Suchergebnisse

Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women

Changes in quality and availability of information related to human rights violations raise questions about how best to use existing data to assess human rights change. Information effects are discernible both in primary sources of information and data coded by two prominent human rights datasets, the Political Terror Scale (PTS) and the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Data Set (CIRI). The authors discuss ways that human rights information has changed for the better, evaluate the scales and their primary text sources for countries in Latin America, and compare them with information drawn from regional truth commission data. Extra caution is advised when using summary data to make inferences about human rights change.

Desde la década de 1980 los Estados se han abocado cada vez más a abordar las violaciones a los derechos humanos ocurridas en el pasado mediante la utilización de variados mecanismos de justicia de transición que incluyen a los juicios internos e internacionales sobre derechos humanos. A mediados de esa década, los estudiosos de las transiciones a la democracia llegaron en general a la conclusión que los juicios por violaciones a los derechos humanos ocurridas en el pasado eran políticamente insostenibles y podían socavar las nuevas democracias. Más recientemente, algunos especialistas en relaciones internacionales se han hecho eco de las afirmaciones pesimistas de aquellos primeros "escépticos de los juicios" y han añadido dudas sobre el impacto de los juicios. Sin embargo, hay pocos estu

Since the 1980s, states have been increasingly addressing past human rights violations using multiple transitional justice mechanisms including domestic and international human rights trials. In the mid-1980s, scholars of transitions to democracy generally concluded that trials for past human rights violations were politically untenable and likely to undermine new democracies. More recently, some international relations experts have echoed the pessimistic claims of the early `trial skeptics' and added new concerns about the impact of trials. Yet, relatively little multicountry empirical work has been done to test such claims, in part because no database on trials was available. The authors have created a new dataset of two main transitional justice mechanisms: truth commissions and trials for past human rights violations. With the new data, they document the emergence and dramatic growth of the use of truth commissions and domestic, foreign, and international human rights trials in the world. The authors then explore the impact that human rights trials have on human rights, conflict, democracy, and rule of law in Latin America. Their analysis suggests that the pessimistic claims of skeptics that human rights trials threaten democracy, increase human rights violations, and exacerbate conflict are not supported by empirical evidence from Latin America.

Der Aufsatz beschreibt die internationalen Abkommen und Gesetze zum Schutz der Menschenrechte und die Praxis in Lateinamerika. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf drei grundsätzlichen Normen internationaler Menschenrechtsverträge im Hinblick auf Verbot der Folter, Verbot des Verschwindenlassens und Anspruch auf eine demokratische Regierungsform. Untersucht werden vor allem die Konsequenzen der Festschreibung von Menschenrechtsnormen in der Region. (DSE/DÜI)

Human rights practices have improved significantly throughout Latin America during the 1990s, but different degrees of legalization are not the main explanation for these changes. We examine state compliance with three primary norms of international human rights law: the prohibition against torture, the prohibition against disappearance, and the right to democratic governance. Although these norms vary in their degree of obligation, precision, and delegation, states have improved their practices in all three issue-areas. The least amount of change has occurred in the most highly legalized issue-area—the prohibition against torture. We argue that a broad regional norm shift—a "norms cascade"—has led to increased regional and international consensus with respect to an interconnected bundle of human rights norms, including the three discussed in this article. These norms are reinforced by diverse legal and political enforcement mechanisms that help to implement and ensure compliance with them.