A couple new posts on police and human rights - tackling police corruption
A recent article in this week-end’s Financial Times pointed out that Transparency International had branded the Indian police force as one of the most corrupt throughout the world - not a small performance, since India is the largest democracy in the world. Actually, India scored 2.8 on 10 in Transparency’s scale (which, according to the FT indicates « rampant » corruption). You can read the section devoted to India in the 2005 global corruption report over here .
The implications of corruption for human rights are severe: when corruption is the dominant mode of functionning, the regard for human rights, equality of treatment before the law, and the probability of police fighting criminality are very scarce. In a dictatorship, corruption fulfills a sort of « oiling » function, in that it allows a space of negotiation in the application of laws which are often harsh and uncompromising. It also creates a fundamental disbalance in the exercise of power between the have and the have-nots. It is all very bad in itself, when a dictatorship applies laws, but the additional burden of corruption introduces another element of insecurity for the citizen, in those circumstances.
In a democracy, normally, none of the inconvenients of dictatorship are present - notably the question of harsh laws. In those conditions, having the insecurity of corruption added on to the problem of having a face to face relationship with the society, is problematic. Third world countries are especially vulnerable to corruption, as there is often a sub-culture of corruption that pervades the very structures of society, making it especially difficult to rebuild a clean public service from scratch. The problem with a corrupt police force is that violence is extremely easy under those circumstances...
If you wish to have an idea of the effects of corruption on society (and you can only imagine what are the effects when they come to police forces), then log on to read the global corruption report on the site of Transparency here . This link will bring you to the page on which you can download the report. If you wish to immediately download the part of the report speaking of the effects of corruption on civil society, then click here.
I also commend the introduction by Francis Fukuyama which gives an excellent idea of the effects of corruption on civil society: read it here . For those who do not know him, Francis Fukuyama is a professor of International political Economy at John Hopkins University, and he has reached world fame for having written a famous piece about "the end of history", back at the time when the Berlin world had fallen. He has lately expressed some concern about the rage of cloning...
The implications of corruption for human rights are severe: when corruption is the dominant mode of functionning, the regard for human rights, equality of treatment before the law, and the probability of police fighting criminality are very scarce. In a dictatorship, corruption fulfills a sort of « oiling » function, in that it allows a space of negotiation in the application of laws which are often harsh and uncompromising. It also creates a fundamental disbalance in the exercise of power between the have and the have-nots. It is all very bad in itself, when a dictatorship applies laws, but the additional burden of corruption introduces another element of insecurity for the citizen, in those circumstances.
In a democracy, normally, none of the inconvenients of dictatorship are present - notably the question of harsh laws. In those conditions, having the insecurity of corruption added on to the problem of having a face to face relationship with the society, is problematic. Third world countries are especially vulnerable to corruption, as there is often a sub-culture of corruption that pervades the very structures of society, making it especially difficult to rebuild a clean public service from scratch. The problem with a corrupt police force is that violence is extremely easy under those circumstances...
If you wish to have an idea of the effects of corruption on society (and you can only imagine what are the effects when they come to police forces), then log on to read the global corruption report on the site of Transparency here . This link will bring you to the page on which you can download the report. If you wish to immediately download the part of the report speaking of the effects of corruption on civil society, then click here.
I also commend the introduction by Francis Fukuyama which gives an excellent idea of the effects of corruption on civil society: read it here . For those who do not know him, Francis Fukuyama is a professor of International political Economy at John Hopkins University, and he has reached world fame for having written a famous piece about "the end of history", back at the time when the Berlin world had fallen. He has lately expressed some concern about the rage of cloning...
posted by dawnofeurope | 2:42 pm
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