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Hum Rights Rev (2016) 17:143164 DOI 10.1007/s12142-015-0391-1
Published online: 15 December 2015# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Recent scholarship has focused on the effects of institutional design and constitutional provisions on human rights protections. Democratic institutions, like other manifestations of credible commitment to human rights, seem to play a role in human rights provisions across the world. Yet, there is still a great deal that we do not know about domestic institutions like the human rights ombudsman, an institution created specifically to protect human rights, on human rights provisions. We conduct an examination of the effects of the human rights ombudsman (which may go by the name Defensor del Pueblo, Procurador de Derechos Humanos, or Comisionado Nacional de Derechos Humanos), on personal integrity violations across Latin America, 1982 2006. We find evidence that this understudied institution had significant and positive impacts on reducing such violations.
Keywords Human rights . Ombudsman . Latin America
Whether the focus is on the role of constitutional provisions (see Camp Keith 2002, 2011; Poe et al. 1999). judiciaries (Powell and Staton 2009). or electoral rules (Cingranelli and Filippov 2010), democratic institutions have played important roles in improving the lives of citizens around the world. However, even as the number and quality of democracies grow, there are many unresolved human rights issues that deserve attention. In an effort to address these many concerns, a rather interesting and novel human rights institution has flourished across the Americas: the Human Rights Ombudsman (Peruzzotti 2012). The emergence of these offices after the third wave of democracy presents us with an opportunity to examine the role that this
* Erika Moreno [email protected]
Richard Witmer [email protected]
1 Department of Political Science, 2500 California Plaza, Omaha, NE 68178, USA
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Erika Moreno1 & Richard Witmer1
144 E. Moreno, R. Witmer
recently created institution has on human rights in democratic countries (see Cardenas 2005; Koo and Ramirez 2009; Peruzzotti 2012; Reif 2004).
The ombudsman,1 which may go by several names,...