Silencing Human Rights Defenders Once and for All? Determinants of Human Rights Defenders’ Killings

When are human rights defenders at risk of being killed? Echoing research on journalist killings, we argue that a democratic context makes it easier for human rights defenders to operate and incentivizes them to continue activities and to pursue information that puts them at risk. De jure protections that defenders have may not be enforced or may not protect defenders from bad actors engaging in politically motivated murder. These factors make human rights defenders more likely to be killed by actors trying to avoid the spotlight and exposure in democratic systems than in other types of regimes. Autocratic regimes provide fewer opportunities to freely advocate for human rights and to pursue or disseminate information about human rights violations by state or non-state actors, reducing the likelihood of defender mortality. Using two new sets of cross-national data on the number of killings of human rights defenders between 1997 and 2010 and from 2014 to 2020, we find that these arguments are generally supported when controlling for other factors that affect the killing of human rights defenders, particularly in democracies with lower state capacity.