Repressive state violence, intended to tamp down collective mobilisation, sometimes inspires greater participation by protesters. When popular and/or elite reactions cause the repressing party to concede, civil resistance scholars define the failure of state repression as ‘backfire’. Some have proposed that movements’ nonviolent discipline is essential to backfire. This article demonstrates that movements that practise ‘unarmed militancy’ – forceful, combative tactics less damaging than armed violence – can also succeed through backfire, achieving policy concessions and even presidential resignations, and presents a qualitative comparative analysis of the outcomes of 48 protest events with multiple deaths in Bolivia between 1982 and 2019, and a case-based analysis of how either movements or repressors prevailed. Movements that confronted deadly repression succeeded in 57–8 per cent of cases. Whether or not protesters engaged in lethal defensive violence did not affect their likelihood of success. However, state repression of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and during polarised partisan conflicts, was consistently successful. Current understandings of backfire need to be reconsidered in light of successful unarmed militant protest in Bolivia and numerous other locations worldwide.

In Ghana, persons below 18 years of age are presumed to be children and vulnerable, and are expected to enjoy special protection and care against all hazards, even if they go against the law. This agrees with Ghana’s legal provision and other international legal documents. This study examined the knowledge of the police and their relationship with children in conflict with the law in Ghana using the Northern Region as a case study. Primary data were generated through interviews and questionnaire administration from a combined 219 participants who were purposely and systematically selected in a convergent mixed-methods design. The study found good knowledge of the police as to who a child in conflict with the law was (76%), yet only 40% rightly knew the criminal capacity of a child. The study revealed that the rights of children in conflict with the law, such as non-torture, access to legal assistance and right to safe custody, were flouted.

The meeting between the imperatives of criminal procedure, as legal instruments of the State, and human rights generates a confrontation at one time or another. Procedural formalities tend to protect society from the scourge of crime, while human rights imply respect for the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual. However, implementing procedural formalities inevitably prevents the exercise of certain human rights. This article addresses this clash within the context of legal developments in Morocco since the promulgation of the 2011 Constitution. It highlights the extensive transformations in Morocco since 2011, the main objective of which was strengthening human rights and consolidating the rule of law. The most remarkable transformation undoubtedly remains the independence of the judiciary and the complete emancipation of the Public Prosecutor’s Office from the Minister of Justice’s power.

The criminological dimension of crime generally does not arouse great enthusiasm from researchers in Arab countries, unlike Anglo-Saxon- or French-speaking countries. Admittedly, Western criminology is more advanced, but it is more interested in common crimes than in mass crimes such as crimes against humanity, genocide, human trafficking or terrorism. However, the rare existing studies reveal the emergence of a criminology of massive human rights violations and expose some particularities of this criminal phenomenon. These include the often transnational nature of the crimes, the geographical, socio-economic and political disparity of criminals, the high number of victims, and more. The relationship between criminal law, criminology and human rights should be examined to determine the complementarity of the law and the empirical criminal sciences in crime prevention.

El tema de la justicia transicional mexicana, materializado a través de una Fiscalía Especial que funcionó entre 2001 y 2006, sigue siendo ignorado en la academia. La mayoría de los estudios existentes supone que la Fiscalía Especial fue creada para generar resultados que contribuirían a la consolidación de la democracia mexicana: particularmente, verdad y justicia. También señalan que esta institución fracasó, porque no obtuvo verdad ni justicia. No coinciden, sin embargo, sobre las razones detrás de dicho fracaso: falta de voluntad política, ausencia de personal capacitado, elaboración de estrategias jurídicas torpes. Este artículo se aleja de estas interpretaciones y rastrea la genealogía de la Fiscalía Especial. Para hacerlo, analiza críticamente el papel crucial que desempeñó en la justicia transicional la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH), institución que hasta ahora ha sido ignorada en los estudios sobre el tema. El argumento que enmarca esta investigación es que, en México, la justicia transicional fue diseñada por la CNDH de tal manera que contribuyó a perpetuar la injusticia. Este artículo busca mostrar que no es que la Fiscalía Especial haya fracasado en la marcha, sino que desde su origen fue pensada para otorgar un indulto a los perpetradores de crímenes.

