The OECD DAC Handbook on Security System Reform Supporting Security and Justice


Book Description

How can conflict-prone countries ensure better delivery of security and justice services? How can they establish structures and mechanisms which will ensure effective and accountable security and justice institutions? Although there has been ...




Securing Development


Book Description

Securing Development: Public Finance and the Security Sector highlights the role of public finance in the delivery of security and criminal justice services. This book offers a framework for analyzing public financial management, financial transparency, and oversight, as well as expenditure policy issues that determine how to most appropriately manage security and justice services. The interplay among security, justice, and public finance is still a relatively unexplored area of development. Such a perspective can help security actors provide more professional, effective, and efficient security and justice services for citizens, while also strengthening systems for accountability. The book is the result of a project undertaken jointly by staff from the World Bank and the United Nations, integrating the disciplines where each institution holds a comparative advantage and a core mandate. The primary audience includes government officials bearing both security and financial responsibilities, staff of international organizations working on public expenditure management and security sector issues, academics, and development practitioners working in an advisory capacity.




Justice as Prevention


Book Description

Countries emerging from armed conflict or authoritarian rule face difficult questions about what to do with public employees who perpetrated past human rights abuses and the institutional structures that allowed such abuses to happen. Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies examines the transitional reform known as "vetting"-the process by which abusive or corrupt employees are excluded from public office. More than a means of punishing individuals, vetting represents an important transitional justice measure aimed at reforming institutions and preventing the recurrence of abuses. The book is the culmination of a multiyear project headed by the International Center for Transitional Justice that included human rights lawyers, experts on police and judicial reform, and scholars of transitional justice and reconciliation. It features case studies of Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, the former German Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and South Africa, as well as chapters on due process, information management, and intersections between other institutional reforms.




The United Nations and Security Sector Reform


Book Description

Multilateral organizations - the United Nations (UN) in particular - have played, and continue to play, an important role in shaping the security sector reform (SSR) agenda, both in terms of policy development and the provision of support to a wide range of national SSR processes. This volume presents a variety of perspectives on UN support to SSR, past and present, with attention to policy and operational practice. Drawing from the experience of UN practitioners combined with external experts on SSR, this volume offers an in-depth exploration of the UN approach to SSR from a global perspective.




No Law, No Justice, No State for Victims


Book Description

It has been 14 years since the armed conflict between Maoist insurgents and government forces ended in Nepal. Tens of thousands became victims of enforced disappearances, torture, rape, and unlawful killings in the decade of fighting between 1996 and 2006. They are still waiting for truth and justice. There have been hardly any successful prosecutions since the end of the conflict for severe violations. Resistance to address past abuses has entrenched impunity in the present and, combined with a failure to ensure security sector reform, has led to repeated lack of punishment in cases of serious human rights violations which still occur in Nepal. In a mounting number of alleged extrajudicial killings by the police, custodial deaths allegedly resulting from torture, and shootings of unarmed protesters in recent years, the authorities refused to take action despite strong evidence. We conclude that failure to provide justice for past crimes creates direct and tangible harms in the present: families who lost loved ones years ago continue to seek justice and are forced to live without closure. And as new cases of abuse by the police show, impunity for past crimes means that unaccountable and abusive individuals and institutions continue to claim new victims in post-conflict Nepal.




Back to the Roots


Book Description

There has now been more than a decade of conceptual work, policy development, and operational activity in the field of security sector reform (SSR). To what extent has its original aim, to support and facilitate development, been met? The various contributions to this book address this question, offering a range of insights on the theoretical and practical relevance of the security-development nexus in SSR. They examine claims of how and whether SSR effectively contributes to achieving both security and development objectives. In particular, the analyses presented in the book provide a salutary lesson that development and security communities need to take each other's concerns into account when planning, implementing, and evaluating their activities. The book offers academics, policy-makers, and practitioners within the development and security communities relevant lessons, suggestions, and practical advice for approaching SSR as an instrument that serves both security and development objectives. (Series: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces [DCAF])




Transitional Justice in Balance


Book Description

In the first project of its kind to compare multiple mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms across regions, countries, and time, Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy systematically analyzes the claims made in the literature using a vast array of data, which the authors have assembled in the Transitional Justice Data Base.




Military Courts, Civil-military Relations, and the Legal Battle for Democracy


Book Description

"The interaction between military and civilian courts, the political power that legal prerogatives can provide to the armed forces, and the difficult process civilian politicians face in reforming military courts remain glaringly under-examined. This book fills a gap in existing scholarship by providing a theoretically rich, global examination of the operation and reform of military courts in democracies. Drawing on a newly-created global dataset, it examines trends across states and over time. Combined with deeper qualitative case studies, the book presents clear and well-justified findings that will be of interest to scholars and policymakers working in a variety of fields"--




Transitional Justice and Development


Book Description

As developing societies emerge from legacies of conflict and authoritarianism, they are frequently beset by poverty, inequality, weak institutions, broken infrastructure, poor governance, insecurity, and low levels of social capital. These countries also tend to propagate massive human rights violations, which displace victims who are marginalized, handicapped, widowed, and orphaned--in other words, people with strong claims to justice. Those who work with others to address development and justice often fail to supply a coherent response to these concerns. The essays in this volume confront the intricacies--and interconnectedness--of transitional governance issues head on, mapping the relationship between two fields that, academically and in practice, have grown largely in isolation of one another. The result of a research project conducted by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), this book explains how justice and recovery can be aligned not only in theory but also in practice, among both people and governments as they reform.




Transitional Justice and Education


Book Description

After periods of conflict and authoritarianism, educational institutions often need to be reformed or rebuilt. But in settings where education has been used to support repressive policies and human rights violations, or where conflict and abuses have resulted in lost educational opportunities, legacies of injustice may pose significant challenges to effective reform. Peacebuilding and development perspectives, which normally drive the reconstruction agenda, pay little attention to the violent past. Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace presents the findings of a research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice on the relationship between transitional justice and education in peacebuilding contexts. The book examines how transitional justice can shape the reform of education systems by ensuring programs are sensitive to the legacies of the past, how it can facilitate the reintegration of children and youth into society, and how education can engage younger generations in the work of transitional justice.