kurds live. The Kurds in Iran also live in four other Iranian provinces: Western Azerbaijan, Kirmanshah, Hamadin, and Ilam. In addition, there is a community of Kurds in the northern part of Khorasan province in northeastern Iran that was forcefully relocated there during the eighteenth century to disperse and thus better control the ethnic and religious composition of the Persian Empire. Finally, in recent decades many Kurds have also moved to Tehran to seek better employment and living opportunities. Kurds (unlike the Turkic Azeris) have been barred from high levels of power in Iran, and human rights violations are systematically carried out 54 *Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, TN. He is an authority on Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, has written eleven books on the Kurdish struggle, and has co-edited eight books. Gunter is a board member of the Center for Eurasian Studies. He is frequently consulted by media members for analysis and comment on breaking news in the Middle East. 55 against them. In January 2009, for example, Human Rights Watch documented how Iranian authorities use security laws, press laws, and other legislation to arrest and prosecute Iranian Kurds solely for trying to exercise their right to freedom of expression and association. The government has closed Persian- and Kurdish-language newspapers and journals, banned books, and punished publishers, journalists, and writers for opposing and criticizing government policies.1 Amnesty International also expressed concern over the treatment of ethnic Kurdish prisoners of conscience. Kurdish representatives have testified how ethnic Kurds are denied education in their own language. Kurds are not allowed to give their children certain Kurdish names; Sunni Muslim Kurds face discrimination because of their religion; women’s rights are denied; and economic opportunities are bleak.2 In June 2012, US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor Michael Posner denounced continuing negative trends in Iran toward its Kurdish population: “Intolerance, of dissent…; free speech restricted; internet freedom restricted; political participation severely circumscribed; unfair trials; amputations; floggings; lots of death penalty…. So, it is a very grim picture.”3 History of the Kurds during the Ottoman period. Sheikh Ubeydullah In 1880, Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri—a devout and highly revered religious leader—led possibly the most significant Kurdish revolt of the nineteenth century in the area along the Ottoman-Persian border. This ultimately unsuccessful uprising is sometimes said to have been the prototype for subsequent Kurdish revolts in the twentieth century. Explaining his actions, Sheikh Ubeydullah famously wrote the consulgeneral of Great Britain in Tabriz that “the Kurdish nation…is a people apart…. We also are a nation apart. We want our affairs to be in our own hands.”4 Indeed, in his seminal work on Kurdish studies, Wadie Jwaideh concluded concerning the sheikh that “as the old parochial interests of a local leader gave...

The economic case for improving legal outcomes for accused persons with cognitive disability: an Australian study

AbstractPeople with cognitive disabilities face specific forms of discrimination and disadvantage in the criminal justice system, including in legal proceedings. While unfitness-to-stand-trial provisions are intended to assist in avoiding unfair trials, in application, such laws can exacerbate disadvantage. A recent research project sought to increase the participation of accused persons with cognitive disabilities in legal proceedings by developing, implementing and evaluating a model in which disability support workers were embedded in legal services in three Australian jurisdictions. This paper details the findings of a cost–benefit analysis undertaken of that model compared with the common outcomes for accused persons with cognitive disability, including a finding of unfitness to stand trial. The analysis provides evidence of how a tailored programme intervention at a critical point can provide savings in police, courts and custody costs in addition to improving the timeliness and quality of outcomes for people with cognitive disabilities.

Law as an Instrument and as a Mirror of Official Memory Politics: The Mechanism for Rehabilitating Victims of Communism in Serbia

This article examines the mechanism for judicial rehabilitation in Serbia as a tool and as a reflection of state-sanctioned memory politics of the Second World War and Yugoslav state socialism. The mechanism of rehabilitation seeks to accommodate victims of unfair trials by revising them or declaratively and collectively rehabilitating victims of political persecution. In the case of Serbia, the legislation enables rehabilitation of persons responsible for collaboration and crimes during the Second World War as long as it can be argued that political and ideological grounds were also involved in their judicial or extrajudicial persecution. Acknowledging that individuals were unjustly persecuted in the postwar period, the article is primarily concerned with prominent military and political actors of the Second World War. Discussing rehabilitation in the context of the relation of history, memory and law, the article represents a perspective of history and memory studies rather than a purely legal-dogmatic analysis.

