About the event

The emergence of individual criminal accountability for war crimes, mass atrocities, and the violation of human rights is among the most dramatic normative developments in international politics over the past half-century. Nevertheless, in this article, we document a sharp global decline in prosecutions for these crimes since 2010 and develop a theory to explain this trend. We argue that the confluence of two factors is necessary for the initiation of prosecutions: there must be a government willing to supply justice and a domestic audience that demands it. We test this argument using a new dataset of all prosecutions of government officials for human rights violations initiated between 1970 and 2020. We show that the global shift is driven by a reduction of prosecutions in domestic courts and that the interaction of a state’s level of liberal democracy and its legacy of past human rights abuse is strongly predictive of domestic trial initiation. We also demonstrate that global shifts are not due to regional trends, changes in transitional justice practices, or declines in international tribunals and universal jurisdiction cases. Our argument and findings indicate that the global decline in prosecutions is both a sign of success and a cause for concern. While past legacies of repression and violence were addressed in openings created by democratic transitions, contemporary democratic backsliding risks denying today’s victims justice in the future.

This lecture is part of the SCRIPTS project De-centering Human Rights.