Volume 2 Number 3 September 2003

In Latin America, crime and social violence and both private and state responses threaten fundamental liberties, the rule of law and democratic consolidation. Social violence has an increased political impact in weak democratic cultures. When police or private security or paramilitaries commit abuses, democracy is undermined and further violence is generated. Democratic institutions display little ability to confront growing levels of collective insecurity without resorting to abusive policies. Public discourse reflects socially embedded authoritarianism that encourages repressive law enforcement. Yet, to focus on accountability only without considering how to improve citizen security ignores the threat crime poses to democracy. It also threatens the public standing of the human rights movement, which accused of protecting criminals. As a result, human rights organizations are studying the issues and engaging with institutional reforms of the police.

Analyses of transitional justice processes conventionally address the formal steps taken by national governments and international political institutions. This article focuses on the under-appreciated role of non-state actors in this increasingly important arena of human rights practice. The author extends the literature by developing a theoretical framework,, based on broad comparative analysis, concerning the involvement of civil society in these processes. In particular, "demand" and "supply" factors that support and impede such contributions are identified, various roles that NGOs and civic associations perform are enumerated, and the implications of different scenarios of engagement for the development paths of transitional political societies are considered.

African NGOs have created an awareness of the rule of law. These NGOs follow the Wiseberg-Scoble typology of documenting violent violations. There is a long relationship with European NGOs, as European NGOs opposed slavery. Yet, suspicion of foreign NGOs in Africa is based partly on the history of colonialism and slavery, whose legacy continues. This was dramatized initially with the documentation of the Megnuistu regime in Ethiopiaís mass murders. Africa has weaker human rights networks than for Latin America and Europe. At the end of the Cold War, the deterioration of the postcolonial states dominated by one or two political forces has left a vacuum of Cold-War-era weapons; the great powers that provided those guns and polarized political confrontation, and contributed to their ungovernability, have retreated in their preference. More of the aid to African NGOs has come not form the US government but from the Ford Foundation and the Scandinavian, Dutch and German governments. The International Commission of Jurists paid attention to Africa in the 1960s and 1970s when other NGOs were not paying any attention. NGOs have not stopped the decline in the rule of law in Africa, though they may have reduced the decrease. They do not have the capability to press for prosecutions in regimes that do not prosecute and where patrimonialism inhibits the development of such institutions so that rulers exempt themselves through this solvent.

Even the most localized rule-of-law conflicts are integrally tied to global forces. At the local level, these global discourse and resources are utilized in the local power struggles as they play themselves out in democracy promotion projects. This paper analyses the role of local NGOs in helping to institute the rule of law in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Global democracy promotion efforts in the world of projects may actually inhibit the emergence of democratic practices. At the global/local interface, we must analyze why certain definitions or discourses triumph over the long term. It remains to be seen whether we are exporting genuine democratic norms or simply the forms of activity typical of project society.

For years, the measuring stick for human rights performance of governments around the world has been the human rights standards adopted by the United Nations: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the six core human rights treaties set forth most of these standards. Although the UN has created expert treaty bodies to assess compliance with the treaties, the key to successful monitoring has been the contribution of non-governmental organizations that provide alternative information about country compliance, as well as offering advice on national legal standards. Because the treaties do not provide for an explicit role for non-governmental organizations in the work of the treaty bodies, this aspect has developed on an ad hoc basis. Treaty body interaction with NGOs deserves more focused attention, as advocates work to enhance the effectiveness of human rights norms, and governments contemplate reform of the treaty body system.

The challenge for UN peace missions promoting the rule of law is not only to adapt international norms to changing contexts or local laws which are not consistent with international human rights standards. It is also to understand, first, that, in many contexts, the local law is no more than on paper somewhere ñ which has nothing to due with the reality and the informal rules which have been developed. This is usually associated with a certain number of collective representations regarding the figure of the state, the judicial apparatus and the police. Second, the basis for the establishment of the rule of law is the result of an encounter, an outcome rather than a given. The rule of law cannot be constructed without integrating local actorsí different frames of reference and organization, with all their historical baggage, including their relation to the universal. The essay evaluates the interaction between global and local NGO actors to evaluate how norms are formed and implemented.

