Cahiers de Defense Sociale. Bulletin de la Societé Internationale de Défense Sociale pour une politique criminelle humaniste (SIDS). Número especial: “Homicide in the world and in Latin America” (original) (raw)

Letter from the President Luis Arroyo Zapatero We are living through turbulent times in which, as Mireille Delmas-Marty has recently declared in her Aux quatre vents du monde, petit guide de navigation sur l’océan de la mondalisation (Seuil 2016), we need a sort of “wind rose” to try to orient our scientific and political work, overcoming the damage inflicted by the maelströms of the appearance of global terrorism and the resurgence of the penal law of exception, the fraudulence and the impunity of the international financial crisis and its costly social and economic damage, as well as the danger of rescission of the agreements reached in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an attempt to endow the anthropocene with a sort of world government. The economic crisis also affected the ISSD and financing for the publication of the Cahiers, but today we can present a new ordinary number, corresponding to 2016. We see its non-appearance in 2014 and 2015 as a sort of incentive to renew editorial commitments for the near future. The doctrinal part of this number is dedicated to the study of Homicide in the World and in Latin America. The embryonic development of the project commenced at the meeting of the five scientific associations and its Coordinating Committee, in Rome, in October 2014, following our audience with Pope Francis, at which he delivered a lengthy speech of the utmost importance to us. He commended the analysis of the matter to, among other societies, ISSD and ALPEC (the new Latin-American Association of Penal Law and Criminology), delivered in a keynote speech by Adolfo Ceretti Milan-Bicocca and with the coordination of regional reports from Keymer Ávila, Central University of Venezuela. Hence, the constitution of the Study Group on Homicides and Massacres (GEHOMAS), with the participation of Eloisa Quintero and Martín Barron, both from INACIPE Mexico; Juliette Trico, University of Paris X, France; Arturo Arango, Crimipol, Mexico; Matías Bailone, University of Buenos Aires, and Luigi Foffani, Modena, as well as the undersigned. It has held three successive meetings throughout 2016: May, at INACIPE, Mexico, attended by ISSD, SIC, AIDP and ALPEC; August, at the Instituto Brasileiro de Ciencias Criminais at Sao Paulo, and in December at Ciudad Real, University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain. Even in Mexico, we were fortunate to have the general report of Elías Carranza, Director of the United Nations Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of offenders (ILANUD). In turn, Víctor Moreno, chair of the University Carlos III of Madrid, who has acted for 8 years as the secretary Letter from the President Luis Arroyo Zapatero of the Conference of Ministers of Justice of Ibero-American Countries (COMJIB), presented a summary of his experience to us. Activity will continue with visits to present the results at the forthcoming United Nations Conference in 2020. A scientific society such as our own, which since its foundation in 1949 has above all been concerned with the painful and disproportionate way that prison sentences are handed down, can do no less than shudder at credible information on the epidemic of mass imprisonment, individual confinement, life-imprisonment without review, and racism and discrimination in such systems. It may be seen there where information in that respect may at least be gathered (Enmienda XIII, documentary by Ada DuVernay, 2016, Monographic num. of the Revista Brasilera de Ciencias Criminais, 129, 2017 on “encarceramento en massa” [mass imprisonment], as well as in reports from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), from “Mother Jones” and from the Brennan Center). Worse still however, it is also true that homicides committed by the police, also called extrajudicial executions, continue to be a very serious problem. In the United States of America, where only the Washington Post has been capable of establishing a permanent observatory of homicides due to police shootings (991 and 963 in 2015 and 2016). It is also very well reflected in the information from Brazil that ccompanies the judgement of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of 16 th February, 2017, in the Favela Nova Brasilia case and the monograph of the RbrCCrim. Vol. 129). It is an outright scandal in the Philippines, where an individual reached the presidency who committed himself to order the police to shoot-to-kill, and fulfils his program with thousands of deaths in its first year, as may be seen from the press and the reports from Human Rights Watch. Above all, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions of the United Nations maintains us carefully informed. This problematic issue is in parallel with both militarization of the police or their direct replacement by the armed forces, avoiding in both cases the control over standards of human rights in the exercise of lethal force. Close monitoring of homicides and police brutality has fallen or has been prevented in numerous countries, proof of which are the attempts in various countries –such as France– to widen the factual basis of legitimate defence applicable to law enforcement officers while on duty.