Rule of Law

Accountability of the Police, and operational independence of policing from political influence

/ stefanfeller / Leave a comment
This text is based on a version that I wrote in my capacity as Head of the European Union Police Mission in Bosnia&Herzegovina, in 2012. I replaced the specific links to this amazing and so much torn country on the Western Balkans with more general contexts. What came out of it has deep relevance to everything I am doing these days.
“The rule of law is a principle basing the relationship between citizens and authorities on a legal framework rather than the arbitrary execution of power. It ensures that any government action is based on law and legality. As the late British Judge Tom Bingham describes it: “All persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly made, taking effect (generally) in the future and publicly administered in the courts.“
Law is made by a political process. The application of law is ensured by an apolitical system of governance. Actions of police and other parts of the executive are governed by this law. These laws are the only basis and set the limits of democratic policing. The limits of policing are also to be found in international human rights norms, such as the European Convention of Human Rights which is directly applicable law in Bosnia and Herzegovina. When police interacts with citizens, all actions have to be within the legal framework set for those interaction. No questioning of a witness or a suspect, no arrest, no seizure of evidence may happen without a legal framework providing for it. No arrest, interrogation or search must happen on political request or undue influence.
It is the very fact that interactions of the police with citizens are bound by law which constitutes the basis for the principle of “operational independence”. Because the law has no space for political interpretation, the police applies the law without political interference, but based on the principle of legality.
The police must also act on concerns and requests of citizens. Setting policing policies is part of government action and requires strategic political decisions. The professional conduct of police is based on modern values cultivated by leadership. Leadership has to lead by example.
This requires responsible education and training. Policing as a service is consuming public resources. For all this, and more, the police must account for. Thus, operational independence and adherence to the law does not exempt the police from being accountable on administrative and managerial levels, within a larger system of governance. All parts of
public administration, including the police, are part of the executive branch, and as such, policing is also subject to legitimate policy discussions. This is necessary to reflect the interests and demands the citizens channeled through the democratic process. Police action is therefore also subject to the scrutiny of the courts.
Appropriate solutions must integrate the police into a reliable framework of accountability. In all situations where the International Community assists in the reestablishment of governance, affected by conflict, broken down as a consequence of conflict, or having been part of the conflict, a home-grown solution ensuring accountability has to be found. In our assistance to the establishment of sustainable policing arrangements and the rule of law in countries affected by conflict, international policing is monitoring and advising on the establishment of a better system of law enforcement.
Such a system is the true cornerstone of the rule of law. We respect the political discussions about the legal framework that govern the work of the police. Law is never static. Its development is an important element of democratic life. In the resulting democratic discourse, international policing assistance is not party and cannot take sides.
Our role relates to whether a law meets requirements, standard, and best practice. A political discussion whether lawmakers are motivated by the right spirit, or not, is not a discussion in which international policing has a public place. However, we raise our voices internally, in true partnership with those who we assist.
Publicly, we may assess whether any of the laws in question does contribute to a legal framework in a manner that is reflecting international standards, and international principles. We also monitor and assess whether practical action of authorities, be it police, criminal justice system, or ministries, adhere to text and spirit of the law, to the rule of law and to the principles of democratic governance.
We encourage that the actors in the political arena lead a discussion in an open, fair, factual and transparent manner. A meaningful discussion needs to involve consultation of all stakeholders, and the general public. This will allow for a discussion about substance which should replace rhetoric. This applies also to stakeholders from the police. We expect and see that police is invited to contribute their opinion as experts.
Experts should limit their contributions to expertise and refrain from participating in the political exchange of arguments. Otherwise, important factual contributions get blurred in political rhetoric undermining the credibility of the arguments.
The area of justice, liberty and security is a particularly important field for the rule of law. The ability to discuss and pass relevant legislation remains an important test for the maturity of any democracy.”

First attempt to close in on a challenging topic: Torture

/ stefanfeller / Leave a comment

There will be more entries, don’t how how many initially, yet.

Here is how I want to begin:

In 1976, I became a police detective trainee. I was eighteen years old, had just finished High School. Pondering what to do, I had pursued enrolling in University, with a main interest in biochemistry, or, believe it or not, becoming a police officer. My father had recommended to pursue a second career option, in parallel to my interest in sciences. The additional benefit: If I were to become a police officer, it would exempt me from mandatory military service, as police service is considered equivalent in my system.

Well, I had won the job, and had begun just a few months ago, I loved the Police from the first day on, abandoning my other career option as soon as I saw: “This is it”.

I had entered a mixed training that would bring me to an Undergraduate Degree in Public Administration within three years, through a combination of academic studies and practical training on the job.

Meaning, that soon after entering the Police in a large local Police Department, I was assigned to my first practical trainee work. My trainee colleagues and I were were allocated to various functions of investigative policing and patrolling, mentors would show us how they did the various jobs.

Perhaps two months into this exciting new phase of my life, a trainee colleague spoke to my friend and me. The previous night, he had been assigned to shift duty in a 24/7 investigative desk. Over night, several arrests had been made in that department, people were kept in holding cells. My colleague’s mentor took my trainee colleague into one of these holding cells. Inside, a suspect of a crime who had not revealed his identity, no ID card was found on him.