Radicalization in prison is a well-developed field of research that, particularly in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, has involved academics and practitioners in the attempt to highlight possible push and pull factors and dynamics, as well as useful strategies for preventing and countering extremism inside the facilities. Like every subject of great interest, it has given rise to numerous theories about the possible approaches to radical violence, some even at odds with each other. However, there is almost unanimous agreement that isolation from external society and the inadequate management of the right to profess one’s religious faith within prisons may be elements that increase the risk of intramural radicalization. In Italy, the COVID-19 pandemic interfered heavily not only in the lives of people belonging to free society but also – and perhaps even more – in the lives of prisoners, resulting in the total isolation of prison facilities from the outside community. The dramatic efforts to protect public health have effectively eclipsed every other right, including – for prisoners – practising one’s faith with the guidance of authorized religious leaders. The present article explores how and why these anti-virus changes in the management of the Italian penitentiary could have influenced the risk of intramural radicalization.

This research note outlines the current state of preservation and accessibility of an audiovisual document that contains complete video footage of the Trial of the Argentine Military Junta, whose verdict in 1985 found the accused guilty of crimes against humanity perpetrated during the last military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983).The project of digitization is the result of a joint effort by the University of Salamanca, the Argentine human rights organization Memoria Abierta, and the judges involved in the case, with the support of the Argentine Cámara Nacional de Apelaciones en lo Criminal y Correccional Federal. Its two main objectives are to preserve and provide open access to the audiovisual document. To date only digitized preservation has been attained, a nonetheless remarkable achievement. Despite legislation dates enforcing the protection of the parties involved in the trial, and the absence of legal constraints, open access to the document has not been obtained.

This paper offers a historical examination of the ways in which advocacy strategies and tactics have shifted in relation to political opportunities, using a case study of a hydroelectric dam project in the Brazilian Amazon, known as the Belo Monte Dam. Drawing on over three decades of resistance by transnational activist coalitions, the paper looks at how new tactics and political alignments have altered the dynamics of activism and norm diffusion in Brazilian domestic environmental, human rights and development policies. The paper argues that current theories of norm diffusion inadequately explain backslides and tend to underestimate the complexity of domestic political alignments. The case adds political insight to our understanding of the relationship of transnational advocacy strategy to environmental and human rights political realities in Brazil.

Many Latin American countries are moving towards increased accountability for past human rights violations, and there is a growing global consensus that international law does not allow some crimes simply to be exempted from prosecution. Uruguay has had a deeply split response to these developments. While the Supreme Court and the political elite increasingly pushed to end impunity, the public actually ratified the 1985 amnesty law protecting the military from prosecution in a 2009 plebiscite. The amnesty law was finally abolished by Parliament in 2011. This article traces the winding road from impunity to accountability in Uruguay in the context of substantial public support for impunity. It argues that, while the lack of judicial independence obstructed the quest for justice for many years, the combination of continued civil society demands for justice met by increasingly human-rights-friendly executives and liberal-minded judges (and lately also prosecutors) explains the recent advance in retributive justice.

How do global rights regimes promote compliance? Can they form the basis for effective advocacy campaigns at the domestic level? In this paper, we address these questions via a case study of the role played by the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Argentinian politics. We argue that ratification of the convention strengthened the coherence and leverage of rights-based domestic activists and ultimately led to the introduction of a new rights-inspired legal code for children. We trace the emergence of a local compliance coalition for children's rights and the subsequent campaign for rights-based reform. Our analysis suggests that global rights conventions can alter the domestic political opportunity for advocacy, strengthen rights-based claims and bring about changes on the ground.