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Chapter 10. How Accountability Institutions Matter
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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10 How Accountability Institutions Matter A friend had just taken the man to a local meeting where there was talk of “derechos humanos” and of how the police can’t do certain things to you; if they do, you can report them to La Comisión. The man took the pamphlet they gave him and put it in his shirt pocket (he couldn’t read, but he knew his children would like the bright colors). As he was driving home, the police stopped him on a mountain road. They pulled him out of his truck, shoved him roughly—for no reason. He remembered he still had the pamphlet in his pocket. He took it out, waving it and saying, “I have human rights. You can’t do this, or I’ll go to La Commisión.” The police, looking disgusted, let him go; and the man continued on his way home. His friend later told us about it. —Human rights worker, Chiapas, Mexico, interview with author, August 1996 I nstitutional assessment is always rife with dilemmas. How does one capture the full array of what an institution does? How does one accommodate relative successes and failures alongside a coherent narrative of the institution’s overall effects? That institutional outcomes can be conceptualized (and measured) in vastly different and contested ways, only adds to the complexity of the task. In the anecdote above, was the human rights commission successful in equipping one person with the means to resist police violence? Was the incident isolated, or did it indicate some broader pattern? Should we evaluate the institution’s work in How Accountability Institutions Matter 311 terms of how it empowers people on the street, based on the behavior of a police officer representing the state, or both? These questions are consequential in revealing the multiple ways in which an institution’s influence can be interpreted (and misinterpreted). In the case of accountability institutions, assessment requires that we settle on the notion of “accountability,” on how to conceptualize and measure the term.1 For NHRIs, how exactly does one assess human rights “protection” or “promotion ,” and how does one represent contradictory trends? Despite the challenges, assessing the work of institutions—directly and indirectly—is important. It may not be that we arrive at a final and conclusive sense of the institution’s value. Institutions , after all, are social in nature, simultaneously reflecting and reconstituting a world of actors and structures. In this shifting and complex environment, assessment exercises are always necessarily limited and imperfect, but they serve to document and to mold—reinforcing, altering, reimagining—what the institution does and how social groups co-act with it, as well as how it might be improved. I open the chapter with an overview of how the research on NHRIs has evaluated questions of institutional influence. I then present a framework for assessing the impact of accountability institutions, focusing on how institutions both constrain and empower actors. I touch on the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with assessing any institution, and accountability ones in particular. Rather than focusing on enforcement or punishment, I am attentive to the broader social dimensions of accountability, especially the ways in which accountability offers actors a public, discursive, and normative space in which to confront and engage one another. I also move to outline various stages of accountability (documentation, remediation, and prevention), which I use as a metric of sorts in discussing the work of NHRIs. The overall approach is unorthodox in some ways, though it builds on prior work on NHRIs. Throughout the chapter, I draw on numerous examples from around the world to illustrate my claims. The objective is to show a range of influence—parts of it already considered , some of it new—from which others might draw upon and zero in on while conducting in-depth examinations of particular accountability institutions. As long as institutions are complex and evolving spaces in which various actors come together, assessing their role remains a necessary if partial and ongoing exercise. “Impact” and the Research on NHRIs The literature on NHRIs has existed for just over a decade, with the first generation of work on these institutions focusing mostly on the question of institutional creation. This first wave of work sought to establish that NHRIs existed, both individually and as a broader category of actors, sometimes in a given region of the world. It also set out to describe the contours of these institutions’ design and functions, as well as...