Question:
Double Standard

While proposition may claim that prosecution of war criminals is a moral imperative, the reality is that geo-political factors determine which prosecutions are taken. For example, all of the ICC’s prosecutions have been against African leaders. [i] Furthermore, although the United States is strongly suspected of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is too powerful to be prosecuted. Fair justice should apply equally to everyone. Because it doesn’t, these prosecutions are often seen as Western impositions. This aggravates international tensions and reduces willingness to take any action on war crime in the developing world. For example, the African Union has refused to uphold the ICC’s arrest warrant on Omar Al Bashir. [ii]

[i] Case reports of the ICC http://www.icc-cpi.int/Menus/ICC/Reports+on+activities/

[ii] BBC News, 'Warrant issued for Sudan's leader', 4 March 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7923102.stm

Firstly, more prosecutions take place in developing nations because in recent decades more war crimes have been committed in developing nations. Western nations have been equally committed to prosecutions in the former Yugoslavia, in an increasingly prosperous European region. Secondly, although the refusal of the United States to become a signatory to the ICC is problematic, an inability to prosecute every war crime should not prevent us from prosecuting any.

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

No person would sell sex unless they were desperate. To have sex with someone for reasons other than sexual attraction, desire, and affection is repulsive to any sane and mentally competent adult.

People who sell sex are not exercising sexual autonomy, but are giving up their right to sexual autonomy in order to support themselves and their families. Instead of legalizing sex markets, societies should provide other means of employment and a basic standard of living to all members, so that no one has to resort to prostitution to survive.

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Prison reform is politically unachievable

The failures of the prison system are tolerated within political culture and by the public, partly because the privations of the prison environment are seen as a suitable punishment for criminal behaviour. Deprivation of liberty and the emptiness of criminal life are seen as retribution for criminals’ dishonest or violent activities.

Politicians dare not confront the damaging effects of imprisonment for fear of being labelled as “soft” on crime. There is greater political cache to be gained from introducing policies that prolong prison terms, and remove judges’ discretion to order non custodial sentences. Novel approaches to the problem of criminality are seen as signs of political weakness.

The use of monitored corporal punishment will keep offenders who have not committed serious crimes out of the prison system. At a nominal rate of five lashes for every year of incarceration, flogging will serve as a clear demonstration of societal disapproval, satisfying popular conceptions of retributive “justice”. Once the need to punish is satisfied, policy makers will be free to institute new rehabilitation schemes that address the root causes of criminal behaviour; these schemes can be set up without sacrificing political capital or appearing to prioritise the rights of criminals over victims or the public.

While the conservative press may advocate the reintroduction of corporal sentences, an equally vocal section of society would condemn any attempt to use flogging as a means of punishment. The inherently pragmatic political discourse that prevails in most liberal democracies would be as reluctant to replace prison with the lash as it currently is to reduce prison populations and confront under-investment in rehabilitation schemes.

It should be noted that corporal punishment was initially abandoned as a result of the activities of penal reform campaigners in the early eighteen hundreds. These thinkers, politicians and professionals were able to convince members of a much more conservative political class of the wisdom of sentences focussed on rehabilitation. Moreover, they sold the idea of penal reform to a public who lacked the robust defences against disorder and criminality (the police, electronic surveillance, cheap insurance) that we take for granted today. Victorian-era citizens had much more to fear from crime than we do. If such dramatic change could be brought about in the nineteenth century, why should it be out of the grasp of politicians in the twenty first?

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Custodial sentences make recidivism more likely

A custodial sentence is capable of destroying the relationships and livelihood of an offender. Imprisonment means that an offender will be unable to work and will lose his job, if he has one. Statistics sourced from the Pew Foundation indicate that a criminal record can reduce the likelihood of a black, male American securing a job by up to 57% [i] . The isolation inherent in imprisonment can lead to the breakup of marriages and to the decay of relationships between parents and children. The stigma associated with a custodial sentence may result in an offender being shunned by his friends, his family and his community. He will, in effect, be left with no sources of support once he is released. A former inmate will be left with no incentive to adjust his behaviour and disengage with criminality [ii] . The Pew Foundation notes that 43% of offenders in the United States were returned to prison within three years of release [iii] .

