A Dissertation SUBMITTED to the FACULTY of the UNIVERSITY of MINNESOTA BY
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THE IMPACT OF HUMAN RIGHTS LAW IN TIME A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Geoffrey T. Dancy IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Kathryn Sikkink July 2013 Geoffrey T. Dancy 2013 © ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am absolutely, unequivocally indebted to my adviser Kathryn Sikkink for her counsel, her support, and her infectious commitment to good social science. I also owe a great deal to Ron Krebs, who suffered through repeated office visits filled with half-formed ideas, and served persistently as a devoted critic and ally of my project. I would like to thank Ben Ansell for his help with the numbers, and James Ron for going out of his way not only to stay on my committee despite adversity, but also to provide me with his characteristically brilliant feedback. Also, I appreciate deeply my colleagues who participated in our dissertation group, including Giovanni Mantilla, Ralitsa Donkova, Bridget Marchesi, and Brooke Coe. Additionally, I want to give a special thanks to those who provided invaluable comments at various meetings of the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, including Bud Duvall, David Samuels, Lisa Hilbink, Jonas Bunte, Laura Thaut, and Ismail Yaylaci. The majority of this research would not have been finished without the assistance of the National Science Foundation, which supported me for three years through the Oxford- Minnesota Transitional Justice Collaborative. Also, I benefited greatly from the support of the University of Minnesota Graduate School, which provided me with a year of funding through the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Mom and Dad, you have always supported me despite my strangeness, and you never questioned my desire to pursue a twenty-year education. I could not have done this without you. And to Menaka, my partner and fellow traveler through this world: thank you for everything. i For Steve Poe, mentor and friend ii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ......................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: The Impact of Human Rights Law ....................................................................1 Chapter 2: Rethinking How and When In The Current Approach ....................................32 Chapter 3: Constituent Power, Legal institutions, and Long-Term Change .....................68 Chapter 4: Human Rights in Autocracies: Dissent, Defensive Treaty Ratification, and Democratization ....................................................................................96 Chapter 5: Human Rights in New Democracies, Part One: Domestic Demands, Transitional Justice and Short-Term Consequences ........................................................156 Chapter 6: Human Rights in New Democracies, Part Two: Transitional Justice and the Long-Term Micro-Dynamics of Repression ..........................................228 Chapter 7: Human Rights After War: Enforcement and the Prevention of Conflict Recurrence ....................................................................................................266 Chapter 8: Toward Possibilism in Human Rights Politics ..............................................309 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................328 \ iii LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1. A Glimpse at Changes in South Africa Over Time, 1980-2005 ...................... 63 Table 4.1. Distribution of Autocratic Ratifications ........................................................ 119 Table 4.2. Determinants of Treaty Ratifications, 1976-2006 ......................................... 150 Table 4.3. Ordered Probit Models of Short-term Repression, 1976-2006 ...................... 151 Table 4.4. Proportional Hazard Models of Democratic Regime Change, 1970-2010 .... 152 Table 4.5. List of Human Rights Campaigns, 1970-2006 .............................................. 153 Table 4.6. Summary of Variables Used in Analyses ...................................................... 155 Table 5.1. Democratic Transitions .................................................................................. 220 Table 5.2. Variable Descriptions .................................................................................... 225 Table 5.3. Determinants of Transitional Prosecutions .................................................... 226 Table 5.4. Short-term Risks Associated with Transitional Justice ................................. 227 Table 6.1. Fixed-Effects OLS Regressions of Short-term and Long-term Repression .. 264 Table 6.2. Fixed-Effects Negative Binomial Model Predicting Ordinary Prosecutions . 265 Table 7.1. Hypotheses Derived From Theory ................................................................. 292 Table 7.2. Description of Post-Conflict Data .................................................................. 296 Table 7.3. Cox Models of Conflict Recurrence, Dyadic Level of Analysis ................... 307 Table 7.4. Cox Models of Conflict Recurrence, Country Level of Analysis .................. 308 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. Trends in Human Rights Legal Actions, 1980-2010 ...................................... 15 Figure 1.2. Sanctions and Shaming Over Time, 1980-2010 ............................................. 20 Figure 1.3. Human Rights Legal Actions and Torture...................................................... 27 Figure 2.1. Global Mean of Repression Before and After Democratization, 1980-2010 . 60 Figure 2.2. Global Mean of Repression Before and After Civil War, 1980-2010 ............ 60 Figure 2.4. The Correlates of Repression Approach ......................................................... 66 Figure 2.5. Alternative ‘Process’ Approach ..................................................................... 66 Figure 3.1. HRLAs, Democracy, and Civil War ............................................................... 69 Figure 3.2. Count of Human Rights Treaty Ratifications 10 Years Before and After Democratization, 1970-2010............................................................................................. 88 Figure 3.3. Count of Human Rights Treaty Ratifications 10 Years Before and After Conflict Termination, 1970-2010 ..................................................................................... 93 Figure 4.1. Non-violent Dissent Events Under Autocracy, 1972-2006 .......................... 126 Figure 4.2. Ongoing Human Rights Campaigns Under Autocracy, 1972-2006 ............. 126 Figure 4.3. Changes in Probability of Ratification (Logit), 1972-2006 .......................... 131 Figure 4.4. Percent Change in Expected Number of Ratification (Count), 1972-2006 .. 131 Figure 4.5. Change in Probability of Levels of Repression (PTS), 1976-2006 .............. 136 Figure 4.6. Change in Probability of Levels of Repression (CIRI), 1980-2006 ............. 137 Figure 4.7. Change in Probability of Levels of Torture (CIRI), 1980-2006 ................... 138 Figure 4.8. Change in Probability of Levels of Killing (CIRI), 1980-2006 ................... 138 Figure 4.9. Change in Autocratic Duration Conditioned on Covariates ......................... 147 Figure 5.1. Previous Repression and Proseuctions ......................................................... 201 Figure 5.2. Dissent and Prosecutions .............................................................................. 202 Figure 5.3. Determinants of Prosecutions ....................................................................... 208 Figure 5.4. Change in Probability of Violent Events Caused by Transitional Justice .... 212 Figure 5.5. Transitional Justice and Ethnic Violence ..................................................... 216 Figure 5.6. Transitional Justice and Total Civil Violence .............................................. 216 Figure 6.3. Marginal Effect of TRPs on Overall Repressive Violence in the Short Term ......................................................................................................................................... 252 Figure 6.4 Marginal Effects of Cumulative TRPs on Overall Repression (Long Term) 253 Figure 6.5. Correlation between Cumulative TRPs and Cumulative ORPs ................... 257 Figure 7.1. Effect of Amnesties on Likelihood of Conflict Recurrence ......................... 300 Figure 7.2. Effect of Amnesties on Likelihood of Conflict Recurrence ......................... 300 Figure 8.1. Percentage of Books Using ‘Unintended Consequences’ Over Time .......... 319 v Dancy · Chapter 1 · INTRODUCTION 1 1 CHAPTER 1: THE IMPACT OF HUMAN RIGHTS LAW Concerns over impact have long been used to challenge the work of human rights proponents. In the 1960s, when Amnesty International first began campaigning on behalf of tortured and imprisoned dissidents, its leadership had to dispel criticism that it could actually make things worse for people in danger.2 Jimmy Carter’s rights-sympathetic foreign policy in the late 1970s was blamed for the ascendancy of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the Ortega brothers in Nicaragua.3 Activists’ attempts in early 1980s to hold Latin American military leaders accountable for their paranoid and medieval assault on civilians were derided for jeopardizing democratic advancement with backward- looking and vengeful concerns for justice.4 Human rights advocates at the