This book examines the relationship between international human rights discourse and the justifications for criminal punishment. Using interdisciplinary discourse analysis, it exposes certain paradoxes that underpin the ‘International Bill of Human Rights’, academic commentaries on human rights law, and the global human rights monitoring regime in relation to the aims of punishment in domestic penal systems. It argues that human rights discourse, owing to its theoretical kinship with Kantian philosophy, embodies a paradoxical commitment to human dignity on the one hand, and retributive punishment on the other. Further, it sustains the split between criminal justice and social justice, which results in a sociologically ill-informed understanding of punishment. Human rights discourse plays a paradoxical role vis-à-vis the punitive power of the state as it seeks to counter criminalisation in some areas and backs the introduction of new criminal offences – and longer prison sentences – in others. The underlying priorities, it is argued, have been shaped by a number of historical circumstances. Drawing on archival material, the study demonstrates that the international penal discourse produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laid greater emphasis on offender rehabilitation and was more attentive to the social context of crime than is the case with the modern human rights discourse.
Author(s): Adnan Sattar
Series: Routledge Research In Human Rights Law Series
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 286
City: Milton
Tags: Criminal Punishment , Human Rights
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Table of Conventions, Treaties, and International Instruments
Table of National Legislation
Table of Cases
Introduction
Theoretical and methodological approach
Structure and outline
1 The crime of punishment: reassessing classical penal theory
Thinking about crime and punishment
Legality
Prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment
Proportionality of punishment to crime
Human rights and classical retributivism
Punishment in the utilitarian tradition: Beccaria and Bentham Marx and punishment2 The gods that failed: positivist criminology and the legacy of the international penal and penitentiary commission
The age of optimism
Enter positivist criminology
The forgotten legacy of the international penal and penitentiary commission
The Berlin Congress: setting the record straight
3 Retributivism in the age of human rights
The life and death of the rehabilitative ideal
The revival of retributivism and penal populism
Just deserts and the expressive function of punishment: a critique
The myth of proportionality 4 Punishment and the origins of international human rights law: an uncensored accountSlavery's long shadow and the dark side of enlightenment
Legacy of the League of Nations
Slaves of the state? Convict labour and the development of international law
5 The untold story of the Howard League's campaign for an international prisoners' convention
Intellectual and historical background
The campaign for an international convention
Penal reform and the aftermath of World War II: turning point or false dawn?
6 The great force of history: development of the global human rights regime Drafting of the UDHR and the two covenantsThe bifurcation of the International Covenant
The rise and rise of human rights
7 The evolution and interpretation of human rights norms and penal aims: a new standard of civilisation?
The rehabilitative ideal and the tale of moral progress
The Travaux Préparatoires of the ICCPR Article 10 (3)
Offender rehabilitation and the contemporary regime of international human rights
The human rights paradox: extending and curtailing the penal dragnet
Justifications for criminal punishment: questioning the self-evident? Sentencing aims and the death penalty debateDeterrence, impunity, and predictive dangerousness
Punishment for the sake of punishment
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