The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands by Nicholas Villanueva

Reviewed by: The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands by Nicholas Villanueva Elliott Young The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands. By Nicholas Villanueva Jr. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 219. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-6030-4; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8263-5838-7.) Nicholas Villanueva Jr.'s The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands examines the uptick in violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas in the 1910s. Villanueva shows how the combination of fears of the Mexican Revolution and persistent anti-Mexican racism contributed to a landscape where Texas Rangers and white lynch mobs could act with impunity. While the lynching of Mexicans is deserving of more scholarly attention, it is not clear what new insights are gained through this examination. The book focuses on a few well-publicized cases of lynching and unfair trials that resulted in execution. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb have documented 571 cases of Mexicans killed by mobs in the United States between [End Page 1033] 1848 and 1928, 20 percent of whom were killed in the 1910s. Other historians have suggested that the number of Mexicans killed during the 1910s alone runs well into the hundreds. This book does not attempt to clarify these wide-ranging estimates, but Villanueva argues for expanding the strict definition of lynching employed by the NAACP. In the first chapter the reader learns about anti-Mormonism, Juan Crow segregation, and the Mexican Revolution, and this background provides context for the cases of lynching discussed in subsequent chapters. The second chapter examines the brutal killings of Antonio Rodríguez in Rocksprings, Texas, in 1910 and Antonio Gómez in Thorndale, Texas, in 1911. Rodríguez, a twenty-year-old migrant worker, was dragged from a jail, "doused with oil and set ablaze" (p. 53). Seven months later, Gómez, a fourteen-year-old, was hanged from a telegraph pole by a mob incensed over the murder of a German American. In neither case was anyone found guilty of the murders. The story of these killings is based largely on English-language U.S. newspapers and Texas state archival documents. Although Villanueva refers to the protests that erupted throughout Mexico in response to Rodríguez's murder, we only see these protests through the eyes of English-language U.S. newspaper reporters. It would have been useful to see how Mexican newspapers and Spanish-language Texas newspapers reported on these murders, as well as a fuller analysis of the Mexican government's response. The lack of research in Mexican archives results in a U.S.-centric view of a transnational story. One of Villanueva's main contentions is that the legal system often achieved the same miscarriage of justice as the lynch mob. The chapter on the execution of fifteen-year-old Leon Martínez Jr. for the murder of a young Anglo-American woman, Emma Brown, shows how the legal system worked to condemn Martínez based on a confession coerced out of the teenager under threat of a lynch mob. Facing pressure from Anglo-Texans, Governor Oscar Colquitt refused to pardon Martínez. Villanueva convincingly argues that this execution was a "legal lynching," even though it might not count as a lynching by a strict definition (p. 101). Villanueva acknowledges class and racial divides within the Mexican community, but some of the complexities drop out in the analysis of particular incidents. For example, Villanueva focuses on José T. Canales's heroic efforts to restrain and reform the Texas Rangers following the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of Mexicans in the wake of the 1915 Plan de San Diego. What is missing from this account is the role Canales and other Texas Mexicans played in opposing the San Diego rebels. While the Anglo-Mexican divide helps explain a lot of the violence in south Texas in this period, some middle-class Texas Mexicans sided with the Rangers against the radicals who threatened their interests. Villanueva should be applauded for focusing our attention on the large number of ethnic Mexicans killed in Texas by lynch mobs and by a discriminatory judicial system. Other scholars will have to build...

Non-coupables! Le non-refoulement, les assurances diplomatiques et la réinstallation des acquittés des juridictions pénales internationales dans leurs pays d’origine

This article addresses an issue henceforth well-known as one of the most topical challenges international criminal justice is subject to: the relocation of acquitted in their home countries. It starts with a mere factual finding on the contextual differences between the situation at the icty, the ictr and the icc while analyzing the legal issues surrounding returning home (unfair trials, personal safety, double jeopardy) before leaving room to a gripping and dialectical discussion on the applicability of the non-refoulement to international organizations. Are legal non-state entities – such as icc and ictr as a subsidiary body of the un Security Council – legally liable for returning an acquitted person back to his country where his life would be threatened because of his political opinions or his membership to a particular group? The article identifies diplomatic assurances as a possible avenue, while listing the indicators and the conditions of validity of such assurances.

The Effect of Delay on Historical Child Sex Abuse Cases: Commentary on the Irish Experience

After a notorious case in 1994, Ireland saw a ‘tsunami’ of allegations of historical child abuse. As well as undermining the Catholic Church in Ireland, this has also posed grave problems for the legal system. On the one hand, there was an enormous, strongly articulated demand for prosecutions for such offences. On the other hand, the prosecution after periods of up to 54 years — often of old or very old defendants some of whom had cognitive or other problems — was difficult to reconcile with Ireland's elaborate requirements for fair procedures, including the right to an expeditious trial. It became usual for defendants confronted with these very old allegations to seek prohibition in the superior courts against what they said were manifestly unfair trials. The tension between the felt need to prosecute and the legal necessity to ensure fair trials troubled the Irish courts and especially divided the Supreme Court of Ireland. This commentary examines some of the key case law, including the landmark 1998 judgment in PC v Director of Public Prosecutions, in which the Supreme Court controversially mandated an assumption in such cases that the complainant's account was true (contrary to the presumption of innocence), and the 2008 decision in SH v Director of Public Prosecutions that introduced a single, prejudice-focused test.

