Does Terrorism Threaten Human Rights? Evidence from Panel Data

Abstract

Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1982-2002, we employ two indexes that cover a wide range of human rights to empirically analyze whether and to what extent terrorism affects human rights. According to our results, terrorism significantly, but not dramatically, diminishes governments' respect for basic human rights such as the absence of extrajudicial killings, political imprisonment, and torture. The result is robust to how we measure terrorist attacks, to the method of estimation, and to the choice of countries in our sample. However, we find no effect of terrorism on empowerment rights.