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Who commits to regional human rights treaties? Reputational benefits, sovereignty costs, and regional dynamics
Abstract
Over the past 50 years, regional international organizations have adopted several treaties on human rights. By ratifying them, member states can signal their commitment to the norms codified in the respective documents. Yet ratification patterns vary greatly across both states and treaties. Extant studies of commitment to human rights focus on the impacts of reputational benefits and sovereignty costs. These arguments, however, are largely based on studies of ratification behavior in Europe and the UN system. We extend this logic to treaties created in the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (OAU/AU). Between them, the two organizations have adopted 15 human rights agreements, giving their member states ample choices about (non)ratification. We apply event-history analysis to newly collected data on treaty commitment. This reveals variation in line with regional differences in how treaties are elaborated. Benefits from commitment expected by democratic and democratizing states play an important role in the member-state driven process in the OAS, but this is not the case in the OAU/AU. In the expert-driven context of the OAU/AU, in contrast, concerns about sovereignty costs related to treaty design and the relative power of member states are more pronounced.
... Commitment to international human rights norms and their legal manifestations serves as a marker of legitimate statehood and status within the liberal international order (Donnelly, 1998;Geisinger & Stein, 2007;Reus-Smit, 2013). States may be able to gain legitimacy and esteem among domestic or international audiences by committing to a strong mechanism that ensures compliance with the norm(s) enshrined in the treaty (Comstock, 2021;Lohaus & Stapel, 2022) and allows for systematic monitoring and ranking of member states (Kelley & Simmons, 2015). A better reputation among other states may be an end in itself or it may serve as a way to gain more tangible benefits from ICP acceptance, such as development aid or more favorable trade relations. ...
How do states react to adverse decisions resulting from human rights treaties’ individual complaint procedures? While recent scholarship has shown particular interest in states’ reactions to international court judgments, research on state behavior vis-à-vis an increasing treaty body output remains scarce. I argue that states generally want to avoid the costs implied by adverse decisions, or ‘views’. Rising numbers of rebukes lead them to update their beliefs about the costliness of complaint procedure acceptance in a Bayesian manner. As a result, states become less inclined to accept further petition mechanisms under different human rights treaties. I test these assumptions on an original dataset containing information on individual complaint procedure acceptance and the distribution of 1320 views for a total number of 169 countries ranging from the year 1965 to 2018. Results from Cox proportional hazards regressions suggest that both the number of views against neighboring states and against the examined state itself decrease the likelihood of acceptance of most of the six individual complaint procedures under observation. I also find evidence that this effect is exacerbated if states are more likely to actually bear the costs of implementation. Findings indicate that the omission of further commitment can be a negative spillover of the treaty bodies’ quasi-judicial output.
... This availability of data allows for rigorous tests and enables a deeper understanding of what type of rights change given the different findings in the existing literature. While important work examines regional human treaties including those focused on women's rights (see the Organization of American States and African Union treaties examined by Mathis Lohaus and Soren Stapel [2022]), CEDAW remains accessible for commitment across regions and continues to remain important in current crises. It is clear from recent studies focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic era that CEDAW and women's rights issues remain at the forefront of global human rights issues and that this area of international law remains a vital one to study. ...
Can commitment to international human rights law promote human rights when the commitment is not yet legally binding? I argue that treaty signature can be used by non-governmental organizations and other rights actors to mobilize around rights standards and hold states accountable in the lead up to binding treaty ratification. Using the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) as a case, I argue that CEDAW signature can have a positive impact on women’s rights. I find overall support for the argument that, following signature, states are significantly and positively associated with higher women’s rights. The findings hold across numerous robustness checks. Using an illustrative case of CEDAW signature and mobilization in the United States, I demonstrate that activists drew on the treaty following signature in the absence of ratification. The argument and results contribute to the study of international law and women’s rights mobilization, highlighting the importance of signature commitment as a tool for advancing women’s rights in advance of treaty ratification.