The long-term damage done to an offender’s life is not an intended consequence of custodial sentencing. However, it cannot be claimed to be a proportionate response to crime, as it affects both serious offenders and those accused of non-violent offences such as burglary or fraud. The decay of an offender’s relationships and social support structures is yet another harmful externality of custodial punishment.

A corporal sentence caters to the social imperative to punish criminals, but it also allows offenders to remain with their families and to avoid financial hardship by remaining in employment. In Moskos’ own words, corporal punishment allows society to express its disapproval quickly and efficiently, leaving the offenders to “move on” with the process of reform.

It is in the interests of any effective system of rehabilitation to ensure that a non-violent offender remains in contact with their family and remains in employment (excepting, of course, offenders who have attack or abused family members). Families, spouses and social networks can play an important role in supporting and encouraging an offender to engage with rehabilitation programmes. Wives and children can effectively monitor an offender’s behaviour when trained staff are unavailable, integrating the reform process with the offender’s day to day life.

[i] “Tackling Recidivism: They All Come Home”, The Economist, 20 April 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18587528

[ii] “A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America”. Drucker, E. The New Press

[iii] “Tackling Recidivism: They All Come Home”, The Economist, 20 April 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18587528

Rehabilitation programmes are not a panacea – nor are they instantly or reliably effective. The risk of an individual committing crime can only be reduced by long-term engagement with reform schemes. In 2009 violations of parole- the rules, conditions and schemes offenders are required to engage with on being released from prison- led to a third of all state prison admissions in the United States [i] .

This being the case, the best location in which to rehabilitate offender is prison. Prison serves, in some cases, to separate prisoners from poverty and desperation, and to help them access the structure and routine that was missing from their lives.

Moreover, contrary to the proposition’s argument, offenders are less likely to originate from stable family environments, to have secure employment, or to have the skills that will let them seek employment in the future.

Additionally, it does not seem proportionate for a white collar fraudster, whose actions could affect the livelihoods of thousands of individuals, to receive a flogging while retaining his freedom and his assets.

Prison also quarantines offenders from the influence of gangs or damaged family structures. Offenders may have difficulty cutting themselves off from close knit social groups of this type; the activities of these groups (drug taking, organised violence) may compete with the positive behaviours fostered by rehabilitation.

It cannot be assumed that dramatic changes in an offender’s behaviour can be brought about without a correspondingly dramatic change in their environment and lifestyle. Criminality is as dependent on context and environment as it is on the choices and values of the criminal.

If there are minimal restraints put on an offender’s freedom while he rehabilitates, it will be easier for him to avoid complying with rehabilitation programmes. As noted above, the threat of further floggings will not motivate offenders who have become habituated to brutality and violence.

[i] “Tackling Recidivism: They All Come Home”, The Economist, 20 April 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18587528

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Flogging harms offenders less than imprisonment

he criminologist Peter Moskos [i] observes that most of us, if given the choice, would opt to receive ten lashes rather than spend five years in prison. Paradoxically, a significant number of us would condemn corporal punishment as barbaric and inhumane. If imprisonment is a more rational response to criminal behaviour, why would so many rational individuals opt to receive corporal punishment?

Contemporary prisons are the result of a failed utopian experiment. They serve no useful rehabilitative purpose, and exist only to fulfil a common desire to punish deviant behaviour and to segregate criminals from the public at large. Prisons harm inmates and obstruct attempts to reintegrate them into society. It may be necessary to incarcerate certain compulsive and habitually violent criminals, but for a majority of offenders, prison only serves exacerbate underlying social, economic and psychological problems that lead to criminality.

