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	Guatemala’s Shameful Repudiation of Justice by Aryeh Neier New York Review of Books   If countries were ranked by lawlessness, Guatemala would score near the top. The country is ridden by crime and corruption and has one of the highest murder rates in the world. While many of its neighbors in Latin America have poor human rights records, Guatemala is the only country in the Western Hemisphere where it would be appropriate to use the word genocide to describe what has occurred there since World War II. Until recently, prosecutions and convictions for murder were infrequent. In a handful of cases, people who had committed human rights abuses against prominent persons were prosecuted successfully, but those responsible for the genocidal violence directed against the country’s Mayan Indian population in the early 1980s have never been brought to trial.   All that began to change following the appointment of Claudia Paz y Paz as Guatemala’s attorney general in December 2010. In addition to tackling corruption and organized crime related to drug trafficking, and sharply increasing the conviction rate in murder trials, Paz y Paz launched a number of cases against those who had committed political violence—including, most notably, General Efraín Ríos Montt, who was president of Guatemala when the worst violence took place. But now Guatemala’s Constitutional Court has ruled that Claudia Paz y Paz must step down in May, seven months before her four-year term is scheduled to be completed in December—a move that seems aimed at derailing her courageous effort to return the country to the rule of law.   Paz y Paz, now forty-six years old, is a lawyer with a background in criminal law and human rights work, including service with the human rights office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala City. It was with this background that she set out as Attorney General to rectify some of the worst abuses of Guatemala’s past, spearheading the prosecution of Ríos Montt, who was the country’s president from March 1982 to August 1983, for genocide and crimes against humanity. The trial was historic for including extensive testimony by members of the Ixil, an ethnic group that suffered the most grievous violence and that were apparently targeted on the basis of their ethnicity. Ríos Montt was convicted on May 10, 2013. But ten days later, that verdict, and a portion of the trial leading to it, were annulled on procedural grounds by the Constitutional Court. The eighty-seven-year-old Ríos Montt is supposed to be retried in 2015, though whether that trial will take place is far from certain.   Now the same court has ruled that Claudia Paz y Paz must step down in May, ostensibly on technical grounds, because the court had disqualified another lawyer who assumed the post of Attorney General in May 2010, prior to the appointment of Paz y Paz. The court seems to imply that Paz y Paz was only filling in for the unexpired portion of her predecessor’s term. The Court’s two-and-a-half page decision does not explain why it chose to ignore Article 251 of the Gautemalan Constitution, which states that only the president can remove the attorney general:   The General Prosecutor of the Nation serves four years in the exercise of his functions and shall have the same privileges and immunities as the judges of the Supreme Court of Justice. The President of the Republic shall be able to remove him for a duly established justified cause.   Though Paz y Paz has said she will seek to have the court reverse its decision, it is hard to see how this is possible.   The ruling to limit Paz y Paz’s term as Attorney General sends a clear signal. During the trial of Ríos Montt, it became clear that there were entrenched forces in Guatemala that strenuously opposed acknowledgment that what took place in the early 1980s constituted genocide and, therefore, opposed conviction of Ríos Montt for that crime. That opposition had been pressed by CACIF, Guatemala’s leading business organization, in an intense public campaign that preceded the annulment of Ríos Montt’s conviction. The decision to remove Paz y Paz shows that these forces have prevailed. Those concerned that Guatemala would suffer embarrassment if former government officials were prosecuted for crimes against humanity apparently did not recognize that other countries that have come to terms with their past—most notable Germany, where thousands of Nazi war criminals were prosecuted in the country’s own courts following the international trials at Nuremberg—have thereby gained in stature.   Another source of hostility to the Attorney General has been her vigor in prosecuting corruption. These investigations have antagonized many government officials. Her supporters in Guatemala are mainly members of the country’s beleaguered human rights community and members of the country’s large but politically marginalized indigenous population, who have applauded her prosecution of crimes in which they were the primary victims. President Otto Perez Molina, a former military leader whose own role in the country’s political violence three decades ago is obscure, did not seem to take a stand for or against Paz y Paz. At times the President and the Attorney General have collaborated and at other times they have been on opposing sides.   Admirers of Paz y Paz had thought the crucial test would come somewhat later in the year, when the question would be whether she would be reappointed for another four-year term. In Guatemala, the Attorney General is appointed by the President from among six candidates designated by a nominating commission. The nominating commission includes the deans of the country’s law schools, and in an indication of how politically significant this process has become, a number of new law schools—with limited educational programs—have been created recently. That way, their “deans” can expect to take part in nominating candidates.   Among the Attorney General’s accomplishments are her successful prosecutions and convictions of a number of military who were at lower levels than Ríos Montt, for crimes against humanity in Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war. (The war officially ended with a 1996 peace agreement.) Those convictions suggested that Guatemala was following the lead of other Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, where the perpetrators of such crimes are being brought to justice. Had she been allowed to finish her term, Paz y Paz could have consummated these achievements by preparing a renewed prosecution of the former dictator who was responsible for the highest level of violence in the western hemisphere since World War II.   By making it impossible for the Attorney General to prepare that case, the Constitutional Court has halted Guatemala’s progress on that path. Its legally questionable decision helps to deny Guatemala a historic opportunity to undue its reputation for lawlessness.   http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/judicial-independence-under-threat-guatemala Visit the related web page
