Explaining the Deterrence Effect of Human Rights Prosecutions for Transitional Countries1

TLDR

Human rights prosecutions emerged in the late twentieth century as a key policy innovation aimed at deterring future violations. The article investigates whether prosecuting human rights abuses can reduce repression by analyzing a new dataset of domestic and international prosecutions in 100 transitional countries. The study employs this dataset to assess the deterrent effect of prosecutions on repression across these countries. Findings show that post‑transition prosecutions enhance human rights protection and deter repression beyond national borders, with effects driven by both normative pressures and material punishment, outperforming truth commissions that lack punitive measures.

Abstract

Human rights prosecutions have been the major policy innovation of the late twentieth century designed to address human rights violations. The main justification for such prosecutions is that sanctions are necessary to deter future violations. In this article, we use our new data set on domestic and international human rights prosecutions in 100 transitional countries to explore whether prosecuting human rights violations can decrease repression. We find that human rights prosecutions after transition lead to improvements in human rights protection, and that human rights prosecutions have a deterrence impact beyond the confines of the single country. We also explore the mechanisms through which prosecutions lead to improvements in human rights. We argue that impact of prosecutions is the result of both normative pressures and material punishment and provide support for this argument with a comparison of the impact of prosecutions and truth commissions, which do not involve material punishment.