The May/June 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs – one of the world’s most respected and widely read international policy journals – features an article co-authored by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros, an IJM-friend and Federal Prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The article, entitled “And Justice for All: Enforcing Human Rights for the World’s Poor,” is dedicated to discussing IJM’s “collaborative casework” model – working with local law enforcement to enhance public justice systems – and is supported by powerful casework examples.

The article is available for purchase on the Foreign Affairs website and is really helpful in understanding the importance of the rule of law when it comes to ending slavery. Here is a summary of the article:

 

International norms and legal codes that are meant to protect human rights mean little for people in the developing world, who suffer abuse not for a lack of laws but because these laws are not enforced. It is imperative, therefore, that the human rights community build up political will and capacity among local law enforcement bodies.

For a poor person in the developing world, the struggle for human rights is not an abstract fight over political freedoms or over the prosecution of large-scale war crimes but a matter of daily survival. It is the struggle to avoid extortion or abuse by local police, the struggle against being forced into slavery or having land stolen, the struggle to avoid being thrown arbitrarily into an overcrowded, disease-ridden jail with little or no prospect of a fair trial. For women and children, it is the struggle not to be assaulted, raped, molested, or forced into the commercial sex trade.

Efforts by the modern human rights movement over the last 60 years have contributed to the criminalization of such abuses in nearly every country. The problem for the poor, however, is that those laws are rarely enforced. Without functioning public justice systems to deliver the protections of the law to the poor, the legal reforms of the modern human rights movement rarely improve the lives of those who need them most. At the same time, this state of functional lawlessness allows corrupt officials and local criminals to block or steal many of the crucial goods and services provided by the international development community. These abuses are both a moral tragedy and wholly counterproductive to the foreign aid programs of countries in the developed world. Helping construct effective public justice systems in the developing world, therefore, must become the new mandate of the human rights movement in the twenty-first century.

Go here to see a short video of Gary Haugen speaking more on this. The video serves as a help to understanding the importance of the rule of law. If you can pick up a copy of the entire article, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.