The issue of impunity forms the axis around which all abuses in the Middle East and North Africa continue to revolve. Even where there are legal means to ban abuses or to ensure personal rights, repression continues largely because institutions are too weak or too unwilling to hold violators accountable and to uphold the rule of law. The emphasis of reform efforts--by both activists and international actors--should be oriented toward projects that focus on (1) cultivating cultures of transparency and accountability to ensure professional, impartial execution of the rule of law, (2) empowering the state structures with the capacity to control security forces, and (3) creating an apolitical judicial environment that is able to prosecute members of the state without fear of interference or professional and personal reprisals.
Confronting impunity should begin by opening up what are now very opaque, at times disorganized judiciaries and law enforcement agencies. This is best demonstrated by the lack of transparency in Yemen. Conditions in the country are largely eroded by corruption; money is either required to compel security forces to enforce the law or is a persistent option to convince them to ignore it. Perhaps one of the weakest states in the region, the lack of effective record keeping only serves to complicate basic rule of law procedures. Very little information or access is available to citizens or observers to assess how long certain detainees have been held, whether they've been charged, etc, in part because of government dysfunction and opacity.
Aside from external review, security forces act with impunity first when they elude internal oversight and accountability. This is particularly true in Egypt where security forces operate unmoored from state control, demonstrating an internal cohesion despite a continuous lack of loyalty to a given government--the police forces have been given autonomy for decades and they are intent to maintain it. The Morsi government had virtually no control over security forces, and though the interim government demonstrated a better relationship with police forces, this had no effect on repressive practices. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi will be the next president of Egypt, and his political ascension has been accompanied by improved relations between the police and the state. In other circumstances this may open the door for reform, however this would require a government that was truly interested in reform and had the will to engage its political capital on such a difficult and contested issue as security sector reform; Sisi, to say the least, does not seem predisposed to such a government.
In a similar vein, many of Libya’s human rights abuses stem a lack of government control over the parts of security forces comprised of post-revolutionary militias that have yet to demobilize or completely declare allegiances to the state. It is difficult to say whether various abuses occur more or less today than they did under Qaddafi, but what is demonstrably true is that many armed factions are now far removed from any political or judicial hierarchy in the absence of the Qaddafi regime’s monopolization of violence. Torture, wrongful imprisonment, religious persecution, sexual assault, and other abuses have all occurred at the hands of these militias, yet the government continues to utilize such forces in various parts of the country to compliment its own security apparatus. As yet, the government has not demonstrated an ability or will to investigate and punish abuses. The development of a strong constitution is the first step, but ultimately the fate of the country will rest upon whether these quasi (or wholly) independent groups can be convinced to declare loyalty to said document and then be contained by its legal parameters. The way forward for Libya thus lies not only in reform and institution building, but these difficult processes are further complicated by the thorny process of conflict resolution and negotiation.
The Egyptian judiciary’s role in selectively prosecuting and convicting people for transgressions is important to consider. Torture, arbitrary arrest, and extrajudicial killings are more commonplace today than they were in 2010, and there have been few attempts to investigate abuses, fewer attempts to press charges, and fewer still successful convictions. Though few members of the security forces--much less the former regime--have been successfully convicted for the deaths of protesters during 2011 uprising or its subsequent violence, numerous citizens and activists and have been condemned. The recent disturbing mass convictions of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and affiliates has rightly brought down international condemnation and concern upon Egypt, but what failed to garner as much outrage was the quiet acquittal of police officers implicated in extrajudicial killings. Though the Egyptian judiciary has independent fragments, cases and courts are still managed in a highly politicized fashion to ensure that the state, particularly the military and the police, can ensure their desired outcomes when they wish.
In Yemen, the wider project of protecting the perpetrators of past abuses is more formalized. The uprising was effectively ended by a power-sharing scheme agreed upon by the Joint Meeting Parties and the General People’s Congress--the former ruling party. The most contentious aspect of the agreement was the immunity law that still serves as an obstacle to pursuing the perpetrators of terrible crimes committed during the uprising, including former President Ali Abdullah Saleh himself, who remains free to manipulate Yemeni politics to this day. This power sharing scheme, which so far has done little more than paralyze the government and exclude popular opinion from the transition process, is a microcosm of larger mechanisms at play that impede accountability. Offending members of the security forces and government officials are often treated lightly--if sanctioned all--for abuses, often for political expedience due to various social sensitivities, like tribal connections.
The region, regrettably, does not lack authoritarian regimes where impunity is commonplace, but it should be understood that impunity is not just an aspect of repressive regimes: it is a central component without which the entire game begins to unravel. The first step is addressing transparency within the system; citizens must be able to see and understand the process. Then all institutions and groups acting in the name of the state--security forces, the judiciary, etc.--should be made to conform to a coherent hierarchy that citizens can trust. Finally, a free and independent judiciary should be molded to ensure that members of the state are held to the same standards as the citizens they are charged with ruling over. If more effort was focused on building the capacity of rule of law institutions, these institutions would largely act on their own accord to purge the system of its remaining poisons.
No comments:
Post a Comment