Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop on Wednesday, September 12 from 4:15-6:15 pm at the Political Science Thesis Room (5th floor).  Veronica Michel (John Jay College, CUNY) will be presenting her paper, “Specializing Justice: NGOs and the Rule of Law in Latin America” (co-authored with Shannon Walsh). The paper is attached and the abstract is below. Come to support your peer, engage in a lively discussion, share free wine and snacks, and network with your department.

To download the paper, click here

Abstract:

With the goal of improving access to justice and human rights performance, NGOs in Mexico and Guatemala now provide victims of gender violence accompaniment through legal proceedings and sometimes pro bono litigation. Current research suggests that NGO- led support for victims of crime and violence are crucial and necessary to attend to cases that would otherwise be left unresolved or abandoned by public prosecutors who lack the resources, will, and/or capacity to competently manage their caseload. But why did NGOs began expanding towards services beyond litigation? In this paper, we address this question by analyzing the expansion of various services provided to victims of feminicide and their relatives by local NGOs in Guatemala and Mexico. Through comparisons of cases of femicide (killings of women), we show when and why NGOs began to dedicate to victim services beyond litigation in Mexico and Guatemala.