Many studies show that supranational governance structures (SGS)—understood as international organizations or international treaties—contribute to the global diffusion of public policies. However, we still have a limited understanding of which properties of SGS hasten the number of policy adoptions. To advance this literature, we argue that SGS making legally binding and univocal claims are more likely to act as diffusion accelerators. We demonstrate the suitability of this argument through a case study of the global diffusion of mifepristone approvals, a single‐purpose medicine to terminate pregnancies that has revolutionized abortion services. The analysis supports our expectation. Links to the EU and the Maputo Protocol—the only two considered SGS that make binding claims with clear implications for this policy field—hasten mifepristone approvals. By contrast, ratification of four other treaties—that do not make binding and univocal claims—and exposure to World Health Organization guidelines on medical abortion does not hasten these approvals.
This piece introduces a collection of essays that examine various aspects of the ASEAN human rights regime, as we recognize decadal anniversaries for its two key foundational institutions: the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (ACIHR), established in 2009, and the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), promulgated in 2012. This introduction considers the aspiration of the regime to promote and protect human rights and the performance of the regime in practice over the decade since its establishment, and reviews the principle themes taken up by the contributors to this special issue of the Journal of Human Rights.
International relations scholarship has made significant strides in explaining how states design treaty obligations and why they accept treaty commitments. However, far less attention has been paid to factors that may influence states’ modification of their treaty obligations via reservations. We theorize that states will be more likely to enter reservations when treaty obligations increase compliance costs and policy adjustment costs. More specifically, we expect that demanding provisions, i.e., provisions that create strong, precise obligations requiring domestic action, will enhance the likelihood of reservation. To test our theory, we exploit an original dataset that codes reservations at the provision (treaty–article–paragraph) level for the ten core international human rights treaties. Consistent with our expectations, we find that states are more likely to enter reservations on more demanding treaty provisions. In contrast to prior studies, our results indicate that reservations are not driven purely by state-level characteristics such as regime type or the nature of the legal system. Rather, it appears that states weigh individual treaty obligations and calibrate their commitments accordingly.
Recent decades have witnessed the emergence and spread of a broad range of liberal norms in global governance, among them sustainable development, gender equality, and human security. While existing scholarship tells us a lot about the trajectories of particular norms, we know much less about the broader patterns and sources of commitments to liberal norms by international organizations (IOs). This article offers the first comparative large-N analysis of such commitments, building on a unique dataset on IO policy decisions over the time period 1980 to 2015. Distinguishing between deep norm commitment and shallow norm recognition, the analysis produces several novel findings. We establish that IOs’ deeper commitments to liberal norms primarily are driven by internal conditions: democratic memberships and institutional designs more conducive to norm entrepreneurship. In contrast, legitimacy standards in the external environment of IOs, often invoked in existing research, mainly account for shallower recognition or “talk” of norms.
The hazard function plays a central role in survival analysis. In a homogeneous population, the distribution of the time to event, described by the hazard, is the same for each individual. Heterogeneity in the distributions can be accounted for by including covariates in a model for the hazard, for instance a proportional hazards model. In this model, individuals with the same value of the covariates will have the same distribution. It is natural to think that not all covariates that are thought to influence the distribution of the survival outcome are included in the model. This implies that there is unobserved heterogeneity; individuals with the same value of the covariates may have different distributions. One way of accounting for this unobserved heterogeneity is to include random effects in the model. In the context of hazard models for time to event outcomes, such random effects are called frailties, and the resulting models are called frailty models. In this tutorial, we study frailty models for survival outcomes. We illustrate how frailties induce selection of healthier individuals among survivors, and show how shared frailties can be used to model positively dependent survival outcomes in clustered data. The Laplace transform of the frailty distribution plays a central role in relating the hazards, conditional on the frailty, to hazards and survival functions observed in a population. Available software, mainly in R, will be discussed, and the use of frailty models is illustrated in two different applications, one on center effects and the other on recurrent events.
International relations scholarship assumes that states weigh the costs and benefits of treaty ratification. In human rights, the worse a particular state’s record, the higher the presumptive costs of ratification and the lower the likelihood of ratification. But prior work neglects variation in the extent of obligation that different treaties create. In this article, we argue and demonstrate that (1) human rights treaties differ substantially in the scope and scale of the obligations they contain, (2) this variation can be measured, and (3) it matters for ratification. Treaties that create a larger number of demanding obligations imply greater potential costs of compliance for states. The larger the number of demanding obligations, the more grounds various actors will have to challenge a state’s practices. We analyze innovative data on treaty obligations and commitments for the ten core global human rights treaties to test our propositions, and we find strong support.
