The Cost of Shame: International Organizations and Foreign Aid in the Punishing of Human Rights Violators

Abstract

Are violators of international human rights norms punished with lower levels of foreign aid? Despite their abstract preferences, governments often lack the incentive to punish norm violators bilaterally. Multilateral lending institutions, such as the World Bank, could fill the void if they wanted to consider human rights abuses and could bypass restrictions on evaluating the political character of recipients. This article argues that `shaming' in the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, through resolutions that explicitly criticized governments for their human rights records, provided substantive information about rights abuses and gave political cover for the World Bank and other liberal multilateral aid institutions seeking to sanction human rights violators. Statistical analyses support these theoretical claims. The adoption of a UNCHR resolution condemning a country's human rights record produced a sizeable reduction in multilateral, and especially World Bank, aid but had no effect on the country's aggregate bilateral aid receipts. The analyses also support predictions that `objective' measures of human rights have no independent effect on multilateral aid allocations. The findings, which are robust to different model techniques and specifications, suggest that punishment for violating international human rights norms is selective, that international organizations play an important role in the selection process and, thus, that seemingly symbolic resolutions of a politically motivated IO can carry tangible consequences.

Treaty Compliance and Violation

“…Emilie Hafner-Burton argues that human rights don't just improve on their own accord; improvements are instead associated with hard-nosed efforts by the international community to link preferential trade agreements to improvements (Hafner-Burton 2005). More recently, James Lebovic and Erik Voeten have shown that the World Bank tends to reduce its aid to countries that have been named as severe rights abusers by resolutions of the United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) (Lebovic & Voeten 2009). But what no one has shown is that there is any significant external enforcement behind the provisions of international human rights treaties, of a kind that might plausibly account for the patterns of compliance observed across a number of rights areas.…”

Human rights shaming through INGOs and foreign aid delivery

“…Some argue that donor governments prioritize geostrategic or economic considerations over human rights, making it unlikely that aid officials will systematically punish recipient governments for human rights violations (Alesina and Dollar, 2000;Neumayer, 2003a,b). Others find that donor governments sanction human rights violations with reductions in foreign aid, although cuts are limited to specific aid types and sectors (Cingranelli and Pasquarello, 1985;Lebovic and Voeten, 2009;Nielsen, 2013). 2 This paper strengthens our knowledge on the link between human rights and foreign aid policy by developing and testing a model of foreign aid delivery that identifies human rights international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) as an influential force in foreign aid decision making.…”

“…Lebovic and Voeten (2009) find that donor governments pressure international organizations to sanction repressive behavior with cuts in multilateral aid, while bilateral aid flows between donors and the repressive recipient government remain unchanged. Nielsen (2013) disaggregates bilateral aid into its various sectors, showing that human rights violations lead donor governments to cut economic aid but not humanitarian aid.…”

“…1 Among scholars interested in the nexus between foreign and human rights, however, a long standing debate continues over whether donor governments use foreign aid to sanction government-led repression in aid-receiving countries (Cingranelli and Pasquarello, 1985;Alesina and Dollar, 1992;Apodaca and Stohl, 1999;Alesina and Dollar, 2000;Rioux and Belle, 2005;Neumayer, 2003a,b;Lebovic and Voeten, 2009;Nielsen, 2013). Some argue that donor governments prioritize geostrategic or economic considerations over human rights, making it unlikely that aid officials will systematically punish recipient governments for human rights violations (Alesina and Dollar, 2000;Neumayer, 2003a,b).…”

Deep Determinants or Interactions: Explaining Spatial Patterns in Human Rights

“…The main exception are autocratic states: those that have better human rights records get more aid than those with bad records. Lebovic and Voeten (2009) test the hypothesis that a developing country that has been criticized in a resolution by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), will receive less aid. These authors find that such countries do indeed get significant lower World Bank and multilateral loan commitments, but that bilateral aid allocations are not affected.…”