	Integrating Rights into a Post-2015 Agenda by David Mepham Human Rights Watch   Before Tunisia’s popular uprising erupted in late 2010, many in the international community saw the country as a development success story. Economic growth was close to 4 percent, 9 in 10 children went to primary school, and life expectancy was an impressive 75 years.   But for many Tunisians this progress was clearly not enough: higher incomes and better access to services did not compensate for the ills and costs of corruption, repression, inequality, and powerlessness. Nor did it satisfy aspirations for greater justice, freedom, and dignity. In January 2011, popular protests ousted Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from the presidency after 23 years in power.   While Tunisia’s struggle for rights-respecting democracy continues, its recent experience exposes the narrowness and inadequacy of many existing approaches to development. It also provides a compelling case for development to be reframed more broadly, not just as higher income (important as this is), but as the creation of conditions in which people everywhere can get an education, visit a doctor, and drink clean water, and also express themselves freely, be protected by a fair and accessible justice system, participate in decision-making, and live free of abuse and discrimination. These are some of the basic economic, social, cultural, civil, and political rights that governments are obligated to honor but deny to hundreds of millions of people.   Many of those who are most impoverished belong to society’s most marginalized and vulnerable social groups—women, children, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, people infected with HIV—who often lack the power, social or legal standing, or access to decision-making that allows them to challenge their disadvantaged status or improve their circumstances.   For the most part, development policy and programs have ignored the critical interdependence of economic and social rights with civil and political rights, and so have failed to challenge systemic patterns of discrimination and disadvantage that keep people in poverty. As a result, many poor people have been excluded, or have failed to benefit, from development programs. More disturbingly still, people have been harmed by abusive policies carried out in the name of development: forced from their land to make way for large commercial investors, compelled to toil long days for low pay in dangerous and exploitative conditions, or exposed to life-threatening pollution from poorly regulated industries.   Development can also be unsustainable, achieved at considerable cost to the environment —including carbon emissions, soil erosion, pollution, depletion of fresh water supplies, over-fishing, or damage to biodiversity—which then damage people’s rights, including those to life, health, safe food, and clean water.   More than a decade ago, in 2001, world governments set about addressing such problems by agreeing on eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Set for achievement by 2015, they included halving the proportion of people suffering from extreme hunger, reducing child and maternal mortality, and achieving universal primary education.   With this date fast approaching, a United Nations-led process is under way to agree on successor goals. This is a crucial opportunity to change the daily reality for millions of people currently overlooked, disadvantaged, or damaged by development efforts. Despite growing civil society support for rooting development in human rights standards, many governments, especially authoritarian ones, remain hostile to them, and will seek to minimize and marginalize the role of rights in any new international agreement.   To counter this threat and build wider international support for rights, it is essential and urgent to show how their fuller integration can contribute to improved development outcomes—promoting a form of development that is more inclusive, just, transparent, participatory, and accountable, precisely because it is rights-respecting.   An Unfulfilled Vision   The UN Millennium Declaration of 2000 was strong on human rights and democratic principles. World governments endorsed it in September 2000, asserting that freedom, equality, solidarity, and tolerance were fundamental values. Making progress on development, they said, depended on “good governance within each country,” adding that they would “spare no effort” to promote democracy, strengthen the rule of law, and respect internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms.   Strong words. But the Millennium Declaration’s vision, and the important principles it contained, never found their way into the new Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which emerged from a UN working group in early 2001 and soon became the dominant framework for international development cooperation.   While drawn from the Millennium Declaration, the MDGs were far more circumscribed. They prioritized an important set of economic and social issues, which were seen as less political and easier to measure, such as child and maternal mortality and access to primary education. These issues were defined in technical terms rather than as a set of rights obligations. Nor did the MDGs set any goals or targets related to political freedom or democratic participation, equality for ethnic minorities or people with disabilities, freedom from violence and abuse in the family and community, freedom of expression, or rights to peaceful protest and assembly.   Despite these limitations, the MDGs have contributed to real progress for many people. They have embodied and helped generate substantial international consensus about the focus of development cooperation. And in many countries they have facilitated higher levels of public investment in health and education, contributing to significant increases in school enrolment rates and big reductions in child mortality over the last decade. Since 1990, for example, child mortality has almost halved globally, plummeting from 12 million to 6.6 million in 2012, while the number of primary school-age children out of school has fallen from 102 million in 1990 to 69 million in 2012.   But the neglect of human rights by many governments, donors, international institutions, and the MDG framework has been a serious missed opportunity, which has greatly diminished development efforts and had other harmful consequences for poor and marginalized people, as elaborated below.   Unequal Development   Even before the MDG framework was established, many governments were unwilling or unable to address discrimination and exclusion in their development strategies and their broader social and economic policies. Authoritarian governments were obviously reluctant to empower restless minorities or disadvantaged groups that might threaten their grip on power, and were generally unwilling to address sensitive issues around ethnic or religious conflict. Such governments also often refuse to accept that women, girls, indigenous people, or other marginalized social groups deserve equal status under the law.   But development donors and international institutions like the World Bank also shied away from the more complex and politicized approach to development implied by an explicit emphasis on rights. The MDGs, with their stress on measuring development in terms of average or aggregate achievement of particular goals, for example on child and maternal mortality, did little to change these calculations and meant that marginalized communities continued to be overlooked.   Indeed, because it is often more difficult or expensive to assist poor and marginalized communities, the MDG framework may have actually worked against them, incentivising a focus on people who are easier to reach and assist, such as those living in cities rather than far-flung rural areas.   Nowhere is unequal development better documented and more visible than in the widespread and systematic discrimination against women and girls.   * Access the complete essay via the link below. Visit the related web page
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