Using corporal punishment to reduce or replace custodial sentences would provide an effective way to fulfil the social need to punish criminals, while removing the harmful externalities of mass incarceration. Strictly supervised whipping or caning can adequately and proportionately express society’s anger with the criminal, while avoiding the dangers of long-term incarceration and reinvigorating the use of rehabilitation.

In the United States, the UK and many European countries, prison populations have increased dramatically, but reductions in rates of offending have been minimal or non existent. In the absence of funding, or coherent, centrally administered rehabilitation strategies, prisons have become places devoid of productive activity. Prisoners are not encouraged to address the causes of their offending, or to acquire skills that will help them to live independently in society following their release. Boredom, overcrowding and under-staffing have led to the emergence of gang- and drug-cultures in many prisons. Inmates incarcerated for minor offences quickly become complicit in gang violence, or fall prey to alcoholism and drug addiction. Gang associations and chemical dependencies carry over into inmates’ lives once they are released. The prison system serves only to breed criminality, not to cure it.

The cost of incarcerating the average offender in the United Kingdom is estimated to be £45000 a year [ii] . Reduced spending on incarceration can be used to fuel an increase in spending on detoxification, rehabilitation and restorative justice schemes. Moreover damaging effects of prison will not cancel out the positive effects of rehabilitation.

The physical injuries resulting from whipping, although painful, are less severe than the subtler damage wrought on inmates by imprisonment.

[i] “In Defense of Flogging”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 April 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/In-Defense-of-Flogging/127208/

[ii] “Tough on Crime, Tough on Criminals”, The economist, 23 June 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18867740

What pretends to be an argument in support of the resolution is in fact an argument in favour of reforming the prison system. It is true that in an alarming number of prisons the rehabilitative objective of incarceration has been forgotten. In many other prisons, however, innovative rehabilitation programmes are flourishing. The prison system is not a monolith – it is a network of different institutions, each serving a specific purpose, each subject to different standards of management. Schemes such as the HOPE (Honest Opportunity Probation) drug offence sentencing programme in Hawaii [i] should be used as an example of best practice, communicated to other prisons and replicated in other jurisdictions.

Doubtless, knowledge sharing, professional standards and levels of accountability could be improved in many prisons. However, this does not mean that a prison sentence will inevitably lead to an offender suffering harm.

Moreover, if an increase in the prison population has failed to reduce rates of offending, an explanation could well be found in a poorly administered corpus of criminal law, rather than poorly run prisons. As a study conducted by The Economist points out, American law makers are fond of attaching criminal sanctions to otherwise innocuous misdemeanours in order to appear tough on crime. An increase in the number of activities being described as criminal can mask the success of prisons in reducing the number of individuals likely to commit truly harmful, truly criminal acts.

If we cannot be certain that the prison system has failed, if we cannot be certain that the prison system is uniformly harmful to inmates, why should we hasten to replace it with an untested alternative such as “supervised” flogging?

Finally, incarceration, apart from being used to punish criminals, also helps to protect the public, by physically preventing offenders from engaging in criminal activities. Dramatically reducing sentences or attempting to rehabilitate criminals within the community will not prevent them from carrying out further offences. Rehabilitation is not immediately effective; moreover, its usefulness is often reduced when the positive messages that it tries to communicate have to compete with poverty borne of long-term unemployment, or loyalty to a local gang.

The proposition assumes that the pain associated with corporal punishment will be sufficient to discourage offenders from engaging in further criminal activities while they are being rehabilitated. Empirical proof of this deterrent effect is hard to come by. A large number of offenders live lives characterised by chronic brutality, often the result of parental abuse or long term involvement in gang violence, and they may come to regard state administered flogging as little more than an occupational inconvenience, one more aggressive act among many.

[i] “A revival of flogging?”, The Economist, 25 April 2010, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/04/crime_and_punishment

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Imprisonment punishes offenders’ families

Even though liberal democratic systems of justice continue to place an emphasis on punishment rather than rehabilitation, sentences are still required to be proportionate to the crime that they punish. Further, a sentence must only punish those judged responsible for the crime. Collective punishment and guilt by association are not tolerated within rational, liberal systems of criminal law.

