human rights and state crime

Question 1

breaking domestic law

Answer 1

state crime is a violation of domestic law. officials, who, when representing the govt, break laws of their own country

Question 2

state crime causing harm (hillyard)

Answer 2

legal and illegal acts carried out by govt officials that cause harm e.g increases unemployment

Question 3

labelling (kauzalarich)

Answer 3

whether or not an act is a state crime depends of people’s interpretation. state crime is a social construction

Question 4

violation of international law

Answer 4

Action by/ on behalf of a state that breaks international law.

Question 5

violation of human rights (schwendinger)

Answer 5

The state or its agents violate people’s basic human rights

Question 6

who categorised state crimes

Answer 6

McLoughlin

Question 7

political crimes

Answer 7

acts which a govt carries out to maintain its power or other interests e.g rigging elections, govt officials giving jobs to friends

Question 8

crimes by security and police forces

Answer 8

e.g torture, illegal detention, using unjustified violence in a demonstration

Question 9

economic crimes

Answer 9

e.g health and safety violations, illegal collaborations with corporations (state-corporate crime)

Question 10

explaining state crime - adorno

Answer 10

• genocide is organised by leaders but happens with cooperation of police and civillians
• Adorno was a refugee from Nazi Germany; he was interested in why ordinary Germans became fascist and why they went along with the Holocaust.
• Adorno argued many Germans had an authoritarian personality: an extreme level of respect for authority figures and consequently are more likely to follow their orders.
• Excessively harsh and punitive parenting was caused children to feel anger towards their parents. Fear of punishment caused people to not directly confront their parents, but rather to identify with and idolize authority figures.
• The implication is that people with an authoritarian personality are fundamentally different. People without an authoritarian personality are less likely to commit genocide.

Question 11

evaluation of adorno - milgram

Answer 11

Milgram carried out a lab experiment in America. An actor played an experimenter telling the participants to give electric shocks to someone who got questions wrong in a test. 63% did this (the shocks were fake and the person receiving them was an actor). Milgram found that the personality of the people involved made no difference; just being told what to do was enough for many participants to go ahead and hurt someone.

Question 12

explaining state crime - crimes of obedience, kelman and hamilton

Answer 12

• studied the my lai massacre in vietnam - us soldiers killed 400 civillians
• violent states can encourage their citizens to take part in crimes like genocide through three ways
  1. authorisation- making it clear to individuals they are acting with govt approval. citizens feel it’s their duty to obey
  2. routinisation - making the behaviours seem like a normal part of the days work. e.g they may be trained to see their victims as enemies or go to a military camp to carry out their duties- like doing a job
  3. dehumanisation - portraying the victim as enemies who do not belong and to whom the normal rules of behaviour do not apply

Question 13

evaluation of crimes of obedience, kelman and hamilton

Answer 13

not all genocides occur through a highly organised division of labour that allows ppts to distance themselves from the killing e.g the rwandan genocide was carried out directly by large marauding groups

Question 14

explaining state crime - the use of modern science in the holocaust, bauman

Answer 14

• bauman argues state crime is often seen as the mark of an uncivilised irrational society. however, some of the features of civilisation and rational scientific thinking were used in the holocaust. the holocaust was like a modern industrial factory where the product was death
  – division of labour: each person responsible for a specific task so that no one felt personally responsible
  – bureaucratisation: workers had a rule governed, repetitive job
  – science and technology e.g use of railways, gas

Question 15

evaluation of bauman

Answer 15

• interesting explanation of how the holocaust was carried out but doesn’t explain why - the racist anti-semitic ideology needs to be taken into account
• does not offer an explanation of other genocides that haven’t used science/rationality e.g rwandan genocide was carried by marauding people. this does not consider if there is a generalisable reason behind genocide

Question 16

explaining state crime - the culture of denial, cohen

Answer 16

identified a spiral of denial that states use when accused of human rights abuse
- denial, ‘it didnt’t happen.
- alternative explanation. ‘its not how it looks’
- justification ‘it had to be this way’

Question 17

• denial, ‘it didnt’t happen.’

Answer 17

The first reaction is often to deny that anything occurred at all. This lasts until international bodies produce evidence that it did occur.

Question 18

• alternative explanation. ‘its not how it looks’

Answer 18

Once such evidence is provided, the next stage is often to question a particular version of events, instead claiming that others carried out the atrocity or the evidence pointed to something rather different occurring. E.g. president of Khazakstan called protestors ‘terrorists’ and used this to justify the police’s shoot to kill policy Jan 2022.

Question 19

• justification ‘it had to be this way’

Answer 19

The final stage of the spiral of denial is to admit that the abuse occurred but to justify it using techniques of neutralisation
Denial of victim e.g. saying the victims are terrorists,
Denial of responsibility e.g. saying you were only obeying orders.
For example the US army used interrogation practices such as hooding, shaking, sleep deprivation, stress positions and water boarding against people taken to Guantanomo Bay. The US army sees these practices as stress inducing not torture