Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Human Rights & State Crime - Coggle Diagram
Human Rights & State Crime
State Crimes
Green and Ward
define state crimes as ‘illegal or deviant activities perpetuated by/ with the complicity of state agencies’.
States will generally create the laws of their countries, but they may break these domestic laws themselves as well as international laws (governing the relations between countries).
Examples
: corruption, discrimination, funding terrorism or organised crime, war crimes, torture, assassination, genocide. ethnic cleansing etc
McLaughlin: Four types of State crime:
Political crimes
(rigging elections, corruptly appointing officials)
Crimes of the security and police forces
(torture, illegal detention, unjustified violence)
Economic crimes
(breaking H&S laws, not paying state employees minimum wage)
Social and cultural crimes
(mistreatment of EM, institutional racism)
Crimes of Obedience
Authoritarian personality theory (Adorno)
E.g. In Nazi Germany- the authoritarian personality of Hitler led to the horrific war crimes committed by the Nazis.
When there are authority figures, individuals follow the orders of their superiors without question. This commonly occurs during war, which may explain why usually law-abiding citizens can become capable of committing awful acts.
1) Authorisation
: state exerts authority and citizens feel a duty to obey
2) Routinisation:
abuse is normalised and there is strong pressure to turn the act into routine so it is performed detachedly
Ordinary people may go along with human rights abuses in some circumstances which makes it easier to use techniques of neutralisation.
3) Dehumanisation:
the enemy is dehumanised, regarded as sub-human/ animalistic= the abuse is more justified as rules of morality don't apply
Measuring State Crime
Difficult to measure and define state crime as they:
Have control over law enforcement e.g. military, police, CJS
Have power to define what is and isn't a crime
Can conceal their actions through laws such as the Official Secrets Act
McLaughlin
: the scale of state crime is huge due to the power that governments hold. Since the state makes the law, they can conceal their own actions which makes it difficult to account for.
Spiral of Denial (Cohen)
Despite clear and extreme nature of these abuses, states develop a culture of denial to respond to accusations of abuse:
1) State denies that the event even happened
This lasts until NGOs, international bodies, investigative reporters etc provide evidence it DID
State crimes can be defined as gross violations of human rights against both national and international law e.g. genocide, mass political killings, state terrorism etc.
2) State tries to redefine what has taken place
present events as something other than a human rights abuse e.g. an accident or claim that others carried out the atrocity
3) State justifies the event
suggest that it was the fault of victims or that there was "no other way" e.g. it prevented even greater harm, necessary to maintain national security
Techniques of Neutralisation (Matza and Sykes)
Denial of Responsibility
: individuals state they are following orders of superiors who were responsible, not them
Denial of injury
: suggest victims didn't really suffer
States use these techniques to make abuses seem more acceptable without challenging the idea that human rights abuses are wrong
Denial of victim
: saying that the victims are terrorists/ criminals and therefore the state is the real victim
Condemnation of the condemners
: accusing those of making the accusations of being hypocrites/ behaving worse
Appeal to higher loyalties
: abuses are presented as justified in pursuit of a greater good e.g. revolution, for religion, defence of the free world etc
Transgressive Criminology and Human Rights
While human rights are recognised as international law, many actions recorded as abuses of human rights by NGOs e.g. Amnesty International are not actually against the law in the countries they occur in. TC argue this does not mean they aren't crimes- they still cause significant harm.
Transgressive criminologists are interested in a broader definition of crime- activates that cause harm, not just those that are against the law
Evaluation: what are the parameters? Opening up considerations of crime to anything that causes harm makes it unwieldly and difficult to quantify. It is also subjective as definitions of "harm" differ from sociologist to sociologist
Discourse of human rights is ethnocentric- seeking to apply Western norms of what is right or wrong to all societies.