The mentoring detective asked this person: “What’s your name”. “John Doe” (or the German equivalent to it), the person replied. SLAP, BANG, the first slapping into the face of the suspect happened immediately.

The mentoring detective asked the next question: “When were you born?” – “John Doe” was the reply, SLAP BANG was the consequence.

Over the next minutes, this interrogation continued, non-compliance led to physical abuse through slapping the person straight into the face.

I do not remember whether my troubled trainee colleague who told me the story reported whether the slapping led to that the interrogation was “successful”.

What I remember are several other things:

My trainee colleague was deeply, profoundly shocked. He was not sure about what to do, whether to report this, or not, whether to stay in the training, or to quit.

I was profoundly shocked. Realizing how vulnerable the position of my trainee colleague was, I had no idea what to recommend. Recommending to report it? Well, my colleague would have had his word against that of this Old Hand, and he would have likely lost his job. Reporting it myself? How? What would be the consequence? Would I loose my job?

I was eighteen years old, had just, two months earlier, begun to enter into an amazing new world, the shiny surface of this world had just cracked.

At the end of the day, I did nothing. Felt terrible about it. Forgot it at times, but it always came back. It was one of the first defining experiences that form me today, including, that from the moment on that I had a standing in my profession, I began to develop a zero-tolerance against events like these. At no time later in my career I do remember that I would have become complacent, and/or complicit. This one was enough. I would never ever accept this again. I will write about other experiences.

In this blog, my question is less the (extremely important) managerial side of it, and the ethical one. Here, my question is: Was this torture?

Wikipedia defines torture as following: “Torture is the act of deliberately inflicting severe physical or psychological pain and possibly injury to a person (or animal), usually to one who is physically restrained or otherwise under the torturer’s control or custody and unable to defend against what is being done to him or her.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture, accessed Dec 22 2014, 12:55 local time in NYC).

Was the slapping causing severe physical pain? Was the psychological pain severe, like for example that the suspect would not know whether the slapping would be more painful the next time it would happen?

James Mitchell, one of the two chief architects of the CIA program including waterboarding and other horrible forms of torture (I will correctly refer to everything in later blogs on this topic) is quoted In http://yahoonewsdigest-us.tumblr.com/post/105345504194/psychologist-admits-he-waterboarded-al-qaida as saying to the news service “Vice”: “It’s like any sort of thing you fear: The closer you get to it the next time, the more you struggle to get out of it and find an escape. So the moment [a detainee] was most susceptible to beginning to provide information was just before the next waterboarding session.”

The same principle, obviously. Was it torture what happened to the suspect in that holding cell 1976? In my view, a definite “Yes”.

In my German Criminal Procedural Law, we name the application of methods like these “Prohibited Methods of Interrogation”. Any action, including cheating, establishing a false belief, tricking the suspect into revealing something he or she would not have decided to do if he or she would have known the intentionally and actively falsified reality, or abuse, including through violence, falls under it. The result is that the Police Officer applying a prohibited method of interrogation can commit a crime, at least if he does what this detective mentor did.

The United Nations Convention Against Torture can be found here: http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html.

Article 1 and 2 of this Convention read as follows:

Article 1

  1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
  2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

Article 2

  1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
  2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
  3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

I stop here. In my next blog on this issue, I will give other examples, two that formed my ethical view on torture, and one in which I acted decisively, myself.

To be continued, hang in there!

On Peace, Justice, and Security

/ stefanfeller / Leave a comment

The easy but important stuff first: Linking this blog to important pieces that I have published in my official capacities.

November 26, 2014, I published the following text in The Huffington Post, where it appeared as “An Insider’s View on UN Policing” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stefan-feller/an-insiders-view-on-un-po_b_6278716.html).

The underlying schemes will resonate through, I guess, many entries that I will be publishing here: Which are the common denominators that should define policing, police institutions, and justice institutions? In Kosovo between 2000 and 2004, I was in command for on average 4.500 police officers who were sent to the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) from up to 54 different countries from all around the world. It was my first experience with what it means to establish an international police organisation from scratch, with no blueprint. Moreover, this Police within UNMIK was supposed to be the real Police in Kosovo: The former Police had been a brutal and repressive element of Milosevic’s regime, and had participated in abuse, oppression, and atrocities. So they had to leave after the NATO air strike was successful. Which left Kosovo without ANY policing, apart from illegal structures that sprang up like mushrooms. There never is a void that is left unfilled…

It was my first experience with what it means to harmonise different approaches, cultures, understandings, values, education, managerial styles, operational practice, and tactical engagement. For the outsider it looked like a “Mission Impossible”, and yes, it was daunting, by all accounts. But it was also, in my view, surprisingly successful.

On basis of many similar experiences thereafter, a network of likeminded friends and I, who had been in command of such operations, identified the most pressing task: What is the least common denominator for policing that we all should accept, wherever we come from?

