Abouharb, MR;
Moyer, LP;
Schmidt, M;
(2013)
De Facto Judicial Independence and Physical Integrity Rights.
JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
, 12
(4)
367 - 396.
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | De Facto Judicial Independence and Physical Integrity Rights |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/14754835.2013.812461 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2013.812461 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © M. Rodwan Abouharb, Laura P. Moyer, and Megan Schmidt. Published with license by Taylor & Francis This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1396369 |
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