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According to indicators of political repression currently used by scholars, human rights practices have not improved over the past 35 years, despite the spread of human rights norms, better monitoring, and the increasing prevalence of electoral democracy. I argue that this empirical pattern is not an indication of stagnating human rights practices. Instead, it reflects a systematic change in the way monitors, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, encounter and interpret information about abuses. The standard of accountability used to assess state behaviors becomes more stringent as monitors look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse. In this article, I present a new, theoretically informed measurement model, which generates unbiased estimates of repression using existing data. I then show that respect for human rights has improved over time and that the relationship between human rights respect and ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture is positive, which contradicts findings from existing research.

For the last thirty years, documented human rights violations have been met with an unprecedented rise in demands for accountability. This trend challenges the use of amnesties which typically foreclose opportunities for criminal prosecutions that some argue are crucial to transitional justice. Recent developments have seen amnesties circumvented, overturned, and resisted by lawyers, states, and judiciaries committed to ending impunity for human rights violations. Yet, despite this global movement, the use of amnesties since the 1970s has not declined. Amnesties, Accountability, and Human Rightsexamines why and how amnesties persist in the face of mounting pressure to prosecute the perpetrators of human rights violations. Drawing on more than 700 amnesties instituted between 1970 and 2005, Renée Jeffery maps out significant trends in the use of amnesty and offers a historical account of how both the use and the perception of amnesty has changed. As mechanisms to facilitate transitions to democracy, to reconcile divided societies, or to end violent conflicts, amnesties have been adapted to suit the competing demands of contemporary postconflict politics and international accountability norms. Through the history of one evolving political instrument,Amnesties, Accountability, and Human Rightssheds light on the changing thought, practice, and goals of human rights discourse generally.

This study examines the moderating role of tax amnesty and the mediating role of ethics in the relationship between trust in government and tax compliance among taxpayers in Indonesia and Malaysia. The data were analysed using the structural equation modeling to examine the mediating role of ethics and hierarchical regression analysis to test the moderating role of tax amnesty in the relationship between trust and tax compliance.  Based on the sample collection using the purposive sampling method, the study included 529 respondents from Indonesia and 137 from Malaysia. The findings reveal that the relationship between trust in government and taxpayer compliance is statistically significant with ethics as full mediator in Indonesia. However, the relationship between trust in government and tax compliance is not statistically significant in Malaysia. Ethics has a direct effect on tax compliance in both countries. Tax amnesty does not show a moderating effect in the relationship between trust in government and tax compliance. However, it plays a negative predictive role for tax compliance in Indonesia. This study will assist the government in developing tax compliance strategies to increase tax revenue with the launch of a similar program without neglecting the honest taxpayer.

Obligations that are not fulfilled by economic actors can be removed through legal regulations. This is called fiscal amnesty in the literature and involves the removal or softening of the sanctions economic actors will face. This study aims to empirically investigate the impact of fiscal amnesty programs on collected and acquired public revenues. Data for the sample of Türkiye’s 81 provinces used in the study were drawn from the period of 2004-2020. The study uses the developed data set to evaluate the effects of six fiscal amnesties, each of which had a different scope, on the tax system. The results show the fiscal amnesty program to have had positive short-term effects on accrual and collection amounts. However, tax amnesties were especially seen to negatively affect the amounts collected over the long run. Additionally, amnesty programs have both short- and long-term effects on the accrual rate, one of the macroeconomic measures of tax compliance. The results also show the shortterm beneficial effects on the tax system to decline and the long-term adverse consequences to rise with repeated tax amnesties. One can describe the benefits and drawbacks of financial amnesties at both the micro and macro dimensions due to the study’s methodology and findings, and in this regard, the study offers an empirical basis for both short-term and long-term policy recommendations.

Tax amnesty programmes are generally designed to foster tax compliance. However, their success has been marred by a low response rate. This study sought to investigate the factors influencing Namibian individual taxpayers’ decisions to participate in tax amnesty programmes. Using primary data from a sample of 375 respondents, the research examined the effects of demographic variables (age, income level, occupation, and gender), tax knowledge, understanding, perceived fairness, transparency, awareness, and perceived tax benefits on participation in the tax amnesty program. In this study, the Structural Equation Modelling technique, namely “Partial Least Squares”, referred to as SEM-PLS, was selected to test the presented hypotheses and relationships between these variables. Namibian taxpayers’ participation in tax amnesties is influenced by income levels, tax knowledge, and fairness, while their age and gender are not associated with this decision. Peculiar to Namibian individual taxpayers, age and gender are not important factors in influencing compliance or tax amnesty participation. The results highlighted the importance of occupation, particularly for self-employed taxpayers, and showed that perceived transparency held greater relevance in Namibia than in similar studies conducted elsewhere. These results illustrate the special compliance problems of self-employed taxpayers in emerging economies. The findings expand the tax compliance literature and considerations for improving the success of amnesty programs.