Criminal Legalities In The Global South

This book explores how the law and the institutions of the criminal justice system expose minorities to different types of violence, either directly, through discrimination and harassment, or indirectly, by creating the conditions that make them vulnerable to violence from other groups of society. It draws on empirical insights across a broad array of communities and locales including Afghanistan, Colombia, Pakistan, India, Malawi, Turkey, Brazil, Singapore, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It examines the challenges of protecting those at the margins of power, especially those whom the law is often used to oppress. The chapters explore intersecting, marginal identities influenced by four factors: rebuilding after violent regimes, economic interest behind the violence, entrenched cultural biases, and criminalisation of diversity. It provides scholars from the Global North with important lessons when attempting to impose their own solutions onto nations with a different history and context, or when applying their own laws to migrants from the Global South nations explored in this book. It speaks to legal and social science scholars in the fields of law, sociology, criminology, and social work.

This edited volume presents the work of academics from the Global South and explores, from local and regional settings, how the legal order and people’s perceptions of it translates into an understanding of what constitutes "criminal" behaviors or activities. This book aims to address the gap between criminal law in theory and practice in the Global South by assembling 11 chapters from established and emerging scholars from various underrepresented regions of the world. Drawing on research from Singapore, the Philippines, Peru, Indonesia, India, the Dominican Republic, Burma, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Argentina, this book explores a range of issues that straddle the line between social deviance and legal crimes in such societies, including extramarital affairs, gender-based violence, gambling, LGBT issues, and corruption. Issues of inclusivity versus exclusivity, modernity versus tradition, globalization of capital versus cultural revivalism are explored. The contributions critically analyze the role politics and institutions play in shaping these issues. There is an urgent need for empirical studies and new theoretical approaches that can capture the complexity of crime phenomena that occur in the Global South. This book will provide essential material to facilitate the development of new approaches more suitable to understanding the social phenomena related to crime in these societies. This book will make an important contribution in the development of Southern criminology. It will be of interest to students and researchers of criminology and sociology engaged in studies of sentencing and punishment, theories of crime, law and practice, and postcolonialism.

This volume considers how, based on the examination of cases pertaining to transitional justice settings that resort to local interpretations of crimes against humanity jurisprudence, fragmentation of international law and circumscribed applications of universal jurisdiction are necessary aspects of the grand enterprise to overcome the impasse of the tainted legacy of international criminal law in the Global South. If we are to proceed with adjudication of the most egregious and heinous crimes involving state criminality without facing the charge of neo-colonialist plotting, then we must reckon with localised and domesticated interpretations of international criminal law, rather than pursuing strict forms of legislative dictation of international criminal law.

The book consists of the keynote papers delivered at the 2012 WG Hart Workshop on Globalisation, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice organised by the Queen Mary Criminal Justice Centre. The volume addresses, from a cross-disciplinary perspective, the multifarious relationship between globalisation on the one hand, and criminal law and justice on the other hand. At a time when economic, political and cultural systems across different jurisdictions are increasingly becoming or are perceived to be parts of a coherent global whole, it appears that the study of crime and criminal justice policies and practices can no longer be restricted within the boundaries of individual nation-states or even particular transnational regions. But in which specific fields, to what extent, and in what ways does globalisation influence crime and criminal justice in disparate jurisdictions? Which are the factors that facilitate or prevent such influence at a domestic and/or regional level? And how does or should scholarly inquiry explore these themes? These are all key questions which are addressed by the contributors to the volume. In addition to contributions focusing on theoretical and comparative dimensions of globalisation in criminal law and justice, the volume includes sections focusing on the role of evidence in the development of criminal justice policy, the development of European criminal law and its relationship with national and transnational legal orders, and the influence of globalisation on the interplay between criminal and administrative law.

Although the Global South represents 'most of the world' in terms of constitutions and population, it is underrepresented in comparative constitutional discourse. This book fills the gap in this scholarship by tackling the most important aspects of comparative law from the Southern perspective.

In The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, Zaffaroni, Caamaño and Vegh Weis offer an account of the misuse of the law to criminalize progressive political leaders in Latin America.

This book critically examines the issues pertaining to the Rome Statute’s complementarity principle. The focus lies on the primacy of African states to prosecute alleged perpetrators of international crimes in their respective jurisdictions. The chapters explore states’ international and domestic obligations to hold perpetrators of international crimes to account before the national courts, and demonstrate the complexity of enforcing national accountability of alleged perpetrators of international crimes while also ensuring that post-conflict African states achieve national healing, reconciliation, and sustainable peace. The contributions reject impunity for international crimes whilst also considering these complexities. Emphasis further lies on the meaning of accountability in the context of the politics of selective international criminal justice for crimes committed before the establishment of the International Criminal Court.