Part III: A systematic change perspective
Situation analysis – Racial discrimination in the police and judiciary in European Country X
STAKEHOLDER Analysis
high
Ministry of
interior
Police
management
POWER
Justice
system
Tabloid
press
Police
union
Political
Party 1
Pol.
Party 2
Quality
media
Privat
security
firms
low
negative
Adminstrative
Court
Police
reform
project
Ombudsperson
Police
staff
Lawyers
Ass.
Pol. Party 3
Academic
and
research
institutions
Rights
holders
Activists
HR
Ass of
judges
CPT
FRA
ECRI
CERD
Amnesty
Anti-Racist
NGOs
Justice
initiative
INTEREST
positive
The result is a tentative picture of the particular forces at play. It allows a first grasp of the prospects/
difficulties in achieving the change and, very importantly, an indication regarding which stakeholders
would have to be worked on in order to get the change realised. Naturally, the outcome will be that
the interest of the most powerful actors would have to change and/or the power of those with a strong
interest would have to increase.
Summing up: On the basis of the identification of a concrete problem and the desired change, the following
steps need to be undertaken in a stakeholder analysis:
hh Step 1: Identification of relevant stakeholders in a systematic way
hh Step 2: Locating of stakeholders in the power-interest grid
hh Step 3: Assessing each stakeholder with regard to its relative power and interest as well as
susceptibility to influence or its power potential
hh Step 4: Drawing conclusions for concrete change strategies
Several NPMs have indicated that they do a basic form of stakeholder analysis, but no NPM seems to use
this tool in any systematic manner. Several NPMs stated that they knew their stakeholders in terms of the
authorities to be targeted or they had good cooperation with relevant NGOs.
NPMs as a stakeholder – the relative power of NPMs
The concept of power emerges as fundamental in this approach to stakeholder analysis, and, more
generally, occupies a prominent place in the context of thinking about how change in society can be
brought about.
In the context of the NPM’s work, it is worth remembering that a fundamental function of human rights
monitoring is the protection against abuse of power. In situations of a radical imbalance of power in places
of deprivation of liberty, with its specific characteristics of being opaque to the outside world, distant
from society and dehumanising, human rights purport upholding human dignity and the concrete human
rights of persons deprived of their liberty.
In trying to uphold human rights within their mandate, NPMs do not normally have explicit enforcement
powers and cannot order specific changes.295 Their power only encompasses making recommendationsand
For the examples of the few NPMs with enforcement powers see Part II, Chapter 1.7.
295
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