Extrajudicial punishment

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Extrajudicial punishment consists of various actions to imprison, relocate, harm, torture, or kill someone outside of the legal system, without legal process, and without supervision from a court and its systems of recourse. In short: It's when someone breaks the law to take away someone else's rights. It is similar to vigilante justice, but extrajudicial punishment is usually illegal actions of state agents (law enforcement, intelligence agencies, armed forces) which may be approved by authorities (tacitly or otherwise), while vigilantism generally refers to mob justice or people acting covertly and not even pretending to be lawful agents of the state.














A Waffen-SS officer about to murder a Jewish woman and her child in Ukraine.

Extrajudicial execution is a euphemism for murder.

More specifically, extrajudicial execution may occur when the state kills someone without proper due process. This can involve the direct agents of the state (such as the military or police), or indirect agents such as private citizens whom the state elects not to punish for their actions. (This presupposes that the private citizen does not have an affirmative defense that would hold up in the state's courts of law, such as self-defense.)[note 3]

Extrajudicial executions are almost universally considered a violation of human rights. However, many states continue the practice, either in secret or else justifying it as necessary. The most common justification involves claiming a state of emergency, or that the killings are necessary because the judiciary is weak, slow, or corrupt. Human-rights organizations reject these excuses in almost all cases.


In places like the Philippines, extrajudicial executions may happen when a populist leader convinces the public that dispensing with constitutional niceties is the most expedient way to bring about law and order. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has responded to criticism by saying that Germany killed many Jews and that the U.S. killed many Native Americans[11] - a textbook example of the Tu quoque fallacy.

On the other hand, "extrajudicial executions" also occur commonly in states where the centralized power is very weak. The closer a state is to ochlocracy, the greater the chances of extrajudicial executions.[note 4]

Most of the time,[citation needed] the term is used in reference to killings in Latin America (such as the campaign of killings in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s under Augusto Pinochet) or in the failed states of the world. It is often forgotten that one of the longest-running campaigns of "extrajudicial executions" was that of lynching in the United States. For half a century, it was commonplace in much of the country for mobs of whites to hang African Americans for merely breaching the social etiquette of the times. Afterwards, none of the participants would be punished in any way (see KKK). Sometimes the participants included local government officials, including law enforcement.


Assassination involves the extra-judicial killing of a prominent figure. Assassins may operate within a given society (witness John Wilkes Booth on 14 April 1865) or from outside (as in the the killing of the commander of Iran's Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani on 3 January 2020[12]). Collateral damage may occur during assassinations (for example, at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914).

Lynch mobs[edit]

Three black men lynched in Georgia.


Historically, a lynch mob is any mob of people whipped up to kill someone (by definition: by lynching). While hanging is a typical image invoked from lynches, other forms such as shooting, mutilating, forcing a victim off a bridge, and burning alive are also common, and lynching by hanging is generally easier to photograph (hence such examples show up more frequently in historical records). While groups punishing individuals without legal proceedings was a common feature of early law enforcement (as the court system either didn't exist at all yet or was exclusively reserved for the wealthy), the term lynching goes back to the 1780s American Lynch Law, referring to a punishment without trial, and became inextricably associated with racially motivated violence. In the Southern United States, from the Reconstruction era (of 1865 to 1877) until the 1960s, it was a common occurrence for groups of whites to catch black men who were accused of some offense, including rape or other sexual misconduct, and to lynch them. While the public perception at the time was that these lynchings were mostly of rapists, a 1919 study of 2,500 Southern lynchings found that only one-sixth of victims had been accused of rape or sexual misconduct.[13] Rarely were these accusations ever fairly adjudicated.

Recently found and restored photographs have documented the often festive air of American public hangings, where whole communities would get together and "have picnics" in the shadow of a dead black man.[14] (Note: this is not the origin of the French loan word "picnic", as a rather silly urban legend claims.) Overlapping that phenomenon is the use of mob violence to repress organized labor in the South and the American West.[15] One of the first major civil-rights fights of the 20th century involved the campaign to make lynching a federal crime, over objections from Southern Democrats (this is when the Democrats were the bad guys) that it was necessary to maintain public order. In the period from 1882 to 1968, some 200 bills were introduced in Congress attempting to outlaw lynching, all of which were rejected. This struggle led to the emergence of the NAACP as a major civil-rights organization. Lynchings primarily targeted black men in the South, but other ethnic groups also became victims, and in other parts of the U.S.,[16] such as the lynching of Chinese people in 1871Wikipedia's W.svg, possibly the largest mass-lynching in American history. In 2005 the United States Senate hadsaw fit to apologize for its historical stymieing of anti-lynching bills. It took until late 2018 for a bill, Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018, to be successfully passed in the House and the Senate.[17]

In modern usage, the term "lynch mob" is often used as pejorative description of a group that gets angry at an individual, with the implication that the individual is being subjected to unfair persecution. This usage can be controversial, since some say it masks the true horror of the literal and historical lynch mobs. The single most controversial usage of the phrase was probably Clarence Thomas's claim that he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching".[18]


See also[edit]

External links[edit]


  4. Good examples of this include present-day Iraq and Somalia.


  1. Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  3. See the Wikipedia article on Unlawful enemy combatant.
  7. The ACLU's page on the subject
  9. EU endorses damning report on CIA
  11. Duterte tells EU: FUCK YOU!
  12. Harel, Amos; Tibon, Amir; Khoury, Jack; Landau, Noa (4 January 2020). "Iran Says It Has Decided How to React to U.S. Strike That Killed Soleimani". Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/four-rockets-hit-military-base-near-baghdad-airport-report-says-1.8350357. "The United States carried out a strike that killed Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps - Quds Force, the Pentagon said Friday.
    Tehran has vowed "crushing revenge" for the killing, saying that the assassination will double motivation to retaliate against the U.S. and Israel."
  14. American Lynchings WARNING: Graphic content