De Facto Judicial Independence and Physical Integrity Rights

M Rodwan Abouharb,Laura P Moyer,Megan Schmidt

doi:10.1080/14754835.2013.812461

M Rodwan Abouharb, Laura P Moyer + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2013.812461

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Abstract

Economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have argued that independent judiciaries have an important role to play in promoting economic development and protecting property rights. We argue that judicial independence can also have a positive impact on the protection of human rights. To assess the human rights impact of a de facto independent judiciary, we also argue that scholars must account for the potential of endogeneity between judicial independence and protection of human rights. We examine whether greater de facto independence improves government respect for citizens’ physical integrity rights, using a comprehensive dataset of 193 countries from 1981 to 2010. Employing an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity, we find strong support for the argument that greater levels of de facto judicial independence improve government respect for physical integrity rights. These findings are robust to changes in measurement, estimation techniques, and model specification. Failing to account for endogeneity will tend to overemphasize the ability of completely independent courts to improve government respect for physical integrity rights.

Highlights

De facto independence is positive and significantly related to improved human rights outcomes in both models. (Recall that higher values on the index correspond to fewer violations of physical integrity rights.) While this finding is robust to the choice of estimation techniques, what does change across the models is the substantive nature of the relationship between de facto judicial independence and government respect for physical integrity rights
In the most comprehensive analysis yet on this topic, we find strong support for the argument that de facto judicial independence will lead to fewer instances in which governments violate their citizens’ physical integrity rights
We counsel cautious optimism about the degree to which human rights advocates can count on courts, by themselves, to stop human rights abuses

Summary

Introduction

Employing an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity, we find strong support for the argument that greater levels of de facto judicial independence improve government respect for physical integrity rights. We depart from previous work that does not address this concern and develop an instrumental-variables approach to test our argument about the impact of de facto judicial independence on government respect for physical integrity rights.

Results

Conclusion