Suchergebnisse

This article examines how states and international organizations can be held to account for extraterritorial human rights violations. I develop and investigate the potential of what I call an "indirect accountability" mechanism. In indirect accountability relationships, accountability fora do not directly hold states and international organizations that commit extraterritorial human rights violations to account as these are frequently immune to direct accountability claims. Instead, they hold them to account indirectly by addressing accountability claims to an implicated third party, expecting that the third party will upload the accountability claims to the state or international organization. After conceptualizing the mechanism and its scope conditions, I conduct two brief qualitative case studies using the method of deductive process tracing to explore the potential of the mechanism. The first case study traces efforts to indirectly hold the United States to account for violating foreigners' privacy rights in the context of mass surveillance. The second case study traces attempts to indirectly hold the United Nations Security Council to account for violating the due process rights of blacklisted terror suspects. Both case studies provide support for the mechanism.

This article examines how states and international organizations can be held to account for extraterritorial human rights violations. I develop and investigate the potential of what I call an "indirect accountability" mechanism. In indirect accountability relationships, accountability fora do not directly hold states and international organizations that commit extraterritorial human rights violations to account as these are frequently immune to direct accountability claims. Instead, they hold them to account indirectly by addressing accountability claims to an implicated third party, expecting that the third party will upload the accountability claims to the state or international organization. After conceptualizing the mechanism and its scope conditions, I conduct two brief qualitative case studies using the method of deductive process tracing to explore the potential of the mechanism. The first case study traces efforts to indirectly hold the United States to account for violating foreigners' privacy rights in the context of mass surveillance. The second case study traces attempts to indirectly hold the United Nations Security Council to account for violating the due process rights of blacklisted terror suspects. Both case studies provide support for the mechanism.

Public pressure to take punitive action against human rights violators is often a driving force behind international sanctions. However, we know little about the way in which public support is shaped by varying types of abuse, the costs and effectiveness of sanctions and the differential harm they inflict upon the target population and leadership. Our study specifically addresses this gap by unpicking contextual factors that jointly sway the perception of morality and the cost-benefit calculus. We propose that there is no simple trade-off between instrumental and moral concerns. The context within which violations take place and the interactions between moral and instrumental dimensions shape preference formation. Findings from our paired conjoint experiment suggest that whether respondents support imposing sanctions depends on the category of human rights abuse and its perceived salience. Individuals also prefer sheltering the target population while punishing the leadership, but collective punishment becomes less unacceptable if the majority of the target population support the human rights infringements. The desire to do something against the perpetrators amplifies the appeal of punishing the leadership but assuages the moral concerns of harming the population.