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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/04
Azerbaijan: Turning Over a New Leaf?
May 13, 2004
Abstract
Despite more than six years of increasingly intrusive reforms carried out at the behest of the UN Mission in Bosnia & Herzegovina (UNMIBH), the local police cannot yet be counted upon to enforce the law. Too often - like their opposite numbers in the judiciary - nationally partial, under-qualified, underpaid, and sometimes corrupt police officers uphold the law selectively, within a dysfunctional system still controlled by politicised and nationalised interior ministries.
The 'long arm of the law' is inconsistent and infirm, suffering from jurisdictional divisions that do not hinder organised crime and from national-political manipulations that ensure there is one law for wellconnected members of majority populations and another for powerless minorities. Top-tier criminals ply their trades with relative impunity, ethnic violence is tolerated and corruption is widespread.
