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.