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Why do countries adopt criminal legislation making it possible to prosecute government and military officials for human rights violations? Over the past thirty years, dozens of countries have prosecuted their own or other states' officials for past atrocities. Criminalizing Atrocity tells the story of the global spread of national criminal laws against atrocity crimes - genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity - laws that have helped pave the way for this remarkable trend toward greater accountability. It traces the early 20th-century origins of national atrocity laws to a group of influential European criminal law scholars and explains the global patterns by which they have since spread. The book shows that understanding why countries criminalize atrocities requires understanding how they do so. In many cases, criminalization has not been the result of concerted government initiative, but of inconspicuous choices made by technocratic legal experts who have been delegated authority to draft large-scale reforms to countries' criminal codes. Drawing on research in comparative law and norm diffusion, Criminalizing Atrocity explains how such reform projects prompt technocratic drafters to select legal ideas, like atrocity laws, that have been endorsed by their professional communities and deemed by drafters to be important features of a "modern" criminal code. To test this argument, Criminalizing Atrocity draws on a range of original quantitative and qualitative data, including in-depth case studies of Guatemala, Colombia, Poland, and the Maldvies, and a new, comprehensive dataset tracking the global spread of atrocity laws since Word War II. The book's findings highlight the importance of professional communities in the modern renaissance of atrocity justice and the domestication of international legal norms.

AbstractMuch research casts doubt on the effectiveness of legal norms for improving respect for human rights. But such studies have mostly focused on treaty ratifications or constitutional provisions. In contrast, I focus on national criminal law. I argue that criminalization of torture is more likely to deter police torture than these other forms of legal prohibition, because criminalization more credibly increases the threat of material and social costs of torture, while also helping to catalyze mobilization that amplifies these deterrent effects. Using an original, global dataset on national criminal laws against torture, I find that states that criminalize torture and define it in line with the standards codified in the UN Convention against Torture experience reductions in police torture. These findings highlight a largely unexplored angle on the relationship between law and human rights protection and underscore the general importance of domestic legal internalization for the effectiveness of international law.