Political Crimes

A political crime is any illegal action by an individual, group, or government that has a political motivation or impact. This type of crime most often includes actions taken by or against governments. However, individuals and groups may also target each other for political purposes.

Several aspects of the definition require clarification. The initial issue, illegality, involves the violation of a country's domestic law or accepted practices in international law, including human rights standards. There are four complications in defining illegal actions in this manner.

First, a problem can exist when domestic law is not consistent with international law and human rights norms. Governments typically will follow their own laws first, especially if it is in their interest to do so. However, increasingly, the international norms of human rights provide the basis for superseding domestic laws that violate the rights recognized by the international community.

Second, the perpetrators—for example, protestors—may view the existing domestic legal framework as illegitimate. Instead of viewing their actions as illegal, they regard them as an effort to overturn unjust laws. Though the term political crime carries a pejorative meaning, often only the target of the action may view the protests as crimes. For example, the state branded as criminals those who protested against apartheid in South Africa or opposed racial segregation in the United States, yet these protestors, and many in the international community, believed their actions were a legitimate response to immoral laws. Moreover, terrorist groups maintain they are fighting in the name of a just cause, thus one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Third, when governments are the perpetrators, they rarely admit to committing any political crimes. Moreover, governments will often maintain their actions, though harsh, were necessary to protect the state and its citizens from a serious threat. These threats can be external where a foreign adversary is used to justify repression at home, or internal such as the leftist subversion of the National Security Doctrine used by many Latin American governments in the 1960s and 1970s. States can argue that national security and the need for order trump all other considerations, allowing them wide latitude in responding to enemies.

Finally, defining specific actions as politically criminal can be context dependent. For example, acceptable political dissent has evolved over time so that protest actions acceptable today might have landed someone in prison fifty to one hundred years ago.

Moreover, it is accepted practice that the state may suspend certain rights, such as freedom of movement, free speech, and due process rights, in times of emergency. As a result, a state can use a crisis as an excuse to perform actions that domestic and international law would normally consider illegal.

The second aspect of the definition that requires clarification is the list of potential perpetrators. Individuals, or groups such as terrorist or guerrilla groups who are organized in their efforts to commit the crime, can commit political crimes. For both individuals and groups, there is no affiliation with the state or role in carrying out government policy. In some cases, an affiliation with the state may be present but murky and difficult to prove. For example, paramilitary groups in Latin America, or the janjaweed, an armed militia group in Darfur, Sudan, appear to be doing the bidding of the government, yet the state denies any connection. Usually, people accuse governments of committing political crimes. However, individuals or organizations that work for the state such as police, the military, or intelligence agencies often carry out these crimes.

...