Since 9/11, a new configuration of power situated at the core of the executive branch of the U.S. government has taken hold. In Crimes of Power & States of Impunity, Michael Welch takes a close look at the key historical, political, and economic forces shaping the country's response to terror. Welch continues the work he began in Scapegoats of September 11th and argues that current U.S. policies, many enacted after the attacks, undermine basic human rights and violate domestic and international law. He recounts these offenses and analyzes the system that sanctions them, offering fresh insight into the complex relationship between power and state crime. Welch critically examines the unlawful enemy combatant designation, Guantanamo Bay, recent torture cases, and collateral damage relating to the war in Iraq. This book transcends important legal arguments as Welch strives for a broader sociological interpretation of what transpired early this century, analyzing the abuses of power that jeopardize our safety and security.

This book introduces a new conceptual framework for impunity within state crime theory and uses Turkish state criminality against Kurds between 1990 and 2000 as a case study. It develops an understanding of impunity that goes beyond viewing the state solely as an actor, facilitator, or denier of crime. It argues for an expanded definition of state crime to encompass criminal acts and processes undertaken by states, including impunity. Building on field research, case analysis, and interviews, this book digs deep into the mechanics of impunity and ways in which the Turkish state has evaded punishment for its criminal acts. In doing so, Framing Impunity in the Context of State Crime uncovers a close connection between the crimes of the government and the impunity which allowed those crimes to flourish. It demonstrates that state violence and impunity are endemic in the structural design of the Turkish state and serve to further both the state goals of ethnic and religious assimilation and the subsequent persecution of those who refused to be assimilated into the new state construction. The book uses Stanley Cohen’s work on states of denial techniques to examine how states justify their illegal acts in order to deny and/or to evade responsibility for their crimes. Cohen’s work on denial at the organisational level is central to the question of impunity because, as a form of state crime, impunity involves various state institutions or actors representing the very state machinery deployed to conceal and deny state criminality. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to law students, scholars, researchers, NGOs, and civil society organisations. It will have broader applicability beyond the case study of Turkey and will be valuable to academics and policymakers worldwide who focus on the intersection of state crime and impunity.

The period immediately following Kenya's 2007 presidential election left a shocking trail of atrocities, with over 1,000 people dead and countless thousands left victimised and displaced. In response, the International Criminal Court began a series of investigations and trials, promising no impunity for even the highest ranking perpetrators. When the country's president and vice-president were implicated in the crimes, the case took on worldwide significance. The International Criminal Court and the End of Impunity in Kenya is a five-year study addressing critical human rights issues with a global reach and is the first detailed account of the ICC's intervention in Kenya. It probes the relationship between the ICC and state institutions, known as positive complementarity, and asks whether the ICC's intervention led to an end to impunity. The author provides comprehensive analysis of the Waki Commission's sealed envelope, the government's attempts to establish a special tribunal and the trials in The Hague. He also provides in depth consideration of any influence the ICC's intervention may have had on the passing of a new constitution, the establishment of a truth commission and important reforms to the judiciary, police and witness protection programme. Documenting the effects of these interventions on the Kenyan people, and on the country's legal and judicial systems, the book provides vital lessons in global justice as it: •Details the ICC's involvement in Kenya in the aftermath of extreme violence and instability •Evaluates the ICC prosecutor's strategy of positive complementarity •Identifies optimal conditions for positive complementarity to be effective •Links cultures of impunity to state-sponsored corruption •Explores the possible impact of the ICC on national and global policy •Discusses implications in responding to future crimes against humanity Replete with official government sources, The International Criminal Court and the End of Impunity in Kenya is necessary reading for researchers and practitioners working in public international law, particularly those specialising in conflict and post-conflict states.

The fight against impunity has become a growing concern of the international community. Updated in 2005, the UN Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights Through Action to Combat Impunity is the fruit of several years of study, developed under the aegis of the UN Commission on Human Rights and then affirmed by the Human Rights Council. These Principles are today widely accepted as constituting an authoritative reference point for efforts in the fight against impunity for gross human rights abuses and serious violations of international humanitarian law. As a comprehensive attempt to codify universal accountability norms, the UN Set of Principles marks a significant step forward in the debate on the obligation of states to combat impunity in its various forms. Bringing together leading experts in the field, this volume provides comprehensive academic commentary of the 38 principles. The book is a perfect companion to the document, setting out the text of the Principles alongside detailed analysis, as well as a full introduction and a guide to the relevant literature and case law. The commentary advances debates and clarifies complex legal issues, making it an essential resource for legal academics, students, and practitioners working in fields such as human rights, international criminal law, and transitional justice.