Imprisoning or fining an offender often places an intolerable burden on the offender’s family. If the offender is a breadwinner, the family is denied the income that he would otherwise provide. They may be forced to use inadequate benefit systems. Other members of the family may be forced to take up a second job, adversely affecting childcare arrangements. Any fines that an offender is ordered to pay are often impact upon his family, damaging household budgets and forcing other family members into debt.

The negative effects of a custodial sentence extend beyond the offender himself. Financial and social deprivation may have a minimal impact on an offender while his is imprisoned, but may cause considerable suffering within his family. Sudden social isolation and poverty have themselves been shown to provoke criminality and increase childhood deviance.

Corporal sentences allow a punishment to be targeted only at the criminal, not at their families.

Through their actions, career criminals and drug offenders often subject their families to misery far in excess of the temporary absence of a loved one, or transient financial hardship. The damaging processes of taking drugs and supporting a habit are normalised for children living with addicts; children exposed to drugs in this way are much more likely to develop an addiction themselves. Criminals who make a business out of thievery may use the family home to store acquisitions. Wives and members of an extended family may be coerced into trading stolen goods. Offenders who trade drugs or store stolen goods in leased or social housing risk eviction if their activities are discovered. This, in turn, would lead to their families being displaced or left homeless. Siblings and parents of gang members can often be the targets of violence resulting from feuds and “territorial disputes”.

As noted above, rehabilitation does not offer an immediate “cure” for criminality. Neither can it protect families who, through ignorance or misfortune, are maintained by the proceeds of criminal activity. Although a significant number of prison inmates may be normally honest citizens who have made bad or impulsive choices, an equally large number are poorly socialised members of chaotic families. The environment of lawlessness that such individuals create in family homes creates a situation that may lead their spouses and children into deviance themselves.

Under these circumstances, isolating an offender from his family may give the family an opportunity to break free of a pattern of daily life that would otherwise be saturated with criminality.

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Flogging will be over-utilised, rehabilitation will be under-utilised

The “packaging” of flogging with a revitalised approach to rehabilitation that proposition suggests may be a feasible response to some crimes, but politicians are much more likely to treat the lash as a panacea for any activity or trend that affects the public’s confidence in the justice system.

The public and the mass media are not inclined the probe the depths of criminal sentencing. Criminals are hard to sympathise with, and public confidence rests largely on the visible aspects of a sentence – has a criminal been locked away? Will they be closely monitored on release? Has a criminal received a sufficient number of lashes? As a consequence, as with custodial sentences, cutbacks to reform programmes can be achieved with little objection, leaving only the empty and brutal gesture of flogging itself. Political reality will neutralise the aspirations of the proposition

Lawmakers are currently too keen to invoke imprisonment as a response to crime. They are likely to be just as hasty in ordering the use of whipping as a sanction for criminality. A 1995 US Department of State Report on the use on penal practices in Singapore noted that 3244 sentences had incorporated caning [i] . A subsequent Department of State briefing published in 2008 stated that the Singaporean judiciary had handed down 6404 sentences that included either mandatory or discretionary use of caning [ii] . The corporal sentences handed down to Malaysian women that were discussed above were widely held to have been influenced by a clamp-down on “moral” offences mounted by the Malaysian judiciary [iii] .

Flogging will not prevent politicians from making grabs for political capital by criminalising the ill-judged actions of otherwise harmless, well-adjusted and compliant members of society. Moreover, law makers are likely to discount or overlook the close link between flogging and rehabilitation that the proposition case is dependent on.

