The international criminal court was created in 2002 with the goal of letting world leaders know that an independent organization with independent investigation and prosecution abilities was being developed to deal with serious human rights abuses.
So far I don’t know how successful they have been. But I know from studies on game theory that people stop cooperating with each other once the threat of punishment for cheating is removed. So I assume political leadership somewhat follows the same formula of reward/penalty. When social norms allow abuses and when the benefits are high and penalties are low, abuses happen. When abuses violate social norms, and when the benefits are low but penalties are high they do not.
It seems that with the attempts at judicial penalties for human rights abusers, penalties and possibly social norms may be changing. Not just the ICC but other methods of holding abusers accountable are coming out. Chile recently arrested many members of Pinochet’s regime. The US helped bring down Saddam and Charles Taylor. Well over a dozen dictators have been brought to justice in the last 20 years As a result political and military dictators do have to worry about penalties for abuses either from their own nations, foreign nations or foreign judicial entities.
However if human rights abuses are the only way a military or political leader thinks he can maintain his regime, what happens then? Isn’t that the situation Saddam Hussein felt he was in (large amounts of ethnic strife that he couldn’t control)? In those situations won’t the benefits of human rights abuses (benefits being maintaining your rule and not being overthrown) drastically outweigh any potential penalties down the road?
So are economic sanctions or the risk of potential judicial penalty enough to enforce human rights? Economic sanctions don’t seem to work from what I’ve seen of them (Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, North Korea, etc). Judicial penalties may work, but unless dictators leave the country they are really only at risk in their home country.
If anything too many penalties may lead to more abuses. If a nation like North Korea obtains the ability to kill millions of civilians (which they have), they will not be held accountable in any meaningful way because nobody wants North Korea to bomb Seoul. And as long as the dictator maintains power they are not at risk of losing power or ending up in prison. So the incentives are to engage in more abuses. Supposedly in North Korea this is why Kim Jong Il is so opposed to reform. He thinks it’ll be a situation like China where reform spirals out of control and he loses power (that is what I’ve read his fears are).
So what do you do? Do you take the hard line of heavy punishments for human rights abuses, or do you take a more moderate route of offering amnesty for dictators if they curtail their abuses, or something else? Wouldn’t the second route work better? The first seems like it’d just lead dictators to become more abusive and controlling because they fear what will happen when they stop (they will be removed from power and either imprisoned, tortured or killed).
What do you do if severe human rights abuses are considered culturally normal (ie a war zone) or if they are seen as the only way to maintain political order (like some anti-communist right wing governments considered them)? How do nations rise above cultural norms or find more effective ways to maintain order? Do you try to shuffle people into non-violent democratic methods of resistance? How does that work if the leading regime doesn’t want to give up power?
Can the risk of imprisonment and jail intimidate military and political leaders into respecting basic human rights, or will it just make them become even more abusive out of fear of the consequences of not being harsh enough and then worrying about being overthrown?