The Logic of Transitional Justice and State Repression: The Effects of Human Rights Prosecutions in Post-Conflict States

Abstract

Human rights prosecutions addressing wartime crimes are often credited with deterring future rights abuses, but routinely occur alongside state repression. This article develops a theory of how such prosecutions generate uneven effects across domestic human rights practice by making some repression tactics costlier than others—in the public visibility of the abuse or ease of attribution to leadership—or by directly substituting certain tactics. We test the implications with a multivariate probit analysis of novel prosecution data in contemporary conflict and post-conflict settings. Trials significantly reduce reliance on political imprisonment and extrajudicial killings, relatively visible abuses, whereas gains for less visible physical integrity rights are limited. Further, trials themselves are sometimes deployed as a direct substitute for political imprisonment. The findings reveal how human rights prosecutions themselves can be part of a government’s repressive toolkit, with implications for the study of transitional justice and the judicialization of repression.