[i] “Singapore Human Rights Practices, 1994”, US Department of State, February 1995, http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/democracy/1995_hrp_report/95hrp_report_eap/Singapore.html

[ii] “Singapore”, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, US Department of State, 11 March 2008, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2007/100537.htm

[iii] “Malaysia canes women for adultery”, Al Jazeera English, 18 February 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2010/02/201021844619366612.html

There is political capital to be gained from adopting a hard line stance on law and order issues, but there is also political capital to be gained from showing that a particular policy has had a positive effect on reoffending. The Pew Foundation report cited above has also determined that some 90% of US voters were in favour of reducing the length of prison sentences and “strengthening” probation and parole systems [i] .

The opposition assumes that politicians are interested only in cheap, hollow, short term solutions to problem. However, a large number of policy makers are genuinely public spirited, with a sincere interest in solving long-standing social problems. The adversarial nature of politics tends to prevent politicians from seeking elaborate or novel solutions to such issues. Spending money on intangible rehabilitation programmes will always provoke more criticism than spending money on training more police officers.

The resolution allows politicians to engage with the novel solution to criminality offered by rehabilitation while at the same time meeting a general demand for criminals to be visibly and strictly punished for their actions.

There will be a cynical minority of politicians who will see the dramatic nature of flogging as an opportunity to disguise cuts to reform programmes. Equally, there will be others who will use corporal sentences as an opportunity to address and resolve the politically intractable problem of criminal deviance.

[i] “Tackling Recidivism: They All Come Home”, The Economist, 20 April 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18587528

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Poorly constructed laws are not an excuse to abandon the prison system

The proposition does nothing to address the root cause of overcrowding in prisons and “over-inclusive” penal codes. The problems inherent in the status quo are not solved by flogging. The strain placed on penal institutions and systems of sentencing originates in a political culture that cynically exploits public fear of crime and social breakdown to win votes and project power.

As noted above, many law makers frequently set out to “discover” or “invent” new forms of criminal offence, in order to appear proactive in reducing criminality or protecting communities from state or corporate graft [i] . Dogmatic and over-zealous responses to existing problems can also transform civil or disciplinary issues into crimes. A case in point is Indian anti corruption campaigners’ insistence on the use of a broad and open definition of “bribery” in a proposed open-government law. Under the “three strikes” implemented in the US state of California, approximately 3700 non-violent repeat offenders are serving life sentences [ii] . A US medical specialist received a twenty five year prison term when a number of his patients, without his knowledge, were found to have been illegal selling the drugs he had prescribed to them. Additionally, the practice of electing judicial officials in states such as the US incentives candidates to hand out sentences or file charges that generate a positive public response, whether or not they are suitable response to the actions and circumstances of offenders [iii] .

The resolution purports to discipline and restrain criminals, but does nothing to discipline and restrain law makers. Simply replacing custodial sentences with flogging will do nothing to address the factors that have led to an unreasonable expansion of penal law. The process of excessive criminalisation may even be accelerated, as the reduced cost of flogging over imprisonment encourages policy makers to turn to corporal punishment as a populist, knee-jerk response to civil disorder or moral panics.

Evidence of the inappropriate use of corporal punishment has already emerged from states such as Singapore, where, in 1995 a 48-year-old French citizen was caned for breaking the conditions of his Visa. Corporal sentences have also been given to Singaporean citizens convicted of vandalism and criticising Singapore’s judiciary. In Malaysia during 2010 and 2009 [iv] , state-sanctioned religious courts ordered the caning of four women who had admitted to extra marital affairs and drinking alcohol [v] – the first sentences of their kind in the history of the modern Malaysian state.

[i] “Rough Justice in America”, The Economist, 22 July 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

[ii] “Rough Justice in America”, The Economist, 22 July 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

[iii] “Rough Justice in America”, The Economist, 22 July 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

[iv] “Malaysia canes women for adultery”, Al Jazeera English, 18 February 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2010/02/201021844619366612.html

[v] “Malaysia in heated debate over caning of woman”, World Corporal Punishment Research, 25 July 2009, http://www.corpun.com/09archive/myj00907.htm#21492

The opposition is unable to conclusively prove that the growth in the prison population and the reduced effectiveness of rehabilitation is a direct result of over-criminalisation.

