Pushing for big human rights trials might actually end up protecting the very governments that committed the crimes.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Criminal Punishment as a Human Right?
SSRN · 6331378
The Takeaway
The paper argues that human rights organizations have reflexively embraced criminal punishment because it grants 'status and seriousness' to an issue. However, by focusing on individual criminal guilt, the field risks ignoring the structural conditions and state roles that allow violations to happen in the first place.
From the abstract
This Article takes stock of the expansion of criminal punishment’s role in human rights protection. While significant attention has been paid to the requirement to punish mass atrocity crimes under human rights law, this Article turns instead to the deployment of criminal punishment in service of human rights outside the realm of mass atrocity crimes. In contrast to other work in this area, which has focused primarily on cataloging the types of cases in which an obligation to prosecute or punish