The African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights in Context - edited by Charles C. Jalloh May 2019
Essay on comparative regionalism explaining why the EU model may not apply to other regions
This article provides a pioneering empirical analysis of the emergence and transformation of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). The article analyses both the protracted process of negotiating a common court for the Caribbean and its subsequent institutionalization as the CCJ. The court eventually created in 2005 was uniquely vested with a double jurisdiction: original jurisdiction over Caribbean community law, notably the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (RTC) (2001), and appellate jurisdiction over other civil and criminal matters. We argue that this double competence is symptomatic of the complex socio-political context and transformation of which it is part. While the CCJ’s original jurisdiction over the RTC has been the background to a new more legalized process of Caribbean integration under the CARICOM, in its appellate function the Court is now gradually repatriating to the Caribbean the development and control over the common law from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Privy Council/JCPC) in London which until recently remained the last court of appeals for civil and criminal cases from the Caribbean. Using unique data collected on the ground, in both our legal and sociological analysis of the development of the CCJ since 2005, we show how this combination of globalization and latter-day decolonization continued to have a fundamental impact on the Court and its authority in the region. We moreover demonstrate how the Court has changed from initially deploying a sort of Legal Diplomacy (Madsen 2011) to now increasingly seeking to legitimize its practices in providing justice to the Caribbean people. The latter has helped the CCJ expand its group of interlocutors significantly beyond the initially rather narrow set of insiders involved in litigation before the Court as well as expanded its authority.
The Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) were both born to stabilise vulnerable state borders by practising non-interference in domestic affairs. Today, the OAU’s successor, the African Union (AU), uses sanctions against unconstitutional changes of government, while ASEAN continues to rule out any collective punitive action against members. To explain these divergent trajectories, this article first shows how different traditions produced different ways of engaging with sanctions in the early formative cases of South Africa and Vietnam. Thereafter, it examines how these traditions were selectively re-thought when confronted with the dilemmas of international sanctions against Libya and Myanmar. The interpretive approach enables a nuanced account of continuity and change in beliefs about sanctions. The AU’s sanctions doctrine has updated rather than broken with a traditional interpretation of non-interference. For ASEAN, the longstanding tradition of informality – and not strict adherence to non-interference – has continued to rule out regional sanctions.
Why did election monitoring become an international norm? Why do pseudo-democrats invite international observers, even when they are likely to be caught manipulating elections? Is election observation an effective tool of democracy promotion, or is it simply a way to legitimize electoral autocracies? This book explains international election monitoring with a new theory of international norm formation. It argues that election observation was initiated by states seeking international support. International benefits tied to democracy give some governments an incentive to signal their commitment to democratization without having to give up power. Invitations to nonpartisan foreigners to monitor elections, and avoiding their criticism, became a widely recognized and imitated signal of a government's purported commitment to democratic elections. The book draws on cross-national data on the global spread of election observation between 1960 and 2006, detailed descriptions of the characteristics of countries that do and do not invite observers, and evidence of three ways that election monitoring is costly to pseudo-democrats: micro-level experimental tests from elections in Armenia and Indonesia showing that observers can deter election day fraud and otherwise improve the quality of elections; illustrative cases demonstrating that international benefits are contingent on democracy in countries like Haiti, Peru, Togo, and Zimbabwe; and qualitative evidence documenting the escalating game of strategic manipulation among pseudo-democrats, international monitors, and pro-democracy forces.
International relations scholars have noted the importance of negotiations and socialization in shaping state human rights. So far, we know surprisingly little about how negotiation participation shapes human rights practices. I argue that human rights treaty negotiations socialize states in important ways through repeated interactions in a formal institutional structure. Focusing on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, I test whether negotiating states improved, worsened, or made no changes in their rights practices. Using data on UN negotiation participation, I found states negotiating the treaties contributed to positive human rights practices. This finding was the strongest around 10 years after treaty creation, although it was significant decades after treaty creation. The finding held against robustness checks. This research contributes to the study of human rights law, compliance, and socialization within international organizations.
