Victim compensation for acts of terrorism and the limits of the state

ABSTRACT

Little academic attention has been directed towards the victims of terrorism. This article begins to do so by interrogating how victims get compensated, and for how much, in North America and Western Europe. This article examines compensation from three vantage points. First, attention is directed to the variety of state programmes that have been mobilised over the last several decades to build individual and state resilience. I will suggest, however, that many of these programmes fall short, as they fail to meet victim needs. Indeed, as I subsequently illustrate, public and private philanthropy are playing an increasingly important role in providing victim support, sometimes superseding state contributions. Yet while they speak to an affective response that emerges out of and reinforces community building, they are also highly uneven and can entrench existing social inequalities. I then turn to examine the turn to the courts as a means both for recouping further compensation and for achieving some kind of accountability. Notably, the drive to provide victims with other mechanisms for compensation has led to new legislative mechanisms that are reshaping geopolitics by reworking the principle of sovereign immunity. Together, these examples of compensation trouble simplistic characterisations of victimhood while also illustrating how both victims and terrorism are being made governable, often with chilling consequences. They also expose the limits of the state and of state sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• victims
• compensation
• states
• law

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. UN webpage “Supporting and Highlighting Victims of Terrorism”: https://www.un.org/counterterrorism/ctitf/en/supporting-and-highlighting-victims-terrorism.

2. EU website: “EU strengthens rules to prevent new forms of terrorism”: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2017/03/07-rules-to-prevent-new-forms-of-terrorism/. Already in 2004, the EU had instituted a requirement that all states provide compensation for victims of crime.

3. https://www.penninecare.nhs.uk/your-services/manchester-resilience-hub/.

4. Feinberg has administered a wide range of funds to do with victim compensation, as we will see in more detail later, as well as for recent cases such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Volkswagen’s fraudulent emissions data.

5. The role of advocacy groups – many organised by victims and their families – was crucial. Dozens of groups emerged in response to 9/11, such as the World Trade Center Survivor’s Network and the Voices of 11 September (Bottigliero 2012; Gilbert and Ponder 2014; Fluri and Lehr 2015).

6. http://www.giveforfrance.org/en.

7. The monies that are available derive from a $9 billion penalty paid by French bank BNP Paribas for contravening sanctions against Iran, Sudan and Cuba. $1 billion will go to this new fund, with nearly $3 billion allocated to reopened VCF (as described earlier). Future monies for the fund will come from forfeited funds and property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or the Trading with the Enemy Act.

8. Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/J-2.5/FullText.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2017-1436].