An international NGO representative in Colombia: reflections from practice

Certain contexts render particularly challenging the disjunctures and discontinuities between international NGO (INGO) headquarters and in-country operations, as this Christian Aid case demonstrates. Torn loyalties result when seeking to discern how best to work with partners in a human-rights crisis in a middle-income country. Navigating these challenges requires a critical interrogation and radical practice of partnership. With many INGOs partially or wholly decentralising operations, and in anomalous and complex INGO programme contexts like this, it is vital to analyse the disjunctures and to support in-country staff to respond creatively to them, to do justice to programme potential and partnership principles.     

Assessing Testimonial Evidence in Asylum Proceedings: Guiding Standards from the International Criminal Tribunals

Although credibility determinations rest at the core of refugeeprotection, international refugee law has failed to developa body of evidentiary principles that is tailored to the uniquedimensions of the testimony of those seeking asylum. This articleexamines recent developments in assessing oral testimony ininternational criminal law. International criminal law judges,like national asylum adjudicators, must transcend geographic,linguistic, cultural, educational and psychological barriersin order to assess the credibility of testimony. As a result,these new international courts have developed a body of principlesof international evidence law for assessing the testimony ofalleged victims of, and witnesses to, human rights abuses. Currentsocial science research on the asylum procedures in severaljurisdictions reveals that asylum decision makers often failto adapt the determination process to account for the realitiesof refugees presenting their cases in legal fora, directingproceedings with a ‘presumptive skepticism’ of claims.It is argued that the nuanced and rigourous model for the assessmentof the testimonial evidence of alleged victims and witnessesof human rights abuses in war crimes trials introduces effectiveinternational norms for the assessment of credibility in asylumproceedings.     

A Brief History of Doing Time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the "get tough" era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions.     

Environmental administration,the courts and public policy, 1980-1989

Of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's seven major enabling statutes, six contain citizen suit provisions which reward anti-EPA plaintiffs. This fact, coupled with the agency's increasing use of the courts to bolster its enforcement efforts, yield a multitude of avenues through which courts have affected the policies and administration of the agency. This article discusses how the courts have affected the EPA in the 1980s and then briefly assesses the implications of such court-agency interaction for the successful operation of public agencies in the next decade. ^{? ?}This paper, particulary sections three and four, draws heavily upon a more detailed presentation examining the impact of federal court decisions on the policies and administration of the EPA from 1970 through 1988, published as O’Leary, R. Administrative Law Review, vol. 41. no. 4 (Fall, 1989).      

Forensic Assessment of Adults Reporting Childhood Sexualized Assault: a Lifespan Developmental Analysis

Many adults reporting childhood or adolescent sexualized assault (CSA) seek remedies through civil proceedings, thus necessitating a forensic assessment to determine the nature and extent of any psychological injuries related to such assault. Such assessments pose challenges, as CSA often occurred years earlier and may have affected not only immediate functioning but also later psychological maturation. The present paper explains how a lifespan developmental analysis can assist such assessments. The concepts of psychological development, attachment, developmental trajectory and risk and resilience can help in evaluating whether and how CSA affected normal psychological development, in determining the influence of risk factors other than CSA and in considering resiliency factors. Risk, resilience and psychological function must be examined in the domains of individual abilities and attributes, relationships and significant life activities both pre- and post-assault. Data on pre-assault risk, resilience and function can be used to estimate a “but for the assault” developmental trajectory that can then be compared to the individual’s actual developmental trajectory. This analysis, together with analysis of the severity of CSA, can assist in determining whether and how the CSA that is the basis for civil proceedings contributed to later life psychological injuries.