How Do Human Rights Prosecutions Improve Human Rights after Transition?

Human rights prosecutions are one of the main policy innovations transitional regimes use to address past human rights violations and to prevent future ones. In this article, the authors found that not only those prosecutions that resulted in conviction, but also broader prosecution processes themselves, are associated with improvements in future human rights conditions.1 The authors found that human rights prosecutions are especially effective in deterring future torture cases and that even those prosecutions that ended in acquittals correlate with a lower incidence of torture. The authors also found that prosecutions and convictions of high-level state officials appear to have a stronger deterrent effect than prosecutions and convictions of low-level officials. In addition, high-level prosecutions and convictions are associated with improvements in a wider range of physical integrity rights. This study shows that high-level prosecutions correlate with a lower incidence of extrajudicial killing as well as the use of torture.