This book explores when, why, and how regional organizations adopt and design institutions to promote and protect fundamental standards of democracy, human rights, and rule of law in their member states. These regional institutions have spread globally. While their institutional designs have become increasingly similar over time, regional particularities persist. The book identifies factors that generate the demand for regional institutions and shape its institutional design. The argument combines hitherto juxtaposed explanatory factors of demands and diffusion by integrating them in a single framework and clarifying under what conditions the interplay between demands and diffusion plays out in the adoption and design of regional institutions. The book provides a comprehensive overview of regional democracy, human rights, and rule of law institutions based on two original datasets and draws on multivariate statistical analysis as well as case studies on the making and change of regional institutions in the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity/African Union.
Sören Stapel is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His research interests include global and regional governance, norm and policy diffusion, human rights, and overlapping regionalism. He recently published Comparing Regional Organizations (Bristol University Press, 2020, with Diana Panke and Anna Starkmann).
This article builds a framework comparing how different regional organizations respond to human rights. Moving beyond Eurocentric beliefs that organizations either reject or unambiguously adopt rights, I present four categories of response: antagonism, ritualism, supportive, and embracing. I examine these categories conceptually and empirically, providing examples of how different regional organizations exemplify these categories. Next I detail how ASEAN’s approach to rights represents ritualism, combining support for human rights institutions without agreement on the moral worth of human rights. ASEAN’s ritualism is a product of the requirement to retain traditional commitments to nonintervention while responding to pressure to institutionalize human rights. Ritualism both legitimates human rights and normalizes their violation. Drawing on a comparison with the Inter-American system, I suggest three developments to ASEAN’s system that offer a plausible path for improving human rights governance in Southeast Asian regionalism without falling foul of political reality.
International treaties are the primary means for codifying global human rights standards. However, nation-states are able to make their own choices in how to legally commit to human rights treaties. A state commits to a treaty through four commitment acts: signature, ratification, accession, and succession. These acts signify diverging legal paths with distinct contexts and mechanisms for rights change reflecting legalization, negotiation, sovereignty, and domestic constraints. How a state moves through these actions determines how, when, and to what extent it will comply with the human rights treaties it commits to. Using legal, archival, and quantitative analysis this important book shows that disentangling legal paths to commitment reveals distinct and significant compliance outcomes. Legal context matters for human rights and has important implications for the conceptualization of treaty commitment, the consideration of non-binding commitment, and an optimistic outlook for the impact of human rights treaties.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and particularities of regional organizations across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe since 1945.
The authors analyze the membership dynamics and policy scopes of 76 organizations, and compare their opportunities and challenges in regional governance. They consider organizations’ competencies in eleven different policy areas, including trade, security and environment, and trace patterns in their development.
For those with interests in comparative regionalism, international relations, political science and international law, this is an essential companion to some of the world’s most significant organizations.
c.f. https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/comparing-regional-organizations
For decades, debates about Africa’s contribution to the development of international law have been dominated by two opposing schools of thought. First, that European colonial powers deliberately erased Africa and Africans from the history of the creation and use of international law. Second, that, on the contrary, over the last six decades (since the emergence of the newly independent African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s), Africa has contributed to the making of international law and has not been merely a passive recipient of a Eurocentric international law. This article underscores the role of the postcolonial periphery in the scheme of modern international law by highlighting specific examples of African states’ contributions to international legal norms through multilateral treatymaking. To that end, this article assesses a number of African Union and Organisation of African Unity treaties for their content, relevance, and impact. It concludes that postcolonial African states have been active participants in developing new rules of international law—and strengthening existing ones—through the adoption of path-breaking conventions that work to either (1) establish African commitment to new norms with potential global application or (2) supplement existing global (United Nations) instruments with commitments specific to the African context. It also shines a light on the desirability and pertinence of regional diversity in the continuing development and application of international law, and on the changing geographies of international lawmaking.
