Economic Sanctions as an Indirect Regional Threat : The Regional Impact of Sanctions on the Level of Human Rights Protection in Non-sanctioned Countries

It is generally held that economic sanctions have an adverse effect on human rights in sanctioned countries, but what about the non-sanctioned countries? Previous research has found that human rights sanctions appear to have a deterring effect on non-sanctioned countries in Latin America which, in turn, led to human rights improvements. The assumption from these findings suggests that countries improve their human rights in fear of being sanctioned themselves. Utilising a difference-in-differences method with data from CIRI and PTS for the time period 1977-1996, the present quasi-experimental study attempts to test these findings on Africa and Asia by posing the hypothesis that economic sanctions improve the level of human rights protection in the non-sanctioned countries of the same geographical region. The results show that, while there appears to be a positive effect on some measures of human rights in non-sanctioned countries, these effects are weak. Moreover, the results also show that the improvements correspond with the number of years following a sanction, where 1 year displays the weakest human rights improvements, whilst 10 years displays the strongest. The conclusion is that there, in some cases, appears to be a modest effect which needs to be examined further, but that sanctions, nevertheless, do not improve human rights in neighbouring countries in a meaningful way