Human Rights Change, Politics of Law and Order, and Targeting of Torture (SWP 66)

Human rights have improved but not everywhere and for everyone. Scholarship has focused on domestic conditions under which they improve but we know little about how they affect different groups. Whose rights are being protected? Under what conditions? I compare dissidents and criminals as targets of human rights violations – specifically torture. I also examine the effectiveness of human rights protections under conditions of public insecurity due to crime – as opposed to political or civil conflict or terrorism. I argue that mobilization and judicial enforcement are less effective in the face of public insecurity, and criminals benefit less than dissidents because courts provide less accountability for violations of those accused of crimes. Human rights treaties that depend on these mechanisms thus primarily benefit dissidents. My statistical analysis supports this argument and directly addresses concerns about measurement bias. The key finding is that commitment to the Convention against Torture enhances judicial protection only for dissidents

A decolonised Commission agenda : the missing ingredients – Author's reply

No abstract available.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhiv/home2024-04-18hj2024EconomicsSDG-03:Good heatlh and well-beingSDG-05:Gender equalitySDG-16:Peace,justice and strong institution

A call for an immediate ceasefire and peaceful end to the Russian aggression against Ukraine

The Lancet–SIGHT Commission condemns the Russian Government's aggression against Ukraine and its attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, including health workers and hospitals. We support the March 2, 2022 UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution ES-11/1 that “deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation”. The indiscriminate use of weaponry violates international humanitarian law and has caused catastrophic health impacts, especially on children, older people, and disabled persons, and social and economic disruptions that will be long lasting. There are nuclear risks, both from Russian attacks on Ukrainian nuclear facilities and the potential for nuclear weapons use. There is a further risk that Russia might use chemical or biological weapons. We call for an immediate ceasefire and the appointment of a mediator to facilitate negotiations for a sustainable and peaceful settlement on the basis of international law to end the conflict. We urge the global health community to deliver humanitarian assistance impartially to all those affected by and fleeing the war; document atrocities committed against civilians and the devastating impacts of the war; counter disinformation about the conflict; and advocate for a peaceful settlement. We also call for an end to the repression of those in Russia protesting the war.http://www.thelancet.comhj2023Economic

Public health, conflict and human rights: toward a collaborative research agenda

Although epidemiology is increasingly contributing to policy debates on issues of conflict and human rights, its potential is still underutilized. As a result, this article calls for greater collaboration between public health researchers, conflict analysts and human rights monitors, with special emphasis on retrospective, population-based surveys. The article surveys relevant recent public health research, explains why collaboration is useful, and outlines possible future research scenarios, including those pertaining to the indirect and long-term consequences of conflict; human rights and security in conflict prone areas; and the link between human rights, conflict, and International Humanitarian Law

The Lancet Commission on peaceful societies through health equity and gender equality

