La formazione al rispetto dei diritti umani nel sistema penale

The objective of the book is the improvement, re-organisation and amendment of the curriculum of the schools training staff of the penitentiary system. This involves particularly the amendment of the curricula in order to meet those requirements of the students and teach them those abilities, skills and attitudes which will ensure respect for human rights when they exercise their professional duties – or, to put it in a more realistic way, which will prevent and avert the violations of these rights as recorded by many condemning decisions of the European Court. This emphasizes two critical aspects of the approach we have chosen. We chose to think, reflect and design the necessary changes in the training and the education of these officials on the basis of what has not gone well, with respect to the established violations of human rights. This is not simply an innovation, but a change of perspective, because it raises unexpected questions “What allows the violation of rights by the people socially ap- pointed to these specific roles? What aspects, what elements in their education prepare them for such a situation which goes against the intentions of persons and institutions? How does the asymmetry between education and daily practice legitimizes violations and makes them the rule and not a problem?”. We had to reflect and test “preventively” aspects of the explicit as well as the “hidden” curriculum, the educational material and the disciplinary procedures, which lead to “au- tomatic” actions and reactions of the judge while judging, of the policeman while arrest- ing, of the penitentiary officer while supervising and intervening. We had to reflect on those “automatic” actions and reactions that render human rights invisible, not realistic, not able to be fulfilled, too abstract and theoretical, so that even those responsible for their vi- olation are not aware of the respective situation as being one of anomaly. The preventive approach requires from us to no longer act automatically. The violation of human rights should not be considered as natural, as a necessary evil, as a precondition for protecting social normality and its agents, i.e. the stuff of the criminal systems them- selves. The violation of human rights should not be considered and legitimized as a prem- ise of self-protection, of ensuring individual rights of the executive bodies themselves. On the other hand, the preventive approach establishes the terms and conditions that will allow the cultivation of a mentality and practical attitudes of self-discipline, which will prevent and oppose the violation of rights as a social or sectorial acquis. This –to some extend– reverse planning (based on what we do not want to happen, in- stead of what we want to achieve, which is the usual approach) results from a second specificity, which is the specificity of the field. Judges, police officers and penitentiary staff, represent materially those state institutions, which are entrusted with the intrinsi- cally contradictory duty of managing citizens’ rights. On the one hand, these institutions are there in order to ensure social life in the framework of law and the respect for individual rights, by pushing away whoever and whatever violates them or prevents their exercise and by guaranteeing conditions that will allow all those living in the state’s territory to enjoy these rights. On the other hand, they assume such a major social mission, based on mech- anisms and practices for withdrawing fundamental rights: those who violate the terms of the “common game”, as defined by rights, will have to face the institutionally legitimized abolition of their rights. So the rights of certain people are removed or restricted in the name of the rights of the others. The criminal justice mechanisms and their agents are re- sponsible for managing the implementation of a set of –often arbitrary or incompletely defined– rules, which, on the one hand, protect the rights of law-abiding citizens and, on the other hand, guarantee their precondition, consisting in the removal or restriction of rights for those who violate the law. Therefore, since the exercise of the criminal justice profession (and we are talking in this case indeed about a profession in the Weberian sense), as a fundamental social mission of protecting rights, necessarily leads to a poten- tial (partial) suspension of rights, it becomes for those practicing this profession effec- tively difficult to delimitate rights that remain active for someone who violates the law. The difficulty is, first of all, of a cognitive nature. We are not talking about ignorance of the system in force with respect to those who’s behavior is subject to regulation by the criminal justice system, but of course this plays a role to a certain extent. There is a need to providing information about the legal system in force and information about the ways in which modern societies conceive citizens’ rights. This is particularly important in rela- tion to social rights, which are often underestimated and are, as a result, often not known to the representatives of criminal authorities. But there is a greater need to strengthen the visibility of the claim to rights of those who are brought before the courts and charged, and, also, a lot of those who are investigated and brought in for questioning by the police, or those who are detained and questioned. And there is still a greater need to promote and en- sure ways and methods that will guarantee the preservation and exercise of rights for those who have been deprived of fundamental rights, because they have been condemned or have suffered from the negative consequences of police measures, which are considered as institutionally necessary and essential for maintaining legal order. Having to prepare training curricula which would cope with the above mentioned needs, we found ourselves faced with the intrinsic difficulties of such an educational in- tention. We had, on the one hand, to respond to the rather familiar difficulties of an edu- cational process aiming at the change of attitudes and mentalities, at redefining the ways in which adult people see and experience situations they see around them, in their profes- sional world. On the other hand, we had to consider the even greater difficulty of educat- ing adults, who do not recognize the need for such an education, who are not aware of their ignorance concerning the subject to be taught, adults who, on the contrary, believe they know this subject better than anybody coming from the “outside”, because of their daily practice. Those two difficulties, inherent to the major goals of the project, marked from the be- ginning the logic of the curricula under construction, for the three professional schools. We have thus definitely specified the main educational objective: to make the aspect of human rights discernible in all facets of professional activity of judges, police officers and penitentiary staff; to show them –but also to see with their eyes– all those involved in the fulfillment of their job as bearers of untouchable rights; to re-solve with them the puz- zles of managing critical situations, the puzzles of a contradictory everyday practice; to work out with them what it means to enforce all clauses of human rights conventions, under the actual circumstances of practicing the specific profession. Based on this objective, we had to choose the most appropriate educational method that would allow us to make those professionals more sensitive for the existing but not ac- knowledged problems, to render these problems visible for trainees that are, in the rule, not aware of what they do not know and do not possess a respective cognitive interest. We had to choose learning and teaching procedures and means that would allow us to change the way a daily confirmed reality is perceived and reinforce a differentiated attitude within the practice of a profession defined by situations of exception. For this purpose, we used all available approaches, giving emphasis to documentation, pictorial descriptions, interaction, the study of specific cases, collective resolving of these cases, practical approach and the planning of activities among professionals. We obtained material from all relevant international initiatives and gathered information from the offi- cials of the different institutions, with whom we worked, from the schools, the teachers and the trainees, themselves, focusing on real situations, under realistic conditions. Emphasis was given to things that were happening in practice, outside the classroom. In this way, we were able to prepare a detailed educational programme on human rights that would meet the need of these specific professions, in the actual European present, that is taking into account the recent social changes, the particular needs of an everyday world rapidly intensified and of a penitentiary system under permanent pressure. We tested on a pilot basis both material and procedures, in all four countries, and in all three sectors, we evaluated results, we weighed the conclusions and re-adjusted our choices. Gerasimos Kouzelis