Crisis and Punishment? Explaining Politicians’ Appetite for Retribution in Post-Crisis Europe

This paper investigates the politics of holding bank executives accountable for banking crises. The aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis was characterized by a significant variation in the extent to which European countries endorsed this type of retributive justice. In particular, while some countries established special prosecutorial bodies and took steps to facilitate prosecutions, others seemed to consider the crisis “business as usual” and relied on the existing investigative and prosecutorial mechanisms to seek out wrongdoing. We explore the experiences of two European countries, Iceland and Cyprus. We argue that the way a financial crisis unfolds plays a significant role in shaping the appetite of politicians for promoting an agenda of retributive justice. With a banking collapse, politicians will be most proactive, as voters’ demand for justice is high and the risks for the banking industry are minimal. With a severe yet negotiated crisis following a bailout/bail-in, politicians are more reluctant to endorse policies that may risk the recovery of the fragile

The EU’s Truth by Omission: Learning and Accountability after the Eurozone Crisis

While the literature generally frames crises as catalysts for organizational learning, most theories focus on ‘success’ stories of learning–ex post facto explanations of why certain ideas gained traction after a specific crisis. Less emphasis has been placed on lessons that were likely to be drawn, but were not. In probing this point, we explore the EU’s selective learning after the recent Eurozone crisis. Reforms were mostly top-down institutional and macroeconomic ones, while good practices developed by individual European states in the domain of accountability were ignored. In particular, we focus on the absence of a truth commission, an independent institutional mechanism mandated to carry out a forensic investigation of crisis management and convert past policy failures into lessons for future institutional reform. Why, despite the direct exposure of EU policymakers to these commissions, did this institutional mechanism not travel to Brussels? Drawing on semi-structured elite interviews and primary sources, we argue only organizations with an embedded institutional capacity for self-reflection (meta-learning) possess the required institutional skills to put certain issues into the spotlight

Missing Migrants in the Mediterranean : Addressing the Humanitarian Crisis Summary report

The Mediterranean Missing research project has sought to understand both the impact on families of having a relative missing in migration, and the law, policy and practice around the identification of bodies of dead migrants in Italy and Greece. Interviews with families of missing migrants from five countries confirmed the huge impact of not knowing the fate of loved ones, with families tortured by ambiguity and suffering a range of emotional and psychological consequences. In Lesbos, Greece, and Sicily, Italy, interviews with authorities, civil society and others confirm the presence of a policy vacuum around the issue of the missing, despite the duties on states imposed by human rights law. Investigation of deaths is inadequate, with effective post-mortem data collection and management challenged by the huge numbers of migrants , in some cases sufficiently to compromise future identification. In both Greece and Italy, response is characterised by a policy vacuum, with a large number of agencies with overlapping mandates lacking coordination. Whilst in Italy a dedicated Commission and its partners have demonstrated what can be done with appropriate resources, there is a need to ensure that all the dead benefit from such an approach. A constraint in both contexts remains the lack of outreach to families of the missing, who can provide ante-mortem data to enable identification, and who should anyway be at the centre of all efforts to address the issue and identify the dead

Protracted Stalemates and Conflict Intervention: Policy (Un)Learning and the Cyprus-EU Debacle

The article examines why a comprehensive settlement to resolve the Cyprus problem has yet to be reached despite the existence of a positive incentive structure and the proactive involvement of regional and international organizations, including the European Union and the United Nations. To address this question, evidence from critical turning points in foreign policy decision-making in Turkey, Greece and the two communities in Cyprus is drawn on. The role of hegemonic political discourses is emphasized, and it is argued that the latter have prevented an accurate evaluation of incentives that could have set the stage for a constructive settlement. However, despite the political debacle in the Cypriot negotiations, success stories have emerged, such as the reactivation of the Committee for Missing Persons (CMP), a defunct body for almost 25 years, to become the most successful bi-communal project following Cyprus's EU accession. Contradictory evidence in the Cypriot peace process is evaluated and policy lessons to be learned from the CMP 'success story' are identified. © 2012 Copyright The Editor of Ethnopolitics

Accountability After Crisis Data, 2010-2019

The project ‘Truth, Accountability or Impunity? Transitional Justice and the Economic Crisis’ completed a repository of policies of accountability in response to the post-2008 Great Recession in six European countries (Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal & Spain). The repository included recorded prosecutions of bank executives, office holders and politicians on charges related to white collar crimes and/or corruption in the lead up to the economic crisis. It also includes fact finding commissions (i.e. independent commissions of inquiry and/or parliamentary commissions of inquiry) designed to document patterns of policy and institutional failures that led to the economic meltdown, in the period between 2010-2018. The rationale for developing the repository was, first, to map the range of policies deployed and, second, to investigate potential variations in the national policies. In parallel with the development of the repository, the project included the conduct of approximately 133 confidential semi-structured interviews in Ireland, Iceland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, Washington D.C. (IMF) and Brussels (EU). These included interviews with prosecutors, judges, elected officials (e.g. former Prime Ministers, Ministers, MPs), unelected officials (e.g. policymakers at central banks, relevant ministries, EU bodies, senior IMF executives etc), NGO members, journalists, academics, defense lawyers and other informed stakeholders to understand the rationale and their attitudes towards policies of accountability. There is little emphasis in the extant literature on the role and impact of different mechanisms of accountability in post-crisis settings, so these interviews were expected to shed useful analytical light. Finally, with regards to the case selection six European countries with similar background conditions and exposure to the crisis but different policy responses, each representing a different approach to accountability.The comparative project applies concepts of transitional justice, namely, 'dealing with the past', to investigate how six European societies (Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Iceland) have come to terms with the origins and consequences of the post-2008 financial crisis. The economic aspects of the crash are well discussed elsewhere; the proposed project argues significant political and legal lessons can be learned from the crisis, but these are missed by viewing it only through an economic lens. Simply stated, transitional justice, a framework developed over the past forty years, considers how national political elites balance popular calls for truth and justice with the pragmatic need for stability in the aftermath of crisis. Prosecutions, truth recovery and amnesties or impunity are much studied mechanisms. Notably, these mechanisms have been deployed in the cases under consideration. Spain and Portugal took only minimal steps to address the causes of the crisis, in effect, pursuing a policy of immunity. Iceland and Cyprus set up ad hoc truth commissions to document the causes of the crisis. Ireland and Greece have prosecuted and convicted a number of bankers and politicians deemed responsible. The project seeks to explain why, despite similar background conditions, societies have formulated different policy responses and to identify the strengths and limitations of each response. This is important. Examining the comparative experience of societies who experiment with policy mechanisms will contribute to the design of better policy responses in times of crisis, decreasing the level of social upheaval, boosting political legitimacy and paving the way for meaningful institutional reform. This project is explicitly about the intersection of politics and law; it focuses on issues of political and institutional failure and the role of law in promoting accountability, responsibility and political learning from economic crises.</p

De-linkage Processes and Grassroots Movements in Transitional Justice

Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi-communal grassroots mobilization of the relatives of the missing. By juxtaposing the experience of Cyprus with other societies confronting similar problems, the article shows how the issue of the missing can become a driving force for reconciliation. The findings indicate that a policy delinking humanitarian exhumations from the prospect of a wider political settlement facilitates positive transformation in protracted human rights problems and opens up a window of opportunity to grassroots actors