The multiple and overlapping crises faced by countries, regions, and the world appear unprecedented in their magnitude and complexity. Protracted conflicts continue and new ones emerge, fuelled by geopolitics and social, political, and economic pressures. The legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic, economic uncertainty, climatic events ranging from droughts to fires to cyclones, and rising food insecurity add to these pressures. These crises have exposed the inadequacy of national and global leadership and governance structures. The world is experiencing a polycrisis—ie, an interaction of multiple crises that dramatically intensifies suffering, harm, and turmoil, and overwhelms societies' ability to develop effective policy responses. Bold approaches are needed to enable communities and countries to transition out of harmful cycles of inequity and violence into beneficial cycles of equity and peace. The Lancet Commission on peaceful societies through health equity and gender equality provides such an approach. The Commission, which had its inaugural meeting in May, 2019, examines the interlinkages between Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) on health; SDG5 on gender equality; and SDG16 on peace, justice, and strong institutions. Our research suggests that improvements to health equity and gender equality are transformative, placing societies on pathways towards peace and wellbeing. Four key messages emerge from our research. First, health equity and gender equality have a unique and powerful ability to contribute to more peaceful societies. This Commission recognises the complex web of factors that contribute to conflict. Moreover, health equity and gender equality are themselves shaped by social and economic processes that are complex, contextually specific, and unfold over long timescales. Even accounting for this complexity, our Commission provides evidence that improvements in health equity and gender equality can place societies on pathways to peace. Health equity and gender equality are powerful agents of transformation because they require definitive actions, namely tangible and sustained policies that improve health and gender equality outcomes. We refer to these definitive actions as the mechanisms of health equity and gender equality. Health equity requires countries to embrace the right to health, acknowledge disparities, and recognise that universal access to health-care services is crucial for human potential and dignity. Gender equality requires laws to protect the rights of women and sexual and gender minorities. All individuals need equal access to education, resources, technology, infrastructure, and safety and security to enable participation in the economy, civil society, and politics. Processes to advance health equity and gender equality are more powerful when they operate together, through access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services. Advocacy is also an essential component as it builds a social consensus that the principles of health equity and gender equality apply to all individuals, regardless of their gender or other forms of identity. These tangible actions or mechanisms transform capabilities, a term that we define here as what people are able to do and to be. With improved health equity and gender equality, individuals can access economic resources and assets, live in safety and security, and exercise greater agency. Through these changes, human capital improves and economic growth becomes more inclusive. Social capital is strengthened and social norms are altered to inhibit violence and aggression. Although political processes are characterised by short-term dynamics, the institutionalisation of gender equality and health equity improves the quality of governance and can strengthen the social contract between the government and the citizenry. These processes interact with each other in self-reinforcing feedback loops creating beneficial cycles that influence the dynamics of economic, social, and political systems. For countries locked in harmful cycles of inequity, conflict, and instability, our research suggests that improvements in gender equality and health equity help nudge them onto pathways towards peace. Second, to deliver the promise of the Commission's research, health equity and gender equality principles and processes must be led by communities and tailored to their context. Local and national actors must drive improvements in health equity and gender equality, a process we refer to as change from the inside out. Although communities benefit from evidence from other contexts, we highlight the danger of importing policy models from other contexts. Health and gender systems are social systems, deeply intertwined in culture, contexts, and politics. Tangible and sustained improvements require gender equality and health equity mechanisms to be led by national actors, rooted in the local context, shaped by data, sustained through national systems, and accountable to communities. Efforts to improve gender equality are always contentious, but are transformative, enabling the recognition of the equal rights of women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities within the private and public spheres. Our Commission supports the call from decolonisation advocates for structural reform of global development processes to enable locally driven, context-specific change. However, we also stress that these local and national efforts should leverage and build upon the global scaffolding or architecture of norms, initiatives, funding, and institutions designed to advance health equity and gender equality. Third, within the health sector and beyond, the Commission calls on policy makers to embrace, advocate for, and advance health equity and gender equality. In the health sector, services and systems must adopt, implement, and be accountable to benchmarks for gender equal health responses. The health sector is a key social, economic, and political institution. Individuals engage with health services throughout their lifespan. Health professionals are respected leaders within their communities. Given their reproductive and caregiving roles, women are a majority of users as well as providers of health care. Yet health services and systems can reflect and reinforce implicit biases that undermine access to and delivery of services and the effectiveness of health policy decisions. The gender-blind response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the tolerance of sexual exploitation within humanitarian contexts are examples of the failure to integrate gender equality principles within health sector strategies and responses. Our Commission provides definitive benchmarks for gender equal health services and humanitarian action. If policy makers advance these benchmarks, health outcomes as well as the level of gender equality would improve. Finally, given the evidence we present in this Commission, health equity and gender equality must form an integral part of national and global processes to promote peace and wellbeing. The beneficial cycles of health equity and gender equality unfold over long time scales. Conflict management and humanitarian efforts understandably prioritise short-term interventions to reduce human suffering and stop violence. However, given the path dependencies established by such engagement, gender equality and health equity must be built into these short-term interventions. When integrating health equity and gender equality into humanitarian and conflict management interventions, we need to better analyse conflict dynamics and understand what conditions foster backlash, including when and how best to confront, counter, navigate, and minimise backlash. Gender equality and health equity processes must also recognise how gender norms impact men and boys, and not assume women and girls have the power to single-handedly transform their environments. Policy processes from the UN Sustainable Development Goals to the Group of Seven and Group of 20 Agendas present an important opportunity to advance this agenda. Although global initiatives can provide financial and technical support, gender or health outcomes cannot be instrumentalised or pursued for the interests of external actors rather than for the benefit of communities. The Lancet Commission provides an agenda for a path forward, rooted in a vision of our shared human dignity and collective responsibility to build a more equitable world. This agenda takes communities, governments, and international agencies on a challenging and sometimes contentious journey forward. We can accept the challenge and leverage this moment of opportunity to advance this agenda, or our politics and policies can entrench inequities and create the conditions for a more conflictual world. The choice is ours.The Swedish MFA, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health in Finland, Canada's International Development Research Centre, and a donor whose organisation's policy is to remain anonymous but is known to The Lancet.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhiv/home2024-05-04hj2024EconomicsSDG-03:Good heatlh and well-beingSDG-05:Gender equalitySDG-16:Peace,justice and strong institution

