Ailing legal systems have been characterized by:
- Arbitrary prosecution and arrest;
- Abuse and torture of detainees on remand, potentially for months or even years until a case goes to trial – if indeed it ever does;
- Poor police training and pay;
- Poor legal training;
- Lack of vital resources and infrastructure;
- Defendants denied legal counsel;
- Trials conducted in a foreign language (e.g. English or Spanish rather than the relevant local language) which defendants neither speak nor understand;
- The absence of trial transcripts that could serve as a basis for a retrial.
"When we think of global poverty we readily think of hunger, disease, homelessness, illiteracy, dirty water, and a lack of education, but very few of us immediately think of the global poor’s chronic vulnerability to violence— the massive epidemic of sexual violence, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, assault, police abuse, and oppression that lies hidden underneath the more visible deprivations of the poor."
"—the reality of common, criminal violence in otherwise stable developing countries that affl icts far more of the global poor on a much larger and more persistent scale—and consistently frustrates and blocks their climb out of poverty."
"law enforcement systems in the developing world are so broken that global studies now confi rm that most poor people live outside the protection of law. Indeed, the justice systems in the developing world make the poor poorer and less secure. It’s as if the world woke up to fi nd that hospitals in the developing world actually made poor people sicker—or the water systems actually contaminated the drinking water of the poor"
"The Locust Effect then is the surprising story of how a plague of lawless violence is destroying two dreams that the world deeply cherishes: the dream to end global poverty and to secure the most fundamental human rights for the poor. But the book also reveals several surprising stories about why basic justice systems in the developing world came to be so dysfunctional. It turns out that when the colonial powers left the developing world a half a century ago, many of the laws changed but the law enforcement systems did not—systems that were never designed to protect the common people from violence but to protect the regime from the common people. These systems, it turns out, were never re-engineered."
For example the use of Sedition laws recently in India on students and critics of the Government
"Moreover, great signs of hope are profiled in a variety of demonstration projects being carried out by IJM and other agencies around the world that demonstrate it is possible to transform broken public justice systems in the developing world so they effectively protect the poor from violence."
Something like this is needed in India
" To establish a rural medical clinic in the area where Gopinath is held as a slave without addressing the violent forces that refuse to allow him to leave the quarry and take his dying kid to a doctor seems like a mocking."
" To provide Laura and Mariamma with AIDS education and training on making safe sexual choices without addressing the violence in the slums and brick factories where women don’t get to make choices seems like a mocking"
“In many developing countries, high levels of crime and violence not only undermine people’s safety on an everyday level, they also undermine broader development efforts to improve governance and reduce poverty.” 9
" Perhaps if the locusts of violence laid waste to everything all at once like
they did in the Midwest in 1875 it would get the world’s att ention—but all
the daily slavery, rape, extortion, and dispossession gnaws its way through
hundreds of millions of poor people one assault at a time, and the cumulative
disaster of the locust eff ect is hard to see. Slowly but surely, however, the
experts are starting to add it up, and the price tag is staggering"
from
"The locust effect" by Gary A. Haugen and Victor Boutros
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