The below article gives actual insight in where we are on that. However, it is no coincidence that I wrote this article as well at a time during which I witness an intense discussion on Police accountability on occasion of incidents which happened lately in Ferguson, New York, and Cleveland. I am witnessing a fundamental discussion here in the U.S., one in which these incidents are perceived as results of a disguised racism, and insufficient accountability. The public reaction is encouraging, a large and peaceful movement has expressed the views of many citizens, white and coloured alike. Last weekend, I walked up Fifth Avenue in New York as a part of what the press describes as 25.000 peaceful protesters.

2014-12-13 14.53.22 HDR

I am witnessing much more, and all that is profoundly encouraging. So, here my piece in the Huffington Post:

“Justice is both a concept and a function sitting at the core of any society. Whichever form it takes, it contributes to the fundamental connection of an individual or a community to the larger whole. We may take our understanding of justice as a given, or we may even assume that the specific understanding that we grew up with should apply to all others. The reality is that justice comes in many different conceptual shapes, and forms, based on ethical or moral values, or a combination thereof. The world is an arena for different forms of justice and judicial concepts, within larger ideological and secular and religious frameworks. These memes coexist, they compete, at times they fight each other.

As a value in itself, it is inextricably linked to the absence of it, to injustice. Here, things become challenging: Injustice may for example occur if an individual is not treated in a just way. Being treated “justly” includes appropriateness of the rules one is subjected to and that the given rules are universally applied. Equally important is that the feeling of whether an individual or a group is treated “justly”, or not, is often based on complex and very subjective perceptions. What matters most is that injustice, or the perception of injustice, creates the feeling that one does not belong. In my line of work, United Nations Peace Operations, this often is one factor leading to violent conflicts and the difficulty to move from conflict to lasting stability and peace.

The same holds true for security: security and insecurity, as well as the subjective perception of whether to feel secure or insecure, are critically important for any development of lasting peace. Individual members and communities define their belonging to a society including through whether they are safe, and that their concerns on safety and security are appropriately addressed by the society to which they belong.

Therefore, institutions of governance which provide security and adjudicate justice are of critical importance for development into lasting peace and security. For the United Nations, conflict prevention and sustainable peace comprises measures for the prevention of (armed) conflict and addressing its root causes, including through strengthening the rule of law, national reconciliation, good governance, democracy, gender equality and respect for, and protection of, human rights.

The United Nations is looking back on almost 55 years of deploying international police into peace operations. There are currently over 13,000 UN police from ninety-one Member States of the UN in eighteen peace operations all over the world. We operate globally, in the harshest, most challenging and most dangerous environments. We take casualties. We live in those communities where we contribute to their re-establishing forms of governance that lead to lasting peace. We protect vulnerable communities and individuals being targeted by violence and victimized by the abuse of power. In this, more recently, peacekeepers including police officers have become direct targets of those who try to deprive communities of their right to receive good governance. We face being in the cross-hairs of extremists and terrorism, as we are directly inhibiting their actions to suppress freedom and to subjugate communities under the reign of terror. We assist in the establishment of institutions of just and secure governance that contribute to lasting peace and security, after and during violent conflict. We face the menacing nexus between transnational organized crime and extremism and terror, and the often endemic corruption on which both can thrive.

We have learned the hard way which policing concepts work, for security and justice, and which do not. Consequently, we have put our experiences into a consultative process that, literally, includes the world. Our distilled essence is a policy that is based profoundly on what the Global Community understands as the common denominator of policing. On that basis we continue to shape how to promote this form of UN policing. Naturally, this relates to the peace operations in which we take risks. But what we say is also relevant for all police-related policy discussions, simply because we all agree to it.

On 20 November 2014, the United Nations Security Council had its first ever thematic discussion on policing and peace operations. In an overwhelming show of engagement, every member of the Security Council took the floor. The Security Council unanimously voted for its Resolution 2185 which stressed the importance of international policing in peace operations and requested that the Secretary-General further promote professionalism, effectiveness and system-wide coherence in the policing-related work of the United Nations, including through the development and implementation of standards and guidance through the Strategic Guidance Framework for International Police Peacekeeping. Likewise, the relevant Committees of the UN General Assembly, forming the voice of all 193 United Nations Member States, appreciate both the comprehensive consultative approach and the relevance of this framework for international police peace operations.

So, what is the essence of what we have learned? Our growing repository of guidance can be found online (For starters: See here). It is based on a core principle that can be found in our policy framework, which is fundamentally supported by all Member States, whichever form of justice and security they choose, whatever their culture, history and societal values:

In accordance with United Nations standards, every police or other law enforcement agency should be representative of and responsive and accountable to the community it serves.

Police and law enforcement officials have the obligation to respect and protect Human Rights, including the right to life, liberty and security of person as guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reaffirmed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other relevant international instruments. Pursuant to the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, police and other law enforcement officials are required at all times to fulfil the duty imposed upon them by law, by serving the community and by protecting all persons against illegal acts, consistent with the high degree of responsibility required by their profession.

Policing must be entrusted to police or other law enforcement agencies of a national, regional or local government, within a legal framework that is based on the rule of law. Thus, the police are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. Policing the police requires measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency.

As the police adviser to the United Nations, I believe that every serious discussion about the relationship between the society and the policing model that a society chooses for itself needs to be informed by these guiding principles.”