Getting Away With Murder: Information & Accountability in Human Rights
Open Access
- Author:
- Dietrich, Nicholas
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 29, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Douglas William Lemke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Douglas William Lemke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Bumba Mukherjee, Committee Member
Christopher Zorn, Committee Member
Carleen Maitland, Outside Member
Christopher Fariss, Special Member
Lee Ann Banaszak, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Human Rights
International Relations
Quantitative Methods
Political Violence
Media
Politics - Abstract:
- States routinely cover up or deny their involvement in human rights abuses, sometimes finding exceptionally creative ways to do so. When is information about human rights abuses likely to be incomplete, and what is the effect of information quality on accountability? I conduct the first comprehensive, cross-national examination of this question. I argue that states have incentives to obscure their involvement in violations of human rights to avoid consequences. These consequences can include domestic backlash that increases support for rival political parties or armed groups; international action in the form of naming and shaming, economic sanctions, and military intervention; or prosecution in domestic courts or international tribunals for violating human rights. I introduce a novel dataset of delay times between the occurrence of a violation and the first report of that violation in publicly-available sources to test theoretical expectations about delayed reporting in human rights. I demonstrate that reporting delays are far more likely when the perpetrator is a government, and find limited evidence that delays are more likely when the perpetrator fears potential consequences and when there are logistical barriers to reporting. I also demonstrate that poor reporting quality in the past is associated with more violence in the future because there are fewer pathways to accountability for perpetrators. Leaders use human rights abuses to manage threats, but in doing so risk backlash and future prosecution. Leaders who order human rights violations, or who share political ties to predecessors who did, have incentives to prevent those abuses from coming to light. I demonstrate that abuses are more likely to be reported when a culpable leader is removed from power, leading to a wave of reports about abuse under the previous regime. Abuses are less likely to be reported when a culpable leader shares close ties to the armed forces because they are able to coordinate to suppress information about the abuse. Information quality in human rights reports is likely to affect how citizens evaluate foreign regimes that abuse human rights. Leaders take public opinion into account when deciding whether to punish foreign regimes with naming and shaming, economic sanctions, or military intervention, but differences in reporting quality result in the public having better information about some violations than others. I test expectations from credibility theory about the willingness of international audiences to punish human rights abusers. I find no evidence that precise fatality estimates and locations or prompt reporting influence support for action against foreign human rights abusers. These findings offer the first empirical, cross-national examination of the ways that states manipulate information about their human rights practices. The results suggest that delayed reporting of human rights violations is a substantively important topic and open a number of avenues for future research.