ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact of three types of constitutional provisions on personal integrity rights: provisions for specific individual freedoms and provisions for an independent judiciary that are believed to be necessary for implementation of these constitutional protections. It also includes states of emergency provisions, which arguably will curb a regime’s proclivity toward human rights abuses. The chapter also examines the effects from a purely regional perspective, based on geographic location, with the exception of European-settled countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia. The level of political democracy has been found to be one of the strongest factors related to personal integrity rights, but in this analysis the democracy measure has no impact on the human rights score in states that share a French colonial influence. The measure of state abuse of personal integrity rights used are those originally developed by Michael Stohl and several others.