In Infrastructures of Impunity Elizabeth F. Drexler argues that the creation and persistence of impunity for the perpetrators of the Cold War Indonesian genocide (1965–66) is not only a legal status but also a cultural and social process. Impunity for the initial killings and for subsequent acts of political violence has many elements: bureaucratic, military, legal, political, educational, and affective. Although these elements do not always work at once—at times some are dormant while others are ascendant—together they can be described as a unified entity, a dynamic infrastructure, whose existence explains the persistence of impunity. For instance, truth telling, a first step in many responses to state violence, did not undermine the infrastructure but instead bent to it. Creative and artistic responses to revelations about the past, however, have begun to undermine the infrastructure by countering its temporality, affect, and social stigmatization and demonstrating its contingency and specific actions, policies, and processes that would begin to dismantle it. Drexler contends that an infrastructure of impunity could take hold in an established democracy.

How do top-level public officials take advantage of immunity from foreign jurisdiction afforded to them by international law? How does the immunity entitlement allow them to thwart investigations and trial proceedings in foreign courts? What responses exist to prevent and punish such conduct? In Between Immunity and Impunity, Yuliya Zabyelina unravels the intricate layers of impunity of political elites complicit in transnational crimes. By examining cases of trafficking in persons and drugs, corruption, and money laundering that implicate heads of state and of government, ministers, diplomats, and international civil servants, she shows that, despite the potential of international law immunity to impede or delay justice, there are prominent instruments of external accountability. Accessible and compelling, this book provides novel insights for readers interested in the close-knit bond between power, illicit wealth, and impunity.

This comprehensive, compelling, accessible and timely volume should be compulsory reading to academics, policy makers, social activists, and the general public in Malawi and elsewhere on the continent. The accounts the authors present of the pervasive dysfunctions of Malawi's troubled experiment with multiparty democracy since the mid-1990s, and the endlessly deferred dreams of development, are often dispiriting. Yet, their bleak diagnoses are often accompanied by ameliorative prescriptions that are simultaneously bold and pragmatic. The book exudes a sense of hope that the struggles for a better future will continue. In itself the book represents a testament to the possibilities of the country's democratic dispensation, the need to unflinchingly confront the country's debilitating political and socioeconomic pathologies. Such a text would have been unthinkable during the dictatorship of the founding president, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

This volume presents and critiques the distorted effects of the international human rights movement's focus on the fight against impunity.

This volume reviews the achievements and limitations of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the creation of mixed national/international courts: the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Cambodia Tribunal. The major, unexpected and promising judiciary innovation is however the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998, supported by the UN, European Union members and other countries, effectively promoted by NGOs, but strongly opposed by the USA. The Court will have to show that it is a fair and valuable instrument in fighting impunity at the international level.

Contributing to the literature on comparative criminal procedure and Latin American law, this book examines the effects of adversarial criminal justice reforms on victim’s rights by specifically analyzing the Colombian criminal justice reform of the early 2000s. This research focuses on the production, interpretation, and implementation of rules and institutions by exploring how different actors have employed the concept of victims and victims’ rights to promote their agendas in the context of criminal justice reforms. It also analyzes how the goals of these agendas have interplayed in practice. By the early 2000s, it seemed that the Colombian criminal justice system was headed towards a process characterized by broader victim participation, primarily because of the doctrine of the Constitutional Court on victims’ rights. But in 2002, the Colombian Attorney General promoted a more adversarial criminal justice reform. This book argues that this reform represented a sudden and unpredicted reversal of the Constitutional Court’s doctrine on victim participation, even though one of the central justifications for the reform was the need to satisfy human rights standards and adhere to the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court on victims’ rights. In the criminal justice reform of the early 2000s and its subsequent modifications, the promotion of a dichotomous interpretation of the adversarial model—which conceived the criminal process as a competition between prosecution and defense—served to limit victim participation. This study examines how conceptions of victims’ rights emerged out of the struggles between different and at times competing agendas. In the Colombian process of reform, victims’ rights have been invoked both as a justification for criminal sanctions and as an explanation for crime prevention and restorative justice. After assessing quantitative and qualitative data, this book concludes that punitive approaches to victims’ rights have prevailed over restorative justice perspectives. Furthermore, it argues that punitiveness in the criminal justice system has not resulted in more protection for victims. Ultimately, this research reveals that the adversarial criminal justice reform of the early 2000s has not substantially improved the protection of victims’ rights in Colombia.