This book critically examines the civil, political, socioeconomic, and group rights protected under the African Charter and its Protocol on women’s rights. It then examines the institutional protection of these rights through the African Commission and African Court. The book builds on the concept of regionalism within Africa and the recent drive for finding “African solutions to African problems” by tracing the development of human rights within Africa and assessing the effectiveness of Africa’s core regional human rights institutions. In turn, it critically analyses the obstacles to the full implementation of human rights in Africa such as the lack of political will, jurisdictional issues, lack of resources and funding, poverty, illiteracy, corruption, and customary practices that violate human rights. In closing, the book discusses possible solutions to these problems.
Allwell Uwazuruike is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.
Cambridge Core - International Relations and International Organisations - Sovereignty in the South - by Brooke N. Coe
This paper investigates states’ commitment to human rights, democracy and rule of law through ratifying Council of Europe treaties. We present a first comprehensive analysis of ratifications of all 221 Council of Europe treaties that opened for ratification since 1949 among the 47 current member states. Applying a multilevel Cox regression, we observe a strong influence of external sources for states’ commitment and find evidence for both coercion and emulation mechanisms. First, upcoming EU membership is strongly and positively associated with treaty ratification, corroborating the relevance of accession conditionality in making countries to commit to human rights and democracy. Second, states are much more likely to ratify if a neighbouring country has ratified at the same time, which confirms a strong pattern of regional diffusion of rights acceptance in Europe. However, we find that this pattern of regional diffusion is stronger among states with lower levels of democracy, suggesting that emulation proceeds through mimicry. Finally, our analysis shows that Council of Europe treaty ratification is especially strong during the first years after treaty opening, suggesting that ratification reflects concerted efforts by states involved in the negotiation of regional treaties.
More than 3,000 international investment agreements (IIAs) provide foreign investors with substantive protections in host states and access to binding investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). In recent years, states increasingly have sought to change their treaty commitments through the practices of renegotiation and termination, so far affecting about 300 IIAs. The received wisdom is that this development reflects a “backlash” against the regime and an attempt by governments to reclaim sovereignty, consistent with broader antiglobalization trends. Using new data on the degree to which IIA provisions restrict state regulatory space (SRS), we provide the first systematic investigation into the effect of ISDS experiences on state decisions to adjust their treaties. The empirical analysis indicates that exposure to investment claims leads either to the renegotiation of IIAs in the direction of greater SRS or to their termination. This effect varies, however, with the nature of involvement in ISDS and with respect to different treaty provisions.
States in the same region are bound together by the ways in which the world imagines them as a collective. One distinguishing feature of post-Cold War regionalism is its outward orientation – the importance of the external dimension of regional cooperation. By and large, though, existing analysis of regional institutional development in the Global South does not explicitly conceptualise and theorise collective image consciousness and management. This paper works to address this conceptual gap. Making use of two cases of regional image crisis – post-1980s Africa and post-1997 Southeast Asia – it draws out two primary logics of regional image consciousness: the logic of influence and the logic of resources. A region’s ‘brand’ with respect to (dys)function and international norm (non-)compliance matters to regional actors because it affects the region’s political influence in international arenas and the region’s ability to attract resources from donors and investors.
Cambridge Core - Human Rights - The African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights in Context - edited by Charles C. Jalloh
Since the 1990s, many international and regional groups have adopted international treaties, protocols, and other documents to address corruption. My book is guided by a simple question: What explains the similarities and differences between international anti-corruption agreements?
I compare the contents and legal design of agreements, finding evidence of communication and copy-and-paste between cases. But diffusion processes did not lead to uniform results. I argue that agreements serve as signals of commitment to fight corruption at home and through international cooperation. The scope of issues covered and the degree of legal obligation depend on who the audience is: domestic constituents, other member states of the same group, or development partners. In addition to a comparative analysis of agreements across the globe, the book contains two case studies on the Organization of American States and the African Union.
This article introduces the special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights on institutional change in the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS). In doing so, it identifies the main concepts and ideas central to understanding the institutional change the IAHRS has experienced over the past six decades. Since the adoption of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man by the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948, the IAHRS has undergone a series of institutional changes and transformations that have affected and been affected by the System’s normative leanings, rules of procedure and institutional design, as well as by the position of the System within the broader landscape of the Americas. This special issue explores these changes from a variety of angles, including the process of change in historical context, normative and legal changes in the Inter-American Court’s jurisprudence, and the changing relationship between the IAHRS and other regional and international human rights institutions. This special issue features contributions and insights from the disciplines of history, law, and political science, among others.
