Impunity

Hey, I learned something today!

From Al Jazeera English (emphasis added):

Farida Deif, researcher in the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch, said: "A courageous young woman faces lashing and prison for speaking out about her efforts to find justice.

"This verdict not only sends victims of sexual violence the message that they should not press charges, but in effect offers protection and impunity to the perpetrators."

This is the first time I can remember seeing the word impunity not preceded by with. It looked so strange that I thought it might be a typo for immunity, like the kind prosecutors sometimes give to witnesses who would otherwise be subject to prosecution themselves. Most of the time, when I hear or read that someone acts "with impunity", I take it to refer to the attitude of the person acting, the confidence that their crimes will go unpunished. This isn't something it makes sense to "offer" someone, even unintentionally and even only "in effect" -- you can offer someone the opportunity to act with impunity, but you can't offer the impunity itself.

But never mind all that, because I looked it up, and sure enough, impunity means precisely "exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss". So not only does it refer to the fact of non-punishment rather than just to the expectation of non-punishment, but it can refer to "exemption" rather than mere "freedom" from punishment. So when a prosecutor grants a witness immunity, I suppose she is also granting him impunity. Then again, the dictionary's usage example was "laws were flouted with impunity", which lets me go on believing it's weird to use impunity without with.

In any case, it may be that Al Jazeera's command of the English language is better than mine.

I suppose I have to compare and contrast Al Jazeera's (English-language) coverage of this story with the U.S. media's. The second sentence of the Al Jazeera story is:

But the decision to give a woman who was gang raped a six months jail term and 200 lashes received only mild criticism from the US on Monday.

The headline on CNN.com (as of now) is "Clinton: Saudi rape verdict 'an outrage'", and the article says in part:

Labeling it "an outrage", Sen. Clinton urged the U.S. government to protest the decision.

"The Bush administration has refused to condemn the sentence and said it will not protest an internal Saudi decision," the Democratic presidential frontrunner said in a statement.

That's not so different, but I have to admit that I read the CNN piece first and sort of missed the fact that the Bush administration has not condemned something so obviously condemnable. The Al Jazeera version puts it much more bluntly. I guess Democrats, particularly those running for President, criticize the Bush administration so often that I no longer assume it means they've actually done something wrong.