Better or Worse? The Effect of Economic Sanctions on Human Rights

Abstract

Does economic coercion increase or decrease government respect for human rights in countries targeted with economic sanctions? If economic sanctions weaken the target regime's coercive capacity, human rights violations by the government should be less likely. If, on the contrary, sanctions fail to attenuate the coercive capacity of the target elites and create more economic difficulties and political violence among ordinary citizens, the government will likely commit more human rights violations. Focusing on competing views of why sanctions might improve or deteriorate human rights conditions, this article offers an empirical examination of the effect sanctions have on the physical integrity rights of citizens in target countries. Utilizing time-series, cross-national data for the period 1981—2000, the findings suggest that economic sanctions worsen government respect for physical integrity rights, including freedom from disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture, and political imprisonment. The results also show that extensive sanctions are more detrimental to human rights than partial/selective sanctions. Economic coercion remains a counterproductive policy tool, even when sanctions are specifically imposed with the goal of improving human rights. Finally, multilateral sanctions have a greater overall negative impact on human rights than unilateral sanctions.

The Impact of UN and US Economic Sanctions on GDP Growth

“…Most of this research is qualitative, however, and based on single-country case studies. Quantitative assessments of sanction effects typically focus on their impact on various measures of the human rights situation (e.g., Peksen, 2009;Wood, 2008), political stability within the target state (Allen, 2008;Marinov, 2005), level of democracy (Peksen and Drury, 2010), and their success in terms of meeting the desired objectives (e.g., Hufbauer et al, 2009;Drury, 1998;Dashti-Gibson et al, 1997). 1 The findings are dispiriting.…”

Economic sanctions and human rights: an analysis of competing enforcement strategies in Latin America

“…I was not able to confirm the two hypotheses that investigate the impact of economic sanctions on the level of rights protection in the 12 countries that were targeted by sanctions. These results are not surprising, as a finding in the other direction would be at stakes with solid research by Reed Wood (2008), Peksen (2009), and by Peksen and Drury (2009) that has already established the negative impact that economic sanctions have on human rights. The present project sought to investigate whether these findings were true for a subset of sanctions episodes-those imposed because of the poor record of rights protection in the target country.…”

“…Work by Peksen (2009) and by Peksen and Drury (2009) confirm the adverse-though unintended-consequences of economic sanctions for human rights. This research relies on a different measure of human rights protection, the Cingranelli and Richards dataset, but focus on the same group of rights: those associated with physical integrity.…”

Not all dictators are equal

“…4 In addition, there has been puzzlingly little discussion on whether sanctions are mostly used as a reaction to authoritarian stability or democratic decline (Escribà-Folch & Wright, 2010;Escribà-Folch, 2012). Some authors state that sanctions are usually used as a reaction to drastic democratic deterioration (Laakso, Kivimäki & Seppänen, 2007), whereas others suggest that the most severe repressors are selected in the first place (Peksen & Drury, 2010;Peksen, 2009;Wood, 2008). Yet, there has not been a systematic analysis on how 'trigger variables', such as coups d'état, flawed elections or swift deterioration of human rights, in conjunction with structural variables, influence the decision to impose sanctions.…”