Targeted Versus Conventional Economic Sanctions: What Is at Stake for Human Rights?

The adverse impact of economic sanctions on human rights is well documented in the literature (Peksen 2009; Wood 2008) and so are the consequences of sanctions for democracy (Peksen and Drury 2009, 2010) and for the survival of leaders (Escribà-Folch & Wright 2010; Marinov 2005). Using data from the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (Biersteker, Eckert, Tourinho, and Hudákóva 2013), we analyze whether sanctions that target segmented groups within the leadership fare any better with respect to human rights protection. The analysis focuses on the universe of targeted sanctions against African countries, between 1992 and 2008, and finds that the adverse impact of this coercive instrument—though unintended—is not statistically distinguishable from the adverse consequences already identified by the literature with respect to conventional sanctions. All else equal, the protection of rights to physical integrity (the right to life and the prohibition of torture) in the targeted country is 1.74 times more likely to worsen under an episode of targeted sanction when compared to a situation where there is no sanction. We propose a signaling model wherein a targeted leader is perceived by the opposition as weakened by the sanctions, which leads to more protest and repression. Higher levels of human rights violations follow.