Séminaire NANCY – Benjamin MONNERY (EconomiX)

Détails de l'événement :

“Does the International Criminal Court Reduce Violence Against Civilians?”

co-écrit avec Yann Lecorps

Abstract: The International Criminal Court (ICC) was launched in 2002 with the purpose of fighting impunity and deterring the commission of international crimes. In this paper, we investigate whether the ICC effectively deters ruling leaders and criminal groups under its jurisdiction from engaging in egregious violence against civilians. We exploit civilian killings data from a panel of 176 countries over the period 1989-2019 during which 123 countries incrementally decided to ratify the Rome Statute and recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, while others never did. Due to the strong suspicion of endogeneity of the ratification process, we rely on flexible panel data models with interactive fixed effects to account for potentially complex country-specific trends. We find no evidence of any deterrence in the full sample of countries. However, we find that the probability and intensity of civilian killings by non-governmental forces decreases quite substantially after ratification in high-risk countries, i.e. countries that were marked by civil violence and weak institutions in the 1990s. Conversely, civilian killings by governmental forces appear unaffected by the ICC even in high-risk countries, a pattern that is consistent with the institutional fragility of the Court.