It may be true that the list of non-traditional crimes is expanding, but the harm that the resolution is seeking to address arises in the prison system, not in politician’s manifestos.

The majority of offenders imprisoned in the USA and the UK have committed genuine crimes, albeit of a petty or non violent nature. Once exposed to the prison system the criminal tendencies of these individuals are entrenched, rather than eliminated. The prison system does not transform unwitting and harmless offenders into criminals – it makes criminals out of desperate, poorly socialised or ignorant offenders. The prison system harms those placed in its care because it is no longer able to carry out its rehabilitative objectives.

The failure to rehabilitate those convicted of “ordinary” criminality impacts on the prison system itself, when recidivism and social exclusion lead to offenders being repeatedly convicted.

The root cause of the problems in the status quo is not the creation of too many crimes, but a failure to accept the contemporary reality of crime and criminal behaviour. Flogging would allow policy makers to engage with this reality, while satisfying the fundamental need to see wrongdoing punished.

The danger posed by over-inclusive corporal sentences is neatly eliminated by the balancing of judicial and legislative power in liberal democracies. Judges are given discretion in order to allow them to mitigate the effects of atavistic, unreasonable, disproportionate or populist manipulations of the law. If a judge believes that flogging would be excessive or unnecessary, given the nature of an offence, he will usually be free to hand down a different sentence

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
States’ duty to avoid the use of force when solving social problems

How will the severity and legality of flogging be monitored? How will it be reconciled with existing liberal democratic value sets? The majority of western liberal democracies are party to inter-governmental and supranational agreements that expressly forbid states from using torture or degrading or inhuman punishments in any capacity.

The mark of a modern, liberal state is that it uses authority and engagement rather than raw power to protect its citizens. The use of force or power by the state and its agents is harder to regulate and costlier to compensate when it is misapplied. Liberal democracies, apart from being agents of realpolitik, are also aspirational bodies that should strive to reflect and adhere to the values they were created to defend. Arbitrary, coercive force and violence is one of the core harms that a state must guard against. Violence is said to be the preserve of criminals and those acting against the values of society. Therefore, as an aspirational body, the state should hold itself to a higher standard of behaviour than such individuals.

Violence, as most liberal constitutions make clear, should only ever be employed by the state as a last resort. Where a state has the means to do so, even if those means are costly or politically contentious, it should endeavour to achieve peace and order within its own borders without wielding power.

At its broadest, the liberal democratic ideology holds that the rights and autonomy of individual citizens should be only be infringed in order to protect the rights and autonomy of other citizens. This principle would be violated if the state resorted to corporal sentencing as a way of satisfying a mob-like demand for visible and harsh criminal sentencing.

No citizen of a liberal democracy has a right to demand that another citizen, criminal or not, should be subjected to unnecessary pain and suffering by the state.

As distasteful as debaters, moral philosophers and constitutional lawyers may find it, society still has a need to punish criminals. Although it seems to lack logic or reason (inflicting suffering on a criminal cannot be recompense for what he has taken, and may even prevent him from properly compensating his victim), a criminal justice system which does not punish will not command the confidence of the public.

If a criminal justice system is unable to command the confidence of the public, alternative methods of addressing criminal behaviour will be sought. Eliminating the role of punishment in criminal justice would put our entire judicial system at risk.

The resolution calls for a minimal and carefully controlled use of force by the state. This use of force is necessary in order to provide protection for the state’s citizens in the long term – by leaving the prison system free to treat and control offenders who are truly violent and dangerous, and by preventing the social exclusion of non-violent offenders.

While a state should endeavour to demonstrate the virtues of non violence and compromise, it can also fail in its duty to its citizens by being negligent of the needs of offenders, and wilfully ignorant of the most effective solutions to criminality.

