State Crime & International Criminal Justice

Question 1

What is state crime and how useful is this notion?

Answer 1

Green and Ward
* State crime is ‘state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights’
* State is given a broad meaning in the Marxist sense to refer to a public power and agencies that levy power
* State is legitimate to the extent is secures legitimate to the extent is acts in accordance with the rules it sets for itself and its citizens based on shared beliefs (???)
* By identifying the operative’s goals of an organisation or sub-unit that we can distinguish between individual and organisational deviance
* Former is for direct personal benefit, the latter in accordance with the operative goals
* An organisation’s reaction to individual deviance will be an indication of the deviant act’s perceived compatibility with organisational goals
* Human rights are included to exclude trivial cases, these are certain fundamental needs that we all share

Question 2

Is genocide best understood as an individual or a state crime?

Answer 2

Sutherland: ‘Criminology is the making, breaking and enforcing of laws’
* How can state crime comply with this when it is the one that decides what is lawful?
* Must think there is great difference between the domestic and international context and how we prosecute offenders
* Is the punishing of one or a handful of individuals truly representative of the harm done? What is the alternative to imprisoning individuals?
* May be unfair to punish the state as a whole, peoples participation may be due to indoctrination or duress, state will also be weak and this could lead to further harm

Question 3

Why and how did victims become killers in the Rwandan genocide?

Answer 3

• In 100 days, around 800,000 people were killed, specifically members of the Tutsi minority group, targeted by Hutu extremists
• Carred out with meticuolous organisation, lists of political opponents were given to militia and roadblocks were set up to check peoples ethnicities and kill them
• Propoganda urged people to ‘weed out cockroaches’, neighbours and families killing one another with machetes

Mamdani
* Argues genocide resulted from both top-down political planning and bottom-up social participation
* The genocide must be understood within the colonial history, these policies lead to the racialised division of the two groups
* The genocide was not simply an ethnic conflict but an attempt to erase a racialised foreign presence

Question 4

What role can criminal trials play after mass violence?

Answer 4

USEFUL ROLE:
* Gives the sense of some justice being done, countries themselves often ask for the ICC to intervene after the events
* If the judges and justice system in the country have been apart of the violence, or turned a blind eye, this is the best way to ensure a fair process

HARMFUL ROLE:
* Often based on western practices and ideas about criminality and justice, overlooking domestic and indigenous beliefs
* State will be fragile, trying to enforce a different model of criminal justice can create more instability
* Criminal trial is simply the first step, cannot just punish individuals and except things to change
* Trials should be used alongside practices in the community to ensure that devestating events do not happen again
* May only be done based on the supposed utility of the country to prominent actors. May lead to a difference of what we prioritise in the state, e.g. justice, peace

Question 5

In what ways can the International Criminal Court be considered a ‘racist’ institution?

Question 6

What are the alternatives to international criminal justice and what problems do they encouter?

Answer 6

Allen
* ICC intervention is a neocolonial experiment that ignores the realities and understandings of victims
* Focuses on Uganda, how indigenous practices focus on acknowledgement of responsibility, repentance and compensation not imprisonment

McEvoy
* Legalism is a scholary and practical tendency to privilege law and legal frameworks over other social, political and community based forms of justice
* Human rights have taken a western-centric approach, must rethink transitional justice
* Must adopt a more pluralistic, interdisciplinary and community driven approach
* Law is an essential but limited tool, by adopting other approaches transitional justice can be more responsive to the needs of post conflict communities