Violations of Fundamental Rights in Nigeria during Internal Strife and Civil Disturbances by the Nigerian Security Personnel

Human rights law is the law that deals with the protection of individual and groups against violation by governments of their internationally guaranteed rights and the promotion of these rights. The world is however littered with basic examples of violation of fundamental rights which include, but not limited to discrimination, extra judicial execution, disappearances, torture and unfair trials. This index showcases that the number of human rights abuses are mostly committed by the state agencies, and in Nigeria, by the security personnel, saddled with the responsibility of ensuring protection of lives and properties. This paper therefore addresses instances of those violations during internal strife and civil disturbances in Nigeria

Institutional Disparities: Considerations of Gender in the Commutation Process for Incarcerated Women

Clemency, or relief from a criminal sentence by means of commutation, is a critical component of the US system of justice. The granting of commutation—a power vested solely in the office of the head of state—generally reduces a life sentence, after conviction, to time served. The review process at a commutation hearing allows for the extenuating circumstances of a case to be considered and constitutes the final opportunity for redress of unfair trials, excessive sentences, and the denial of equal rights that may result from systemic injustice on the basis of gender, race, or sexual bias. In highlighting the patterns of control, confrontational conduct, and biased assumptions that form the framework of the eleven commutation hearings in this study, the authors argue that, rather than providing women prisoners with equitable access to a process that fairly evaluates their rehabilitation and any new evidence pertinent to their petitions, the commutation process only compounds the institutionalized disparities that haunted their trials and reinforces the retributive criminalization of women.

Blood on our hands: seeing the evil in inappropriate comparators

What is the value of fairness in medicine? Do unto others as you would have done unto you? Is it possible to say fairer than that? Fair tests of treatments presume a genuine uncertainty about which treatment is more beneficial or harmful. Yet too many clinical trials use inappropriate comparators to exaggerate the benefits of a new therapy. Fairness goes beyond transparency and disclosure of trial data. The results of many unfair trials are published, the data shared. Unfairness, in this instance, lies in selecting a comparator drug or dose of a drug that, for example, is known to be less effective or has a worse side-effect profile. In 56 out of 63 trials involving patients with highly active rheumatoid arthritis, potentially helpful treatments were withheld from 9224 out of 13,095 patients randomized to the control arms. Why? Because placebos or treatments known to be ineffective were used as controls.1

THE RULE OF LAW IN NIGERIA: MYTH OR REALITY?

There is no doubt that the rule of law is unambiguously enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution. The only surprising thing to any competent individual is the blatant disrespect shown to this constitutional provision by Nigerian rulers who had openly sworn to uphold it. From the backdrop of several cases of unjustifiable arrests, unfair trials, executive lawlessness, suppression of free speech and undue domination of minorities, this paper attempts to defend the thesis that Nigerian rulers have become sybaritic in their conscious reduction of the concept of the rule of law to a mere constitutional myth and never a reality that it was intended to be.

Death in custody, arbitrary arrests and unfair trials of children: Children victims of political unrest and violence in Bahrain

Death in custody, arbitrary arrests and unfair trials of children: Children victims of political unrest and violence in Bahrain

Tazmamart: Fort-Militaire-Secret du Maroc. Consequences d'un Internement du 18 Annees

Evelyne van Ginneken, Ronald Rijnders Johannes Wier Foundation for Health and Human Rights, pp 118 ISBN 90-73550-10-6 Tazmamart tells a kind of Gothic horror story, one that is still unwinding. After unfair trials on charges of sedition, 59 former soldiers “disappeared” from Morocco's official prison system and were sent to a secret detention centre, Tazmamart, in the Atlas mountains. For 18 years they were held incommunicado and in almost complete darkness in small single cells which they never left. They were exposed to extremes of temperature, with poor food, little water, and no medical care. Thirty one died during this ordeal, and survivors' accounts suggest that at least 12 of these had pulmonary tuberculosis and 10 a terminal psychosis. One committed suicide a …

B. 2. Amnesty International- The State Security Court Trial at Midnight: Secret, summary, unfair trials in Gaza*

B. 2. Amnesty International- The State Security Court Trial at Midnight: Secret, summary, unfair trials in Gaza*