Four year follow-up of a randomised controlled trial comparing open and laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication in children

The article examines why some postconflict societies defer the recovery of those who forcibly disappeared as a result of political violence, even after a fully fledged democratic regime is consolidated. The prolonged silences in Cyprus and Spain contradict the experience of other countries such as Bosnia, Guatemala, and South Africa, where truth recovery for disappeared or missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democracy. Exhumations of mass graves containing the victims from the two periods of violence in Cyprus (1963-1974) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was delayed up until the early 2000s. Cyprus and Spain are well suited to explain both prolonged silences in transitional justice and the puzzling decision to become belated truth seekers. The article shows that in negotiated transitions, a subtle elite agreement links the noninstrumental use of the past with the imminent needs for political stability and nascent democratization. As time passes, selective silence becomes an entrenched feature of the political discourse and democratic institutions, acquiring a hegemonic status and prolonging the silencing of violence

International human rights and the domestic politics of law and order

Scholarship has uncovered conditional impacts of human rights treaties, attributing improvements to democratic institutions, domestic political mobilization and judicial enforcement of legal obligations, but existing theories do not explain the persistence of many physical integrity violations resulting from routine law enforcement in democracies after they ratified treaties. This dissertation examines how the politics of law and order influence key mechanisms of human rights change. I argue that public insecurity due to high levels of crime limits political mobilization for human rights by strengthening public support for heavy-handed policing, putting constraints on reforms. Further, while judicial institutions are key to protecting physical integrity, public insecurity also makes courts less likely to hold police legally accountable for violations. As a result, these mechanisms of human rights change are less effective in contexts of public insecurity, and criminals and marginalized groups believed to produce criminality benefit less than political dissidents. New democracies, which have incentives to quickly ratify human rights treaties to strengthen their weak or untested domestic judicial institutions, are particularly likely to experience these dynamics because they are prone to public insecurity, and authoritarian legacies make police more likely to respond with violence. This theory is supported by case studies of Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, and by cross-national statistical studies. Analyses of commitments to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) find that new democracies ratify sooner and at higher rates than nondemocracies and established democracies, and commitments are unrelated to judicial strength and recent human rights practices. Analyses of physical integrity practices find that public insecurity contributes to violations, particularly in new democracies. Judicial strength is associated with less violations but this effect decreases with increasing public insecurity, regardless of membership in the treaty. Analyses of torture allegations find support for the claim that human rights change unevenly benefits different societal sectors. CAT commitments are associated with improvements for dissidents and more torture of criminals and marginalized individuals in new democracies. In a context of increased public insecurity, judicial enforcement of the CAT is limited to dissidents

What Is Quality of Government? A Theory of Impartial Government Institutions

The recent growth in research on "good governance" and the quality of government institutions has been propelled by empirical findings that show that such institutions may hold the key to understanding economic growth and social welfare in developing and transition countries. We argue, however, that a key issue has not been addressed, namely, what quality of government (QoG) actually means at the conceptual level. Based on analyses of political theory, we propose a more coherent and specific definition of QoG: the impartiality of institutions that exercise government authority. We relate the idea of impartiality to a series of criticisms stemming from the fields of public administration, public choice, multiculturalism, and feminism. To place the theory of impartiality in a larger context, we then contrast its scope and meaning with that of a threefold set of competing concepts of quality of government: democracy, the rule of law, and efficiency/effectiveness