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.

中文翻译：

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过渡时期正义与国家镇压的逻辑：冲突后国家人权起诉的影响

针对战时罪行的人权起诉通常被认为可以阻止未来的权利滥用，但通常与国家镇压一起发生。本文提出了一种理论，即此类起诉如何通过使某些镇压策略比其他策略成本更高（在滥用或易于归因于领导层的公众可见度）或通过直接替代某些策略来在国内人权实践中产生不平衡的影响。我们通过对当代冲突和冲突后环境中的新起诉数据进行多元概率分析来测试其影响。审判显着减少了对政治监禁和法外处决的依赖，这些相对明显的虐待行为，而不太明显的身体完整性权利的收益是有限的。更远，审判本身有时被用来直接替代政治监禁。调查结果揭示了人权起诉本身如何成为政府镇压工具包的一部分，对过渡时期司法的研究和镇压的司法化产生影响。