Despite the differences between the Inter-American and African human rights systems, there are good reasons for their comparative analysis. This chapter focuses on two such reasons: cross-regional learning and the overall development of global human rights. Four areas of potential cross-regional learning are analysed: weak political oversight, distinct yet overlapping normative frameworks, interim measures and remedies. Much cross-regional learning has already taken place in these areas but more thinking and research is required. In particular, similarities in compliance and design of political oversight hold much potential for cross-regional learning. As to the development of global human rights, important insights can be gained by comparing institutional design, political reaction and the role of domestic actors. The two regional systems can inform our understandings of these dynamics.
This book critically examines the impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS). Going beyond traditional state compliance models of human rights impact, it develops a contextual understanding of how the IAHRS shapes political struggles between actors and institutions seeking to advance the realization of human rights and those who resist such social and political change.
Par Engstrom is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at the Institute of the Americas, University College, UK, and the academic coordinator of the International Network on the Inter-American Human Rights System.
This book celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by showing how global human rights norms have influenced national government practices in eleven different countries around the world. Had the principles articulated in the Declaration had any effect on the behavior of states towards their citizens? What are the conditions under which international human rights norms are internalized in domestic practices? And what can we learn from this case about why, how, and under what conditions international norms in general influence the actions of states? This book draws on the work of social constructivists to examine these important issues. The contributors examine eleven countries representing five different world regions - Northern Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe - drawing practical lessons for activists and policy makers concerned with preserving and extending the human rights gains made during the past fifty years.
The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS Court) is an increasingly active and bold adjudicator of human rights. Since acquiring jurisdiction over human rights complaints in 2005, the ECOWAS Court has issued numerous decisions condemning human rights violations by the member states of the Economic Community of West African States (Community). Among this Court’s path-breaking cases are judgments against Niger for condoning modern forms of slavery and against Nigeria for impeding the right to free basic education for all children. The ECOWAS Court also has broad access and standing rules that permit individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bypass national courts and file suits directly with the Court. Although the Court is generally careful in the proof that it requires of complainants and in the remedies that it demands of governments, it has not shied away from politically courageous decisions, such as rulings against the Gambia for the torture of journalists and against Nigeria for failing to regulate multinational companies that have degraded the environment of the oil-rich Niger Delta.
Latin American governments, social movements, and regional organizations have made a far greater contribution to the idea and practice of international human rights than has previously been recognized. Most discussions of the global human rights regime stress its origins in the countries of the Global North. This article explores the role of Latin America states as early protagonists of the international protection of human rights, focusing in particular on the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. Histories of human rights in the world emphasize the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, as the founding moment of international human rights. Few know that Latin American states passed a similar American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man a full eight months before passage of the UDHR. The American Declaration thus was the first broad enumeration of rights adopted by an intergovernmental organization. This article explores the American Declaration as an example of often overlooked Latin American human rights protagonism that has continued to this day, and that calls into question the idea that human rights originated in only the Global North.
International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way that states interact with each other, with international institutions, and even with their own constituents. The area subjected to the most intense restructuring has perhaps been human rights. The rise of the international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individual constituents to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories of compliance from international law, human rights, and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. The central argument of the book is that compliance with international human rights tribunals' rulings is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: First, why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? Second, how does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? Third, what effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? This book answers these questions through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
This work examines the role of the Organization of African Unity, now the African Union, and how it has dealt with human rights since its inception in 1963. It considers the role of its main institutions both under the OAU and its transformation into the African Union. The book is divided into chapters examining various themes including the rights of women, the rights of the child, the concept of democracy and the right to development. Written by a leading human rights scholar, this book is essential reading for lawyers acting for African states, and for foreign governments and NGOs active in Africa, as well as being of interest to international and comparative human rights scholars.
