SDG 16 Against Impunity
A world that can write rights but cannot restrain power has not built justice; it has built theatre. The present time is full of treaties, conventions, and declarations, and none of them can be more utopian than SDG 16, the promise of peace, justice, and strong institutions. However, for the people who live in the time of conflicts and corruption, this promise cannot be considered a right; it seems to them just an empty slogan. The problem does not lie in the lack of laws in this world; it lies in the very nature of law.
This is the central contradiction of SDG 16. It calls for states to curb violence, promote equal access to justice, establish accountability mechanisms, and respect fundamental freedoms. However, such goals will not thrive in conditions of impunity freely flowing between the international and domestic spheres. A war criminal who avoids prosecution, a state that disregards court rulings, a judge forced to remain silent, and police under political influence, these are not individual problems. They are all interconnected pieces of the same structure.
Justice and peace have historically been seen as opposing forces over the years. In the common narrative, achieving peace is possible by forgetting about previous injustices, by paying a price for stability through political settlements. However, peace founded upon silence is seldom peace. Such peace is merely a break in hostilities. Societies cannot ignore mass murders, acts of torture and disappearance, and systematic humiliation despite any directive asking them to look beyond their past. Injustice creates a public record of resentment, distrust and future conflicts. Thus, justice is not a privilege that can be afforded only after achieving peace. It is part of the foundation on which lasting peace rests.
Indeed, this dilemma is reflected most overtly in the international law regime. There have been numerous declarations of the United Nations pertaining to occupation, settlement of crimes against civilians and war crimes. These declarations are normally accompanied with very firm wording that could be viewed as having both legal and moral implications. But, whenever there is a powerful state or its allies on the opposite side, the execution of such declarations becomes unpredictable, postponed or even impossible. The use of Security Council veto has transformed serious crises into mere theatrical display of diplomatic language.
The International Criminal Court is just another facet to the same dilemma. It was established in order to ensure that acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity would not go unpunished. However, the Court does not have any means of policing on its own. Rather, it relies on states for the arrest of those suspected and turning them in. In cases where states deny their cooperation or protect the suspect, international justice gets caught between law and politics. The result is a damaging impression: justice reaches those without power more easily than those protected by power. It offers domestic lessons as well. Political elites come to know that accountability can be negotiated. Just as international warrants can be ignored, local courts can be hijacked. Just as global law cannot tame the strong, national law can become their cover. Politicization of the prosecution agencies, intimidation of the judiciary, selective policing and the weaponization of legal processes become routine. The victims are often common people. For them, the injustice takes the form of a land conflict that is not going to be considered due to high costs of legal action, a bribe required for the case to progress, or the influential accused who does not even bother appearing in court. Once the rule of law is perceived as a concept available to some but not others, then faith in the whole system replenishes. That disbelief creates the ground on which violence grows.
It is therefore important to take SDG 16 as a more than technical objective related to development because it is not merely about teaching judges, digitizing archives, or reducing backlogs. Rather, it is about the faith that institutions will protect people from arbitrary use of power. Without such faith, all legal reforms would become purely cosmetic since the courthouse would be modern in appearance but the judge would fear for his own life, and the poor would not be able to afford a lawyer. The following cases provide evidence of how this cycle might be broken. Although the Gacaca courts of Rwanda after 1994’s genocide had their flaws and were criticized, they proved that community-based justice can offer solutions to communities on a larger scale than any formal institution alone could. The Colombian transitional justice system after 2016 prioritized victims, truth and accountability, but it is also an example of how good legal design can suffer if political support is lost.
There is a newer example from Bangladesh. The uprising in 2024, initiated by students, began due to quota reforms, but eventually went beyond those reforms and turned into a broader struggle for accountability, institution reform, and ending of impunity. For the time being, issues of judicial independence, executive intervention, and public distrust of institutions have resurfaced in national discourse. The question now is whether popular anger can turn into sustainable reforms. While street politics can pave the way, it is only through independent judiciary, prosecution, legal aid, freedom of media and civil society vigilance that this door will remain open.
The lesson here is simple – if impunity is a connected crime, then justice should be a connected solution. There can be no SDG 16 with international tribunals that do not have the ability to enforce. There can be no SDG 16 with domestic courts that are not independent. There can be no SDG 16 without anti-corruption agencies having any clout, legal aid being funded and the press and civil society being protected. Strong institutions are not built by law on paper alone. They are built by linking law to consequence.
This calls for tough decisions. Development assistance and diplomacy should be linked more strongly with developments toward judicial independence and institutional accountability. The international system needs to rely less heavily on those with power. Domestic reform needs to support not just the courts but the entire justice system including public defenders, investigative reporting, witness protection, oversight systems and legal aid. Most important, societies need to abandon their tendency to view impunity as a passing phase. It is a system and systems can only be dismantled purposefully.
In that respect, SDG 16 serves as an indication of how seriously the world takes its commitments. Peace, justice and strong institutions are not something that can be achieved by better promises. They can only be achieved by ensuring that the law becomes powerful enough to apply to the powerful, commonplace enough to serve the poor, and credible enough to prevent violence from recurring. Until then, the architecture of impunity will continue to stand intact because some of us are unwilling to destroy it.
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