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Motivation Purpose Approach and methods Findings Policy implications National Human Rights Action Plans (NHRAPs) turn state commitments to human rights into policy. Despite their widespread implementation internationally, they remain little studied and there is limited consensus as to their effectiveness.This article addresses this by using a political economy model to develop a framework to evaluate the success of NHRAPs. Within this framework it is argued that capacity, political structure, and political consensus are key drivers in the design and implementation of NHRAPs. We hypothesize that a country is likely to design and effectively use an NHRAP in policy‐making if at least these three requirements are met: (1) they are built on political consensus; (2) their perceived political benefits exceed their costs; and (3) governments have adequate resources to design and implement them.We evaluate this hypothesis using Chile as a case study. In 2016, Chile enacted a national law mandating NHRAPs. Since then, the country has adopted two NHRAPs: one spanning 2018–2021 and another covering 2022–2025.None of the three stipulated requirements were met in Chile. There was deep polarization rather than consensus building; the political costs of implementing an NHRAP exceeded the benefits; and key government bodies in Chile lacked the personnel and mandate to implement NHRAPs.This study advances our understanding of the nuances of designing public policies for human rights, and the complex political costs associated with them. Unless political actors are committed to investing political capital and resources, it is unlikely that these plans will succeed. Our political economy framework can be replicated across multiple national action plans, countries, and contexts. Future studies can identify contributing conditions that can mitigate political costs, increasing the likelihood of the success of these plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis article studies the international determinants of extrajudicial police killings in Latin America. Human rights violations by security forces are a problem that has plagued Latin American countries, despite broad democratization efforts in the region. Addressing the problem requires a better understanding of the processes that underlie it. Although existing literature has explored the determinants of police repression in Latin America through country-specific studies, there has been a lack of cross-national analyses. In this article we use original data on human rights violations by security forces in Latin America between 1998 and 2018 to argue that, beyond domestic factors, foreign aid provided by the United States in the War on Drugs era has influenced police repression both by encouraging heavy-handed policies and by driving a substitution dynamic between violations by different security forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]