Since the establishment of the African Union in 2001, there has been a proliferation of regional institutions that are relevant to human rights in Africa. These include the Pan African Parliament; the Peace and Security Council; the Economic, Social, and Cultural Council; and the African Peer Review Mechanism of the New Partnership for Africa's Development. This book discusses the links between these institutions, and 20 years of jurisprudence stemming from the entry into force on 21st October 1986 of the major African human rights instrument, the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights. This book attempts to provide a comprehensive analytical overview of human rights in Africa, dealing particularly with the regional system of human rights protection. Four themes are followed throughout the book: the principle of uti possidetis, the tensions in the modern post-colonial African state, poverty, and the interrelationship between national and international human rights protection.
This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. By several measures, civil and political rights, women’s rights, a right not to be tortured in government detention, and children’s rights improve, especially in the very large heterogeneous set of countries that are neither stable autocracies nor stable democracies. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.
This article argues that in order to understand how international human rights agreements (HRAs) work, scholars need to turn their attention to rights that are not definitional to democracy. When rights practices diverge from treaty rules, but the domestic enforcement mechanisms that give such agreements their bite are robust, how do governments behave? The study explores this question by examining a core treaty that prohibits child labor. When domestic enforcement is likely, states where many children work are often deterred from ratifying. Nevertheless, those that do ratify experience significant child labor improvements. By contrast, in non-democracies, ratification is a promise that is easily made but seldom kept.
We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries. We assess government performance using measures of government intervention, public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government, and political freedom. We find that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance. We also find that the larger governments tend to be the better performing ones. The importance of historical factors in explaining the variation in government performance across countries sheds light on the economic, political, and cultural theories of institutions.
No other study comprehensively analyzes small states in a comparative perspective, examines their activity levels in EU negotiations and outlines which conditions are needed for the effectiveness of a broad range of strategies. An indispensable resource for students and researchers interested in how and under which conditions small states can influence EU policies and which of the small states are most likely to be successful.
The status of human rights in Southeast Asia is under increasing scrutiny as the process of community building culminates in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR). National, regional, and external civil society actors now populate the ASEAN “human rights space” pressuring member governments and ASEAN institutions. This article investigates the status of human rights in the 10 member states of ASEAN by presenting the patterns of ratification, reservation, and fulfillment of the core global human rights treaties. This analysis suggests that, despite a growing number of treaty ratifications, compliance with the standards those treaties include remains elusive. Reservations, resistance to the optional protocols, and nonsubmission of reports to the relevant treaty bodies suggest that ratification has not led to full compliance. The article concludes that Southeast Asian states will continue to diversify with regard to human rights, placing great strain not only on the AICHR but ASEAN itself.
Considerable research has already been done on the role of the United Nations in promoting human rights; however, the work of regional organizations is just beginning to be explored in greater depth. This article compares the regional evolution of human rights instruments, focusing particularly on Africa, and examines different explanations for regional variance. The impact of domestic conditions, regional and international pressures, and cultural concerns on the instrumental calculations of state actors are explored revealing that international and regional factors played a key role in early adoption of protection mechanisms, and that domestic pressures have grown increasingly important.
How International Law Works presents a theory of international law, how it operates, and why it works. Though appeals to international law have grown ever more central to international disputes and international relations, there is no well-developed, comprehensive theory of how international law shapes policy outcomes.
Filling a conspicuous gap in the literature on international law, Andrew T. Guzman builds a coherent theory from the ground up and applies it to the foundations of the international legal system. Using tools from across the social sciences Guzman deploys a rational choice methodology to explain how a legal system can succeed in the absence of coercive enforcement. He demonstrates how even rational and selfish states are motivated by concerns about reciprocal non-compliance, retaliation, and reputation to comply with their international legal commitments.
Contradicting the conventional view of the subject among international legal scholars, Guzman argues that the primary sources of international commitment—formal treaties, customary international law, soft law, and even international norms—must be understood as various points on a spectrum of commitment rather than wholly distinct legal structures.
Taking a rigorous and theoretically sound look at international law, How International Works provides an in-depth, thoroughgoing guide to the complexities of international law, offers guidance to those managing relations among nations, and helps us to understand when we can look to international law to resolve problems, and when we must accept that we live in an anarchic world in which some issues can be resolved only through politics.