Based on a 25-country econometric model of NGOs, the authors explain the growth and legal impact of NGOs by disentangling the contributions of economic forces, donor aid and legal environment in the so-called ëtransitioní economies of Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union. They find that while greater civil liberty has a positive impact on NGO proliferation in the Balkans, it has actually reduced their number in Central Asia. Conversely, NGOs have had a positive impact on many aspects of the legal environment in Eastern Europe and Western FSU, though not in the Caucasus or Central Asia. Increases in NGO activity, however, have often led to increased corruption (though the inverse has generally not occurred). Donor aid has not had a uniformly positive effect on promoting NGOs: depending on the region, donors and NGOs may act as complements or substitutes for services. Finally, while there are positive income effects on NGO growth, improvements in telecommunication infrastructure have by far a greater impact on NGO activity.

Through the ethnographic exploration of the trial and murder conviction of military commissioners for their participation in the massacre of Rio Negro, the NGO-sponsored exhumation of clandestine cemeteries as well as other human rights NGO initiatives, this article discusses contemporary debates about truth versus justice, national security ideology and impunity, and the role of national and international NGOs. The author problematizes rule of law and the role (both real and potential) of NGOs in national and local peace-building initiatives. The Rio Negro court case is explored from the perspective of Maya massacre survivors, as well as the roles of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, the Archbishopís Office on Human Rights and the Commission for Historical Clarification in this case. This article calls attention to the myriad ways in which rural Maya have created and seized new political spaces in Guatemalaís nascent democracy and often done so in tandem with NGOs. Further, Maya human rights organizing is identified as a nexus of engagement between Maya citizens and the nation. The article points to the absolute necessity of Maya participation in constructing national and community political structures and practices for NGO projects to realize their creative intention to develop a new moral vision of equality and human rights in Guatemala.

NGOs have become involved in virtually all issues on the agendas of organizations throughout the UN system, with their presence facilitated by 90 liaison offices. They play a diversity of roles in public sessions of decision-making bodies and also perform a variety of roles in private meetings in which preparations are made for public meetings. At the same time, their involvements with secretariats involve an even broader range of activities, including regular meetings, representation on committees, involvement in symposia, receiving papers posted on UN websites, joint research, joint implementation and monitoring of UN programs and even standing in for UN agencies. Involvement of NGOs in global governance is growing in dynamic ways at a time in which financial restraints are severely limiting capacity of the UN system to respond.

This essay depicts the contributions of NGOs at the Rome Conference to establish the new statute for the ICC. The author outlines the efforts of various NGOs to include provisions in the definitions of crimes. Particular attention is drawn to the womenís caucus of NGOs for including crimes of sexual violence in the ICC statute, and the broader Coalition for an ICC with 134 NGOs and 235 activists coordinating positions and exchanges of information.

In this paper, the authors argue that a new international norm against comprehensive sanctions is emerging and gaining substantial support among states. A transnational network of individual activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is driving the creation of this norm. To exercise its influence, the network mobilizes information about humanitarian suffering in states targeted by international sanctions and utilizes framing techniques to persuade others to endorse the new norm. Yet this explanation is incomplete. Humanitarian groups and norms trace their roots to the mid-1800s, and civilian suffering from sanctions undoubtedly goes back much farther, yet it was not until the mid-1990s that a norm against comprehensive sanctions began to emerge. In response, it is argued that the norm was triggered by the dramatic increase in sanctions imposed by the United Nations in the post-Cold War era. Both the UNís accessibility and its prevailing humanitarian norms facilitated network influence. During the Cold War, states had imposed sanctions without utilizing the UN. With the dramatic increase in Un-sponsored sanctions in the 1990s, an organization whose normative foundations involve the alleviation of human suffering was itself directly responsible for imposing sanctions that depend and prolonged human misery. This stark, well-publicized contrast offered a favorable normative and political environmental in which the arguments of humanitarian groups would be taken seriously. It became impossible for states to argue that comprehensive sanctions and humanitarian well-being could be reconciled; as a result, one goal or the other had to be modified. Over time, steady network pressure to improve humanitarian conditions in sanctioned countries produced a reaction against comprehensive sanctions.