Book review: The Locust Effect, by Gary Haugen, Victor Boutros

by Gary Haugen, Victor Boutros
Oxford University Press
4 stars
David Wilson

In 1885, a racist Seattle mayor appointed himself police chief and tasked 100 men to stage an attack on the Chinese community: cue an orgy of murder, looting, forced expulsion and arson.

Today, officially sanctioned civic violence of that intensity is hard to imagine, but it still happens: just ask the founder of the human rights group International Justice Mission (IJM) Gary Haugen, and US federal prosecutor Victor Boutros, who cite the event in their expose of the criminal justice system in the developing world, which seems a century behind.

In many poor countries, rape, forced labour and land theft occur routinely, it seems. With a hint of bitterness, the authors note that development agencies fixate on less thorny issues - hunger, disease and homelessness. Meanwhile, suspects railroaded into the court system on wobbly grounds wilt.

"My IJM colleagues and I have sat hundreds of times in cramped, dilapidated and stuffy developing-world courts as a mangy clump of pretrial detainees are shuffled into court for yet another charade of Kafkaesque insanity where they will sit through some intermittent non-event that they don't understand and in which nothing meaningful or comprehensible will happen before they are shuffled back to their detention cell," Haugen writes.

As the extract shows, he and Boutros have a knack for expressing themselves with acid exactitude.

In their view, the near collapse of justice in the emerging world ranks as one of the past half century's worst social disasters. One reason for the decline, they say, is heritage: old colonial systems were designed to pamper the rich. Apparently, the habit became entrenched - just like the occupier's language in some cases: they cite a Swahili-speaking Kenyan courtroom defendant who is forced to grapple with English.