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The justice cascade: Origins and effectiveness of prosecutions of human rights violations

This article uses new data to present a cross-national view of trends in human rights prosecutions. The author trace the origins of individual criminal accountability, the process by which this new norm has spread globally, and its impact on repression levels in those countries and regions where prosecutions have taken place.

The justice cascade refers to a new global trend of holding political leaders criminally accountable for past human rights violations through domestic and international prosecutions. In just three decades, state leaders have gone from being immune to accountability for their human rights violations to becoming the subjects of highly publicized trials in many countries of the world. In a 2014 report, the U.S. State Department reveals dire human-rights abuses in nations around the globe, from Egypt to Russia, Syria to Cuba, China to South Sudan.

The study finds Prosecutions for human rights violations have a strong and statistically significant downward impact on levels of repression, even when controlling for other factors such as democracy, civil war, economic conditions and past levels of repression. Also, from the 1990s on, there was an increase in human rights prosecutions and verdicts. At the same time, while fewer countries were adopting new amnesty laws, a large number of countries still have such laws in place. Thus, increasing prosecutions are not replacing amnesty laws but taking place alongside them.

I think this article can be related to the cascading behaviour in the network which Professor Easley mentioned in class before. In this case, We will consider specifically how new opinions spread from person to person through a social network, as people influence their friends to adopt new ideas. Each country can be treated as a density group. In the beginning, the United States first executed the prosecutions for human rights violation. Then people from different countries also adopted this new idea, so human rights issues  gradually getting attention all over the world. However, this are still other reasons for the trends in human rights prosecutions.

Bibiliography:

  1. Sikkink, Kathryn; Kim, Hun Joon. “The Justice Cascade: The Origins and Effectiveness of Prosecutions of Human Rights Violations,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, August 2013. doi: 10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102612-133956.
  2. “The Justice Cascade: Origins and Effectiveness of Prosecutions of Human Rights Violations.” Journalist’s Resource. April 26, 2016. Accessed November 29, 2018. https://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/human-rights/origins-effectiveness-prosecutions-human-rights-violations.

 

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