Lautaro Adrian Vilches

Confronting Human Rights violations in Argentinean, Chilean and Venezuelan prisons: A lost struggle? Lautaro Adrian Vilches

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Middle- and South America, grade: 1,3, Free University of Berlin (Otto-Suhr-Institut für Sozial- und Politikwissenschaften), language: English, abstract: It will be argued that Human Rights violations in Argentinean, Chilean and Venezuelan prisons represent a non-resolved challenge for the civil rights coalition. This is related to the fact that the civil rights coalition (1) has had serious problems to adapt to the present institutional framework characterised by the democratization and the anomie of the state. (2) Furthermore, the civil rights coalition has lost the battle for the dominant public security concept, whereas the law and order coalitions has established its repressive oriented strategy as the dominant perspective to increase public security. (3) For this reasons, the accusation presented by the civil rights coalition before both the Interamerican Human Rights (IHR) Commission and Court, as also the sentences and recommendations pronounced by them, can be seen as a first step to revert the current situation but certainly not as a definite victory of the civil rights coalition.