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Contributions from
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Giving victims a say in reconciliation
Few new insights into human-rights protection
Civil society should engage in policy-making
01/2007 |
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Few new insights into human-rights protection
Andrea Liese:
Staaten am Pranger. Zur Wirkung internationaler Regime auf innerstaatliche Menschenrechtspolitik [States in the pillory. The effect of international regimes on national human-rights policies]
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, 309 p.,
Euro 34.90, ISBN 3-8100-4071-1
“States in the pillory” deals with the range of procedures that serve the demand that governments uphold the human-rights principles they endorse in theory. Such procedures can be employed by international bodies such as the UN or the EU, but also by non-governmental organisations. In academic jargon, they are called “international regimes”.
This book discusses their effectiveness, focussing on a prominent topic, the prohibition of torture and other forms of inhuman or degrading treatment. The author examines how torture-practices have changed in certain states, and how such changes related to international “pillorying”, on the one hand, and to those countries’ official endorsement of torture prohibition, on the other.
The issue is relevant, and the book is particularly interesting because it scrutinises cases of countries in the period shortly before and after their governments acceded to the relevant international agreements, thus officially recognising the international norms. Liese investigates four countries: Turkey, Egypt, Israel and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
She stresses that she chose two “liberal democracies” (the UK and Israel) and two “blocked democracies” (Turkey and Egypt). One state from each group is relatively open to international controls (the UK and Turkey), while the other generally refuses to cooperate (Egypt and Israel). This is the base for assessing the effect of external “pillorying”.
The case studies, which form the focus of the book, are enlightening, though not all that surprising. Comparing them makes sense, as they provide a solid base for studying how different governments deal with an historically new requirement. Until the end of the Second World war, after all, the issue at stake was considered a purely domestic matter. It is doubtful, however, whether four case studies suffice to identify a typology of how governments and their opponents in civil society and inter-governmental organisations behave in general. Accordingly, one feels somewhat under-whelmed when told that “the extent of effectiveness of the pillorying depends on the level of democratisation of the political system in the given country.”
On top of such general conclusions, Liese does discuss some aspects in more detail, analysing, for instance, how the various governments argued their cases. However, she hardly comes up with more than anecdotal wisdom. For instance, she assesses the gulf between a government’s lip service to international norms against torture and its simultaneous acceptance of torture by stating: “Such disengagement occurs because the international guidelines do not correspond to national or local needs” (for taking precautions against terrorism, for instance). This, however, only masks in academic jargon the well known circumstance that, from a government’s view, the ban on torture may seem inconvenient.
Moreover, Andrea Liese’s empirical base is too tenuous. Using the example of Britain, which both recognises the norms on the prohibition of torture and submits to the monitoring mechanisms, she argues that, in such a setting, a government has little scope to justify any wrongdoings. Yet Spain, which is in the same position, did not hold back from rudely abusing a UN Special Rapporteur for torture, after he produced a critical report following a visit to the country.
Unfortunately the study offers little new knowledge – at least to anyone personally involved in human-rights protection. As a conclusion, the author suggests that this community “must try to undermine those discourses that fabricate a need to weaken the ban on torture.” Wow, who would have thought of that?
Rainer Huhle
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