Suchergebnisse

This global crossnational study seeks to build upon earlier studies that have tested the impact of constitutional provisions upon state human rights behavior. I examine across a 20-year period the impact of constitutional provisions for six individual freedoms & four due process rights on state abuse of the right to personal integrity. Here I find statistical evidence that some constitutional provisions do matter, even when controlling for democracy & for other factors known to influence human rights behavior. While none of the constitutional provisions for individual freedoms is statistically significant, two of the due process provisions (for fair & public trials) do decrease substantially the likelihood that states will abuse their own citizens' human rights. The other two due process provisions, which have become almost universal -- the ban against torture, & the writ of habeas corpus -- are quite disappointing in that they do not produce the expected impact. Over the long term, the trial provisions would lead to a decrease of about one level in the personal integrity abuse score, which is only somewhat less than the impact produced by other variables in the model, eg, population size. 2 Tables, 1 Figure, 146 References. Adapted from the source document.

Formal acceptance of international agreements on human rights has progressed to the point where currently over three-quarters of the UN member states are parties to the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. In fact, becoming a party to this covenant seems to be concomitant with joining the UN. Of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and in the region of the former Soviet Union, only Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Macedonia have not joined the treaty. This article tests empirically whether becoming a party to this international treaty (and its optional protocol) has an observable impact on the state party's actual behavior. The hypothesis is tested across 178 countries over an eighteen-year period (1976-93) and across four different measures of state human rights behavior. Initial bivariate analyses demonstrate some statistically significant differences between the behavior of states parties and the behavior of non-party states. However, this difference does not appear in the bivariate analysis that compares the states parties' behavior before becoming a party to the treaty with their behavior after becoming a party state. When the analysis progresses to more sophisticated multivariate analysis, in which factors known to affect human rights are controlled, the impact of the covenant and its optional protocol disappears altogether. Overall, this study suggests that it may be overly optimistic to expect that being a party to this international covenant will produce an observable direct impact.

This article examines the extent to which the British and French colonial legacies influence the human rights behavior of post-colonial African states. We have examined three areas where the literature suggests different colonial experiences for former British and French colonies: legal systems, formal provisions for judicial independence, and emergency powers. Our findings show very little support that different colonial legacies in those three areas affect the level of state abuse of personal integrity in sub-Saharan Africa. We find no solid evidence, for example, that common law system countries have better human rights behavior than civil code system countries. Nor is there any support for the propositions that former French colonies would have less constitutional provisions for judicial independence and checks against the executive during times of emergency than English colonies. Indeed, contrary to expectations, it is the French-legacy states that have stronger protections for emergency powers, perhaps suggesting recognition of the broad powers of the president in the bequeathed French political system and the need to curtail some of those powers. Likewise, we find little evidence that these elements affect their human rights behavior.