Adnan Sattar, Criminal Punishment and Human Rights: Convenient Morality
| Author | Leslie Sebba |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520953692 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Reference
Schwartz-Marin E and Cruz-Santiago A (2016) Pure corpses, dangerous citizens:
Transgressing the boundaries between experts and mourners in the search for the dis-
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Conor O’Reilly
University of Leeds, UK
Adnan Sattar, Criminal Punishment and Human Rights: Convenient
Morality, Routledge: London, UK, 2019; 270 pp. ISBN: 978-1-138-
62579-2, £120 (hbk)
Adnan Sattar’s choice of dissertation topic was triggered by his perception of the
absence of a meaningful dialogue between penology and penal philosophy on the
one hand (with their recent focus on “punishment and society”), and the expanding
field of human rights and punishment on the other. While both these areas have
generated considerable academic activity in recent decades, in terms of their
common discourse Sattar justifiably invokes the metaphor of “ships passing in
the night”.
1,2
Indeed, a shared subject matter between these fields does not seem to
have developed organically. The development of human rights regimes
in modern times has been identified with the establishment of the United
Nations and its institutions towards the end of the Second World War,
and their objective of establishing the democratic values associated with the
philosophers of the Enlightenment,
3
as reformulated in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the international conventions adopted
in the following decades. The relevance of these developments to criminology and
penology was hardly evident during those decades and, indeed, human rights ter-
minology was rarely invoked in penological discourse – even in the course of the
heated debates of the 1970s pertaining to the objectives of sentencing. During
the past 3–4 decades, however, a much greater awareness of these topics has
developed.
This enhanced awareness of the relevance of human rights issues to penology
may be attributable to two main factors. One factor is without doubt the scale,
pace and intensity that have accompanied the development of international human
rights norms during this period, some of which have had a direct bearing upon
punishment-related issues. Reference may be made here to the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the ICCPR) of 1966, the Convention
against Torture of 1984, and the activities of the bodies charged with the imple-
mentation of these norms – the Human Rights Committee under the ICCPR,
including its General Comments and jurisprudence, and the various sets of
448 Punishment & Society 23(3)
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