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Illegal immigration is facilitated by criminal networks

Repatriating illegal immigrants would lead to fewer opportunities for criminal networks to gain entry to the country. Illegal Immigration is linked to dangerous criminal activity such as people and drug trafficking, terrorism and the sex trade. An estimated 270 000 victims of human trafficking live in industrialized countries, of whom 43% are forced into commercial sexual exploitation, mostly women and girls1. This is both dangerous for those involved in illegal immigration but also increases the criminal activity in a country, putting lawful residents at risk. The state also has a duty to protect its citizens from the harms associated with illegal immigration. Illegal immigration fuels dangerous industries such as prostitution and the drug trade, repatriating illegal immigrants cuts off a vital source of labour for these industries and could contribute to the eradication of these industries.

1 UN.GIFT, "Human Trafficking: The Facts",, accessed 31 August 2011

A repatriation policy will not effectively target this area of illegal immigration. Criminal networks will always find ways of smuggling people into a country and evading detection. All a repatriation policy will do is make these gangs more sophisticated when it comes to hiding illegal immigrants. This not only makes it more difficult to discover and undermine these networks, but also puts the illegal immigrants that are involved in these criminal activities at risk. If there is a standard repatriation policy for all illegal immigrants, vulnerable groups such as trafficked women are less likely to seek help, because not only is it likely that they will be repatriated, but they also put the lives of themselves and their families at risk by going through this procedure, rather than receiving anonymous help. As a result, illegal immigrants that are often at the bottom of criminal organisation will be worse off, while the criminal at the top will get more power over their victims.

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim


Question:
Costs of illegal migrants and harm to labour market

Illegal immigrants cost the state in money, time and resources. It is difficult to give an accurate number on the cost of illegal immigrants for the rest of the population (the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has come up with numbers as high as $1,183 per household in the state of California1), but they are likely to put a strain on resources by not paying taxes whilst demanding social services such as healthcare and education. As a result, they take taxpayer's money away from those who are lawfully entitled to use these services and put a burden on the state. Moreover, illegal immigrants undercut the labour market by accepting low wages and working under illegal conditions. This is harmful to lawful residents because it takes employment opportunities away from them and encourages employers to seek illegal labour in order to keep costs down. Removing the illegal workforce would increase the number of jobs available to lawful residents and force employers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions.

1 Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), "The Costs to Local Taxpayers for Illegal Aliens", 2006,, accessed 31 August 2011

It is impossible to prove that all illegal immigrants are a drain on the system and so their cost to society cannot be used as a justification for repatriation policies. Many illegal immigrants pay taxes in some way and actually contribute to the economy of a country. For instance, every time an illegal immigrant buys something, they pay the same amount of sales tax or VAT as any other person. Illegal immigrants do not always undercut the labour market. The illegal workforce is a necessary part of the economy because lawful residents do not want jobs such as casual labour, agricultural or domestic jobs. Illegal immigrants often provide vital services that would otherwise be too expensive or hard to find if regular workers were employed e.g. cleaning, childcare and manual labour. Goods would become too expensive to produce if, for example, parts of the agriculture industry had to employ lawful residents/migrants.

Religious extremism is not currently considered ‘legitimate’. The community at large have a great disdain for terrorism and similar activity and mainstream religions desperately try to disassociate themselves from extremism, all the while condemning it. [1]

The opposition believes that this good will be so barely perceptible that it does next to nothing to outweigh all the harms that this legislation will bring.

[1] Iannaccone, Laurence R. “Religious extremism: Origins and consequences” Contemporary Jewry. Volume 20. 1996.

An international norm is being breached one way or the other the only question is which one is to be breached. Those in favour of intervention consider that lives saved is worthwhile compared to the problems the breach of a norm against humanitarian intervention might create. All of these norms are there with the intention of saving lives; that is what a norm of preventing any infringement of sovereignty without UN approval is supposed to prevent – conflict and the lives lost this causes. But Internal conflict and genocide has since become much more the problem than aggression between states requiring a rebalancing of which norms are kept.

