Trials Strengthen Rejection of Torture — But Erode Trust in Courts

Why This Question Matters

Donald Grasse, Jennifer Gandhi, and Pearce Edwards ask whether prosecuting perpetrators of dictatorship-era repression strengthens public support for human rights and for the courts that enforce them. Trials are central to transitional justice: they can signal accountability and discourage future abuses, but they can also spotlight the political nature of post-authoritarian reckonings and undermine faith in judicial institutions.

How Trials Could Move Opinions

The authors lay out two competing mechanisms. Convictions may reduce public acceptance of torture and political killings by formally repudiating those practices and ending impunity. At the same time, high-profile trials can draw attention to contested, politicized processes—potentially decreasing beliefs that courts act fairly.

Case and Evidence

The paper studies Argentina, which experienced military rule from 1976–1983 and launched large-scale human rights trials about twenty-five years later. Using observational, day-level opinion data from a survey fielded around the guilty verdict for one of the dictatorship’s top-ranking generals, the authors track short-run shifts in attitudes linked to the verdict announcement.

Key Findings

• The guilty verdict increased public rejection of torture and political killings.
• At the same time, belief in judicial fairness declined after the verdict.

These results indicate that convictions can strengthen public commitments to human rights norms even when they reduce confidence in the judiciary.

What This Means for Transitional Justice and Courts

The study suggests that judicial accountability can change societal norms about acceptable treatment—even if the process is seen as politically fraught. For policymakers and scholars, the findings imply that boosting human-rights compliance does not necessarily require widespread trust in courts; trials themselves can alter normative beliefs about repression while raising questions about institutional legitimacy.