ABSTRACT
Calls for governments and government agencies to be ‘human rights compliant’ have a long history, and since they were established in Britain in the nineteenth century, the ‘new police’ (what we now call ‘public police’) have been in the sights of rights activists. What is understood by the term ‘human rights’, however, has evolved substantially in recent decades, and so is what is understood by the term ‘policing’. Most specifically, in the latter case, the term ‘policing’ has come to be understood as not just what the public police do, but as a social and political function that is performed by a growing array of state and non-state providers. In this chapter, we explore the implications of human rights for the governance and accountability of policing in an increasingly pluralized policing environment, domestically, internationally and transnationally.
