Accountability from Above: Transitional Justice and Human Rights

• In Event: Legacies of Authoritarian Opposition and Repression

Abstract

How do domestic politics affect the breadth and depth of transitional justice (TJ) measures after authoritarian rule? While international courts have been studied independently as vectors of TJ, little research examines their interaction with state-level determinants of TJ implementation. In this paper, we evaluate the incentives of two actors—post-authoritarian executives and victims of human rights violations under dictatorship—to comply with rulings of and bring complaints to international courts related to violence under dictatorship, respectively. We expect executives to comply with court rulings addressing authoritarian human rights violations when domestic TJ has already been implemented, and victims to file complaints when it has not. Using granular data on both filed complaints and reparations rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, we assess whether international courts are complements or substitutes for domestic TJ.

Authors

• Pearce Edwards, Louisiana State University

• Kelly Elizabeth Morrison, University of Tennessee, Knoxville