Get the Word Out: Monitoring Human Rights Reduces Abuse

• In Event: Poster Session: International Collaboration

Abstract

This paper shows that human rights reporting is an effective way to deter abuse. Past research suggests that condemning human rights abuses can help prevent them in the future, but only under very specific circumstances. This dominant view, however, only focuses on the response of perpetrators to realized form of shaming. I argue that would-be perpetrators are more strategic. In contexts were human rights conditions are systematically being monitored, would-be perpetrators can anticipate condemnation and therefore are less likely to use repression. I develop a new global measure of human rights monitoring in the last 40 years using quantitative text analysis. I show that monitoring strengthens human rights even when monitoring agents face institutional and political conditions adverse to their work.

Author

• Jose Kaire, University of Minnesota