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.     

Beyond Couples

Two elderly sisters who lived together complained of discrimination on the ground that, when one of them died, the other would face a heavy inheritance tax bill, unlike the survivor of a marriage or civil partnership who enjoys a “spousal exemption” under the Inheritance Tax Act 1984. They lost in both the lower chamber of the European Court of Human Rights and on appeal to the Grand Chamber. At first instance, discrimination was found but held to be proportionate and justifiable; in the Grand Chamber, no discrimination was found, as siblings and spouses/civil partners were held not to be in an analogous situation. As an attempt to avoid a tax borne only by the comparatively wealthy, this case might not naturally engage feminist sympathies. But it demonstrates how unworthy claims can produce positive results by drawing attention to society’s dismissive treatment of old people and calling into question the legal and economic privileges enjoyed by legally-bound couples at the expense of everyone else.     

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.