Towards a human rights centred criminology

Guest post by Leanne Weber and Marinella Marmo. Leanne is a Research Professor in Criminology in the Canberra Law School and a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford University. Leanne researches policing and border control using critical and human rights frameworks. Marinella Marmo is Professor of Criminology at Flinders University. She is a multiple award-winning tertiary education academic, and she has published extensively in the area of critical criminology and human rights. 

This article introduces a series of four posts that summarise individual chapters from A Research Agenda for a Human Rights-Centred Criminology, edited by Leanne Weber and Marinella Marmo and published in the series Palgrave Critical Studies in Human Rights and Criminology.

The unfolding genocide in Gaza and gross human rights abuses and crimes against humanity being carried out in many other parts of the world have revealed the manifold failings of international human rights regimes to curtail state and non-state violence. But despite the impotence of the United Nations machinery to enforce legal agreements, human rights remain one of the few supra-national frameworks from which the actions of states and state-sanctioned actors can be judged.

For those of us fortunate to live in relatively peaceful parts of the globe, the criminal justice system and related areas of crime, harm and law enforcement are key sites for the exercise and contestation of power. These sites of contestation arise inter alia in racialized policing, prevention of violence against women, border violence, incarceration and equitable access to social support. There is therefore a critical role for criminology scholars in monitoring human rights compliance through empirical studies that go beyond legal analysis, while also critiquing the theory and practice of human rights mechanism themselves.

Despite these pressing needs, the discipline has been slow to advance this critical research program. A Research Agenda for a Human Rights-Centred Criminology explores what such an agenda might look like, featuring critical writing that explores the achievements, shortcomings and potential of human rights approaches to a range of criminological challenges. The contributions discuss civil, political, social and economic rights from the right to life and personal integrity, to protest, to health and an adequate standard of living, to freedom of identity and expression and the right to be free from arbitrary detention and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Over the next few days, some of the authors published in the collection will set out their contribution within their own fields of expertise.

In her piece on governing through rights, Claire Hamilton reveals how human rights regimes have been used across Europe to simultaneously contain and entrench authoritarian securitization measures in the post-9/11 environment. Andriani Fili and Mary Bosworth focus on the particular difficulty of securing the rights of migrants held in administrative detention in Europe and note the shortcomings of human rights regimes in effecting systemic change. Claire Loughnan and Steven Caruana extend the boundaries of criminology by examining the human rights dimensions of aged care facilities in Australia, understood inter alia as places of confinement and control. And Silvana Tapia Tapia brings us back to the longstanding concern of critical criminology with carcerality, applying an abolitionist and post-colonial lens to expose ‘human rights penality’ in Ecuador.

The edited collection contains additional contributions that intersect critical criminology and human rights. Indeed, with such an unstable geo-political situation now more than ever we need to focus on the importance of human rights and the role of criminology. This year the United Nations will celebrate its 74th Human Rights Day (on December 10th) with the slogan: “All Human Beings Are Born Free and Equal in Dignity and Rights”. And yet, we observe we are not going in that direction. Even the UN Sustainable Development Goals, set in 2015 to be achieved by 2030, look further away than ever.

There are also new challenges that criminology ought to consider with a human rights lens. With the recent developments of generative artificial intelligence (AI), criminologists also need to question the human rights impact. In March 2024 the UN General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution on the promotion of “safe, secure and trustworthy” artificial intelligence systems that “will also benefit sustainable development goals”. However, we are only now starting to ponder how AI may exacerbate the erosion of individual freedoms through (even more and often inaccurate) surveillance; and the replacement of independent, sensitive and human-centric thought and judgement (eg, from police officers, judges and other stakeholders of the criminal justice system). AI may also affect perpetuated and emerging inequalities by how vulnerable groups are digitally (mis)coded and (mis)classified, as by now we know that AI has been shown to reflect bias inherent in data reading and training. This will intensify social exclusion, prejudice, and discrimination.

Taken together, the critical, human rights centred criminology imagined by the authors featured in this blog, and by other contributors to the book, is a criminology that works for human rights, but not necessarily through them. By this we mean that additional bodies of critical thought such as counter colonialism, feminism, abolitionism and other critical frameworks will always remain essential as tools to analyse structures that facilitate or threaten human wellbeing.  Their vision for a human rights centred criminology is not as a discreet sub-discipline, but rather a way of doing both criminology and human rights better in order to analyse and respond to a continuum of harms perpetrated by state and non-state actors. The task of applying these insights to effectively control the egregious harms taking place around the world, raises broader questions still about the urgency of shaping a new, and more peaceful, world order.

We invite criminologists to engage more and write about human rights in their different sub-disciplines, also because human rights are a core element of discussion at local, regional and international level by politicians, judges, lawyers, law enforcement agencies, and other key players. The new generation of criminology students will benefit in understanding what the human rights discourse is and how to critique it, as we know far too well, especially from Global South criminology scholars, how far we are from a balanced discussion. To advance our understanding and positioning on human rights, we invite criminologists to publish their research in the Palgrave Critical Studies in Human Rights and Criminology series.

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