And Justice for All
Enforcing Human Rights for the World's Poor
Article Summary and Author Biography
International norms and legal codes that are meant to protect human rights mean little for people in the developing world, who suffer abuse not for a lack of laws but because these laws are not enforced. It is imperative, therefore, that the human rights community build up political will and capacity among local law enforcement bodies.
GARY HAUGEN is President and CEO of International Justice Mission. VICTOR BOUTROS is a Federal Prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Both are lecturers at the University of Chicago Law School. The views expressed here are their own and not those of the U.S. Department of Justice.
For a poor person in the developing world, the struggle for human rights is not an abstract fight over political freedoms or over the prosecution of large-scale war crimes but a matter of daily survival. It is the struggle to avoid extortion or abuse by local police, the struggle against being forced into slavery or having land stolen, the struggle to avoid being thrown arbitrarily into an overcrowded, disease-ridden jail with little or no prospect of a fair trial. For women and children, it is the struggle not to be assaulted, raped, molested, or forced into the commercial sex trade.
Efforts by the modern human rights movement over the last 60 years have contributed to the criminalization of such abuses in nearly every country. The problem for the poor, however, is that those laws are rarely enforced. Without functioning public justice systems to deliver the protections of the law to the poor, the legal reforms of the modern human rights movement rarely improve the lives of those who need them most. At the same time, this state of functional lawlessness allows corrupt officials and local criminals to block or steal many of the crucial goods and services provided by the international development community. These abuses are both a moral tragedy and wholly counterproductive to the foreign aid programs of countries in the developed world. Helping construct effective public justice systems in the developing world, therefore, must become the new mandate of the human rights movement in the twenty-first century.
COLD CASES
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