Migration and the Demand for Transnational Justice

Abstract

Domestic courts sometimes prosecute foreign nationals for severe crimes—like crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, and war crimes—committed on foreign territory against foreign nationals. We argue that migrants can serve as agents of transnational justice. When migrants move across borders, as both economic migrants and refugees, they often pressure local governments to conduct criminal investigations and trials for crimes that occurred in their sending state. We also examine the effect of explanatory variables that have been identified by prior scholars, including the magnitude of atrocities in the sending state, the responsiveness of the receiving state to political pressure, and the various economic and political costs of prosecutions. We test our argument using the first multivariate statistical analysis of universal jurisdiction cases, focusing on multiple stages of prosecutions. We conclude that transnational justice is a justice remittance in which migrants provide accountability and remedies for crimes in their sending states.

Why Restrict Emigration: Autocrats’ Economic Ideas in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan

“…This does not mean that scholars have not addressed migration from the sending states at all. Nonetheless, as Miller and Peters (2020) point out, existing studies on emigration tend to examine either diaspora policy (Gamlen 2008;De Haas 2007;Brand 2006) or motivation for migration or the impact of emigration and remittances (Barsbai et al 2017;Meseguer and Burgess 2014;Pfaff and Kim 2003;Pfutze 2012;Spilimbergo 2009;Moses 2011;Docquier et al 2016;Ahmed 2012;Escribà-Folch, Meseguer Yebra, and Wright 2021;Leblang 2010;Johns, Langer, and Peters 2022;Kapur 2010). As such, we still know relatively little about state behavior and the determinants of emigration policies.…”