Impunity and Oversight: When Do Governments Police Themselves?

Abstract

While constitutional constraints on state behavior are an important tool in extending, promoting, and protecting political and civil liberties, formal or “parchment” guarantees of government restraint and respect for human rights do not necessarily ensure that such restraint will be observed in practice. One persistent and widespread example of such lack of restraint is that of official impunity, or the failure of governments to ensure that their agents are bound by the same laws that apply to the rest of the population. Unpunished violations of human rights by state agents are widespread and are found across a range of regime types and development levels. For this paper I have created a measure of impunity based on data from U.S. State Department Human Rights Country Reports, supplemented with data from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for 158 countries; this indicator provides an additional dimension to other measures of “rule of law” and official respect for human rights. Preliminary analysis of this data suggests that official impunity is worse in polities facing domestic crises and low levels of per capita income, and that the prevalence of impunity decreases dramatically with press freedom. In fact, press freedom may be a more effective tool in curbing official impunity than formal democracy, which results in episodic rather than constant pressure on abusive and poorly controlled military and police forces.

Nick Jorgensen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.

Notes

∗ p < .10.

∗∗ p < .05.

∗∗∗ p < .01.

1. Rule of law indicators are available from the World Bank as part of the Governance Indicators project and through the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom in the World data set (World Bank Institute 2008; Gwartney and Lawson 2007).

2. For example, there is no specific law against police torture in India; police practice in many respects is still driven by colonial-era laws drafted in the wake of the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857; see “Torture in India 2008: A State of Denial” (Asian Center for Human Rights 2008).

3. Also implicit in this requirement is the existence of shared definitions of proportionality or appropriateness of punishment. Impunity may still be present if the state punishes such violations in a manner that victims and other observers deem insufficiently strict. The fact that punitive norms often vary across cultural and political contexts thus complicates efforts to create valid conceptual measures that may be applied cross-nationally (for a discussion of the culturally rooted nature of punishment and retribution, see McNitt 1988; Renteln 1988).

4. In order to include the United States as a case, an impunity rating was created using data from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports for 2005.

5. The negative effects of progovernment militias have been explored at length by Butler and Mitchell (2007); the authors found empirical support for the claim that irregular forces can contribute to and worsen the level of human rights violations in a state, in part because such forces permit a government to evade a degree of accountability for repression directed against both noncombatants as well as opponents of the regime.