State Crimes and Human Rights Flashcards
What do Green and Ward say Green Crimes are?
Illegal or deviant activities perpetrated by, or with the complicity of state agencies.
What does McLaughlin say the 4 types of state crime are?
1) Political Crimes: corruption, censorship, UK manipulation of hospital waiting lists, PartyGate.
2) Crimes by security and police: genocide, torture. Nazi Germany, Gaza, Rwanda Genocide, state-sponsored terrorism.
3) Economic crimes: official violations of health and safety laws. Challenger space shuttle disaster where NASA made cost-cutting decisions that led to an explosion, killing 7 astronauts.
4) Social and Cultural Crimes: institutional racism such as George Floyd, Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson report.
What is Kleptocracy?
When the ruling class or Govt in developing countries engage in widespread corruption, like stealing wealth and aid money for their own benefit.
What is Clientelism?
When politicians give favours in exchange for financial or political support, aiming to stay in power. Grants peerages to those who fund the governing political party is an example of this.
What is Patrimonialism?
When rulers give jobs and benefits to relatives and friends, making decisions based on loyalty rather than the nation’s best interest. Some leaders still treat national resources as their own and distributing them based on personal ties (neo-patrimonialism).
Bureaucracy: supreme court, etc.
How do we define state crime?
State crime is one of the most serious forms of crime, due to the scale of it (can cause significant harm and making it hard to detect) and the state being the source of the law (having the power to define what a crime is).
This makes defining state crimes difficult as using a state’s own domestic law is inadequate. They can avoid criminalising their own actions.
Human Rights:
Human rights can be used as a way of defining state crime, goes beyond just using law to define crime.
Schwendinger = state crimes should be considered as violations of human rights by the state and its agents. Therefore, states that practice racism, sexism etc are committing crimes as they deny basic rights.
HOWEVER, some disagree about what counts as a human right. Cohen suggests that things that we view as morally unacceptable are not evidently criminal, such as torture/economic exploitation.
Social Harm:
Harm done by states can be legal/not against the law, so the study of crimes needs to be replaced with ‘zemiology’ - the study of harms.
Prevents states from ‘ruling themselves out of court’ but this is very vague - who decides what is harmful?
International Law:
Some base definition of state crime on international law, e.g Geneva Convention or the ECHR. This has the advantage of using globally agreed definitions of state crime, as well as being intentionally designed to deal with state crime.
However, the law is a social construction involving the use of power, and it doesn’t really focus on state crimes other than war crimes.
Crimes of Obedience:
Crimes of obedience are crimes of conformity, as they require obedience to a higher authority, which people are willing to obey even when it harms others. 3 types are identified by Kelman and Hamilton:
Authorisation - when acts are ordered/approved by those in authority, moral principles replaced by obedience.
Dehumanisation - when the enemy is portrayed as ‘other’ or sub-human, so normal principles of morality do not apply.
Routinisation - strong pressure to turn the act into a routine that individuals can perform in a detached manner. Normalised as a part of everyday life.
Marxist Perspective:
State crimes protect the interests of the ruling class. Laws maintain the power of the elite, often justifying harmful actions as necessary for security or stability e.g: Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, invasion of Ukraine - allows state crimes to be committed with public support or apathy.
Functionalist Perspective:
State crimes can be seen as disruptions to social order, but may also be justified if believed to maintain stability/national security. Concept of ‘anomie’ explains how the state’s breakdown in moral regulation can lead to state crimes, especially when social change is happening.
Interactionist Perspective:
State actions are labelled as criminal or legitimate based on the social context and power dynamics.
State actions may be criminalised or normalised depending on how they are framed by those in power, and how they are perceived by the public. Those in power decide what is labelled as a crime and therefore criminalises actions that threaten authority.
Feminists Perspective:
Men in positions of power use terror, violence and genocide against women in order to undermine them. E.g: Japanese comfort women.
However, men are also victims of rape during genocide and terror, so maybe not so specific to women.
How do countries react to state crime?
Techniques of neutralisation (Matza) applied by Cohen, explains how states can deny they have committed serious breaches of human rights by re-labelling their crimes.
- Denial of victim
- Denial of injury
- Denial of responsibility
- Condemning the condemners
- Appeal to higher loyalty