After war, the primary need of the affected community is to regain day-to-day functionality, create prosperity and achieve reconciliation. While a Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help to air grievances with positive purpose, trials only serve to rake up old hatreds and prolong social divisions.

A just state regularly abrogates people's rights when they intrude upon the rights of others. By sentencing people to prison, for instance, the state takes away rights to movement, association, and property rights from convicted criminals. The right to life should be no different. When you commit certain heinous crimes, you forgo your right to life. This does not devalue life, but rather affirms the value of the innocent life taken by the criminal. Certain crimes are so heinous that the only proportionate sentence is execution. As for the executioners themselves, there are methods of execution that involve multiple executioners which might reduce the associated psychological burdens. At any rate, no one is forced to become an executioner, and people who choose to take on that role do so with full awareness of the risks involved.

The ICC has itself said that “No country in the world has a right to ask the ICC to prosecute certain people” and highlighted that even after ratification “only the court’s prosecutor can decide whether there is sufficient ground for conducting an investigation”. Once ratified Ukraine may ask, but the ICC is not bound to prosecute him because of the request. [1]

[1] ITAR-TASS, ‘Ukraine not able to prosecute Yanukovych through International Criminal Court’, en.itar-tass.com, 26 February 2014, http://en.itar-tass.com/world/720981

Independent nations are capable of trying war crimes themselves.

The ICC is an unnecessary intrusion on national sovereignty. It should be up to each state to determine its own legal system as to how criminal matters should be prosecuted.

The principle of complementarity is no guarantee as it is up to the ICC itself to determine if the state is unable or unwilling, meaning it could take over a case for its own ends.

The fact that Spain never formally renounced sovereignty is irrelevant – when Britain asserted its territorial claim Spain acquiesced.

Additionally if Spain’s claim did not lapse when it evacuated its colony then surely neither did Britain’s. Nor is it obvious that Argentina should have inherited the Spanish claim to the Falklands – they lie 250 miles off the coast of mainland South America.

Britain was of course not going to immediately contest the 1816 claim as she did not yet recognise Argentina so far as Britain was concern the Argentines were not sovereign and did not have sovereignty over any of their territory – at the time the UK recognised Spanish sovereignty over the mainland that Argentina claimed.

While some sex market transactions are more consensual than others, all sex markets treat people like objects to be used and exploited by others. Sex should not be turned into work or a business from which some people profit, even when the labor is allegedly voluntary.

Moreover, it is not evident that the proliferation of legal sex businesses would involve the proliferation of sex businesses that acted ethically and responsibly. If sex businesses could operate in a more lax and permissive environment, many abuses would go undetected. Because of the already noxious aspects of this industry, abuses such as fraud, deception, and coercion are intolerable.

The reason why the death penalty is so expensive – 13 executions since 1978 in California costing around $4bn [1] - is the “super due process” that is necessary in capital cases, especially with the large flaws in the US justice system.

Blacker makes no coherent proposal on how he would modify the appeals system. Removing or reducing it would make it very likely that more innocent people would be executed.

To accuse people who want to prevent criminals deaths of wasting money is more or less victim blaming.

[1] Alarcon, Arthur and Mitchell, Paula, “Executing the will of the voters? A roadmap to mend or end the California legislature’s multi-billion dollar death penalty debacle”, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, 2011, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/LoyolaCalifCosts.pdf

A Truth and Reconciliation process provides a national forum for facing up to the past. It places responsibility for resolving the tensions latent in post conflict scenarios in the hands of the parties to that conflict [i] . The ICC, by contrast, represents an international intrusion into the moral discourses of post conflict societies.

War crimes tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda have taken years to achieve a very small number of convictions. They can often appear to have been hijacked by international bodies such as NATO or the UN, in an attempt to impose a solution from outside (to salve consciences in the west) without providing a real understanding of the particular circumstances of the individual nation.

[i] “The voice of ‘Prime Evil’”, BBC News Online, 28 October 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/truth_and_reconciliation/143668.stm

Instruction: Given a claim, retrieve documents that refute the claim