Unintended Positive Complementarity: Why International Criminal Court Investigations May Increase Domestic Human Rights Prosecutions

Dancy, Geoff; Montal, Florencia

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2736519

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The opening of an investigation introduces into a country's political discourse the notion that atrocity crimes have been committed. 79 The stigma that comes with this recognition creates 'social costs' for leaders, but also may attract more citizens to the cause of accountability. 80 Finally, once trial proceedings begin, one might expect the level of attention to reach a critical mass.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The hidden impacts of the ICC: An innovative assessment using Google data

Dancy¹

2021

Leiden Journal of International Law

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Commentators now regularly declare that the International Criminal court (ICC) – and international criminal law as a whole – is in crisis. It is certainly the case that the ICC faces a number of operational challenges, and that these challenges worry its defenders. However, one unexamined rationalist assumption is that the Court’s inability to deliver consistent outputs will mean waning influence. This article explores an alternative constructivist theory that the ICC produces diffuse social impacts that are not necessarily tied to its operating effectively. This theory is tested statistically using Google Trends data. Specifically, the article examines whether ICC intervention in a country is associated with more internet search for ‘human rights’. Taking this to be a measure of changing discourse in countries, the article finds that some types of ICC involvement are associated with a far higher interest in human rights, and that this interest only increases as ICC involvement extends in time. In short, despite its disappointments, evidence suggests that the ICC still serves a socio-pedagogical function. Though it does not fit well within a rational evaluation framework, this kind of information should be considered in ICC performance reviews.

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Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The hidden impacts of the ICC: An innovative assessment using Google data

Dancy¹

2021

Leiden Journal of International Law

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“…1See, for instance, Mallinder 2008, Olsen, Payne, and Reiter 2010b, and most notably Sikkink and Walling 2007, Dancy and Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2017, and the ongoing efforts of the Transitional Justice Research Collaborative (TJRC), Dancy and Montal 2017, and Dancy and Michel 2016.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016)

Bates¹,

Çınar²,

Nalepa³

2019

Perspect. polit.

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In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.

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“…The literature suggest that there is just a small group of 'doubleeffects' in international cooperation efforts. For instance, the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the consequences of its trials have a host of unintended effects (Dancy & Monta, 2015;Espinoza, 2014). These unintended effects, such as a reduction in the democratic space in the DR Congo because the leader of the opposition was imprisoned by the ICC, are unavoidable because of the independence of its prosecutor.…”

Section: Key Finding Two: Relative Few Uninteded Effects Are Labelled...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the special issue ‘unintended effects of international cooperation’

Koch

Schulpen

2018

Evaluation and Program Planning

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Unintended Positive Complementarity: Why International Criminal Court Investigations May Increase Domestic Human Rights Prosecutions

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

The hidden impacts of the ICC: An innovative assessment using Google data

The hidden impacts of the ICC: An innovative assessment using Google data

Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016)

Introduction to the special issue ‘unintended effects of international cooperation’

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