Human rights accountability: Exploring determinants of transitional justice.

Abstract

In this dissertation I explore the effects of domestic and international pressures on human rights accountability in states undergoing profound political transformations. My work is rooted in theories of democratization and transitional justice (those legal responses to a former regime's repressive acts following a change in political systems) designed to predict the type of accountability policies employed by new elites. Prevailing causal theories explain transitional justice as a function of the relative power of incoming and outgoing regimes but tend to be under-specified, making them difficult to evaluate. In the dissertation I argue that institutional factors, especially the effects of transitional justice policies on the ability of new elites to deliver public goods, are a better determinant of the path of justice. To test these theories, I propose a seven-stage human rights accountability spectrum that creates a hierarchy of transitional justice measures. My typology is modeled on relative power arguments and yields empirically testable hypotheses that I evaluate based on interview, archival and observational data. I apply my typology to the cases of four diverse post-communist states facing accountability in the context of radical systemic reform: Uzbekistan, Serbia, Croatia and Poland. These states have similar communist legacies---elitist political cultures, similar communist-era abuses and the persistence of former violating institutions. But these cases vary by transition type, post-communist human rights record and degree of internal and external pressures for accountability. As a result, this sample allows me to move beyond the current literature, where there is an overwhelming tendency to focus on short-term reform and exclusively domestic sources of pressure in the accountability sphere. I find significant support for my institutional theory, which predicts accountability outcome in three of my four cases, and very little support for the relative power argument. The relative power thesis predicts none of the accountability outcomes in my cases, while the institutional model errors only in the case of Uzbekistan (the one case of a non-democratic, failed transition). Institutionally determined preferences appear to be much better determinants of transitional justice than is raw power alone.