A sequence of human rights violations precedes mass atrocities, new research shows

(Press-News.org) The road to genocide doesn’t begin with bullets and mass graves, but with more subtle violations.

Declining workers’ rights or compromises on the right to a fair trial may come first. Brutality by law enforcement and prison guards becomes widespread. The judiciary loses its independence from the executive branch.

And then, more serious signs follow: Freedom of speech is restricted for a specific group of people, and then their right to assemble in public places. Members of this group may find themselves increasingly imprisoned for their beliefs, and lose the ability to vote or run for office. Each violation should flash red, demanding that we pay attention.

“There’s never been a genocide without multiple other human rights violations going on,” observed Binghamton University Political Science Professor David Cingranelli, co-director of the University’s Human Rights Institute and co-founder of the CIRIGHTS data project, a collaboration between Binghamton and the University of Rhode Island (URI). “The Holocaust is a famous example.”

In a recent article in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, URI Associate Professor of Political Science Skip Mark, PhD ’18 and Cingranelli argue that human rights violations escalate in predictable patterns, which can potentially culminate in atrocities.

In “The Human Rights Sequence Theory of Atrocity: A Comparative Analysis,” the researchers use data from annual human rights reports from the U.S. State Department. Few people have read these extensive State Department reports, other than members of Congress, Cingranelli said.

“I always have my students read reports from countries we are friendly with, but which are alleged to have poor human rights records, to see if we’re honest about it,” he added. “The reporting, I think, is consistent.”

Their data show that state-led atrocities have occurred in more than 30 countries each year for the past seven years; 2022 alone had 47 atrocities, the highest number ever recorded.

State violence is inevitably targeted at specific groups; at their core, human rights center on the rights of minorities, Cingranelli explained. In the United States, these are almost exclusively racial minorities; in India, on the other hand, it’s the Muslim religious minority.

A mass atrocity is in play when extrajudicial killings are widespread and accompanied by other human rights violations. Genocide, on the other hand, requires a government’s intent to exterminate a group in whole or in part, according to international law. Establishing this intent can be difficult, Cingranelli said. Ultimately, the United Nations decides whether a mass atrocity can be considered a genocide and that, too, is a political process.

“Our research doesn’t get into the politics. We just read what the report says about the number of people that the government killed without judicial process in a particular year,” Cingranelli explained. “If they were citizens of your country, that’s extrajudicial killing of your own people.”

The sequence The raw information in the State Department report is provided by U.S. embassies around the world. Embassies of any considerable size typically have — or had, at any rate — at least one designated human rights officer who collects this data, which is then sent to the State Department in Washington, D.C.

“Multiply that by 194 countries in the world, that’s a ton of money and a ton of effort,” Cingranelli said. “When I visited the human rights officers in these countries, they would take me to prisons to talk with wardens about their policies and that sort of thing.”

The first report came out in 1974, but didn’t supply trustworthy data until 1981 under the Carter administration. Cingranelli has been using the reports to rank countries’ human rights performance since the early 1980s. Political Science Professor Mikhail Filippov, one of the co-directors of the CIRIGHTS, also plays an important role in data collection, which he uses in his own research.

Using this data, the researchers developed a brutality-based atrocity indicator to predict the possibility of genocide, triggered by escalating human rights abuses. The right to a fair trial is among the first to become compromised, followed by torture, defined by intentional suffering inflicted by state agents against targeted individuals.

The loss of collective bargaining, an independent judiciary, and the right to unionize comes next, followed by curbs on free speech and freedom of association. Next in the sequence are political imprisonment, the loss of electoral self-determination and finally extrajudicial killings, the mark of mass atrocity.

Surprisingly, restrictions on freedom of movement aren’t among the warning signs; this type of ban typically falls into place around the time extrajudicial killings become widespread. Nor are the loss of women’s social and economic rights, which may be due to cultural factors surrounding the role of women in traditional societies.

“I see things in this sequence that don’t make sense to me. We’re going to reexamine it to see how we could refine it in ways that would include more rights in the sequence and take more account of how women are treated in society,” Cingranelli said. “It’s a work in progress.”

How long does the sequence take? Cingranelli and Mark are currently researching the answer to that question. In Myanmar, for example, the sequence of escalating human rights abuses took more than a decade before it culminated in a genocide against the Rohingya ethnic minority. The researchers’ brutality-based indicator would have been triggered at least two years prior to six of the seven genocides occurring after 1990, with the Serbia and Montenegro conflict the only exception.

The future Right now, the researchers are in the process of scoring countries for 2023. That’s where the project will end in its current form; the State Department report issued in 2025, which looks back at the previous year, isn’t comparable to previous human rights reports and does not appear to be accurate, Cingranelli said.

“It’s not that our idea ends, but the use of these reports to score countries probably won’t go any further than 2023,” he said. “Until Trump, there was consistent reporting from the U.S. Department of State and very professional people who wrote those reports. The process was not politicized, and friends of the United States didn’t get soft treatment.”

However, they have 40 years’ worth of reports to rely on, which is more than enough to generate a sequence. Amnesty International also supplies usable data.

As a scholar, Cingranelli admits that he has no special insights into the reasons behind the increase in atrocities.

“I do think that something bad is happening in the world,” he conceded. “People are willing to have a government that’s more violent. It’s not just the United States; it’s also happening in Western Europe, in a lot of countries that we formerly thought of as being very respectful of human rights.”

A fear of immigrants is likely part of the equation; European countries, for example, are militarizing their borders in a way similar to that of the United States. Increased political polarization and the willingness to use violence in pursuit of majority-approved goals are also factors.

Individual freedom and social order exist in tension, but a necessary tension; individual freedoms require a certain amount of social order to exist. The system falls out of balance when the majority exhibits an increased willingness to trample the rights of minorities to achieve their goals, preferring to maintain the social order rather than maximize individual freedom.

“When people believe that the level of social order in their society has exceeded a certain threshold, they are willing to authorize the government to do all kinds of horrible things,” Cingranelli observed.

Mark and Cingranelli will be working on a book about the project, along with Cornell University postdoctoral fellow Deanne Roark.

“We’re going to put all of this together in a way that’s useful for people who are trying to stop atrocities,” Cingranelli said. “If you’re an activist in a country and you see human rights violations of particular kinds occurring, that alerts you to the fact that the next step could very well be large-scale killing.”

END