Terrorism And Human Rights Repression In Democracies

After the 9/11 attack,many democracies have introduced a large number of anti-terrorism policies to maintain national security,followed by disclosing of human rights repression behaviors like prisoner abuse,violations of privacy rights and invasions of freedom of speech,resulting discussions on the conflict between national security and freedom.However,arguments that whether the degree of human rights repression in democracies have been enhanced,and whether there is a correlation with the threat of terrorist attacks are lack of statistic tests.Moreover,it remains to be proved that whether human rights repression after 9/11 is special.Without distinguishing between democracies and non-democracies,the current re-search studied the influence of terrorist attacks on human rights repression and con-cluded that the higher the degree of democracy,the smaller the possibility of human rights repression,which is too general.By regression analyses on human rights repres-sion of 86 democracies and influencing factors both in pre-9/11 period and in post-9/11 period,it is found that the low democratic countries and high democratic countries im-posed higher degree of repression in post-9/11 period than that in pre-9./11 period.It is also found that terrorist attacks would increase the possibility of physical integrity rights repression in three types of democracies,although terrorism imposes less impacts on the repression im medium democratic countries.The impact of terrorist attacks on the low democratic countries and high democratic countries in the post-9/11 period has increased in terms of both scope of repressive actions and the degree of influence,while the influence on the medium democratic was opposite.It is obvious that the influence of terrorist attacks may be diversed by degree of democracy,that is,manifests a non-linear relationship with the degree of democracy,and has least impact on medium dem-ocratic countries.Whether to repress human rights is like a game considering both costs and benefits.Mainly influenced by the growing of citizens' fear and by considerations of political legitimacy,democracies will increase the degree of human rights repression.Many fac-tors may differ the influence of terrorist attacks,such as firstly,various considerations of costs of repression and purposes to maintain political trust in low,medium as well as high democratic counties;secondly,economic strategy in pre-9/11 period ana security strategy in post-9/11 period.Low democratic countries and high democratic countries are more sensitive to terrorist attacks,meaning that developing democracies have greater abilities to resist th e negative impact of terrorist attacks on human rights thain other two types of democracies.