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The Review of International Organizations
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-024-09565-0
Abstract
How do states react to adverse decisions resulting from human rights treaties’ indi-
vidual 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 pro-
cedure acceptance in a Bayesian manner. As a result, states become less inclined to
accept further petition mechanisms under dierent 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 haz-
ards 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 nd evidence
that this eect 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.
Keywords UN treaty bodies · Human rights · Individual complaints ·
Commitment · Compliance · Costs · Bayesian learning
Accepted: 22 July 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state
acceptance of the UN human rights treaties’ individual
complaint procedures
Andreas JohannesUllmann1,2
Responsible Editor: Axel Dreher
Andreas Johannes Ullmann
andreas.ullmann@uni-potsdam.de
1 Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
2 Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
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A. J. Ullmann
1 Introduction
In 2004, the United Kingdom’s government declared that it considered the ratica-
tion of the Optional Protocol of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women (CEDAW-OP) as an “experiment” with the aim to “enable [the gov-
ernment] to consider on a more empirical basis the merits of the right of individual
petition which exists under a number of UN treaties” (JCHR, 2006). Specically,
government ocials feared that the “extensive use of individual petition […] could
lead to a signicant cost to public funds” (JCHR, 2005). Furthermore, the UK gov-
ernment vindicated its inaction towards ratication of other UN human rights treaty
individual complaint procedures (ICPs), such as the Optional Protocol of the Con-
vention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD-OP), by putting forward
the argument that the “empirical evidence” garnered during the CEDAW “experi-
ment” would have to be taken into account when deciding on the ratication of the
ICP at question (JCHR, 2015; Lords Hansard, 2007).
The United Nations treaty bodies’ individual complaint procedures (ICP) serve
as a crucial mechanism for individuals to seek justice and hold states accountable
for their human rights violations (Fox Principi, 2017; Harrington, 2011; Schoner,
2023). However, we know little about how states react to the mounting number of
views arising from these procedures (Çalı & Galand, 2020). After all, they can imply
substantial action by state authorities ranging from the payment of nancial com-
pensation to legislative changes (Fox Principi, 2017). The above anecdote from the
UK suggests that governments can be quite sensitive toward the risk of such costs.
What is more, the UK’s practice of using information on the costs and benets of
one ICP before deciding on the acceptance of another ICP under a dierent human
rights treaty suggests that ex-post costs caused by one or more ICPs may have a con-
siderable inuence on future ICP acceptance. Does the output of ICPs aect states’
willingness to accept more of those monitoring mechanisms?
Focusing on state commitment to the ICPs under six UN human rights treaties,1
this article advances the notion that states react to mounting criticisms from the treaty
bodies by withholding their acceptance of further ICPs. As a causal mechanism link-
ing ICP output and state commitment, I propose that states undergo a learning process
that resembles a Bayesian updating framework. Building on the literature on rational
and bounded learning in international investment law (Haftel & Thompson, 2018;
Poulsen & Aisbett, 2013), I argue that before committing to ICPs states make cost-
1 Currently, there are eight operational ICPs. These are the First Optional Protocol to the Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (CCPR-OP), Article 22 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), Article 14 of the Convention on the Elimina-
tion of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD), the Optional Protocol to the Elimination of all Forms
of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW-OP), the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD-OP), the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Economic, Social,
and Cultural Rights (CESCR-OP), the third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the
Child (CRC-OP3), and Article 31 of the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced
Disappearance (CED). While the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant
Workers and Members of their Families (CMW) also allows for an ICP, it has not yet entered into force.
The ICPs examined in this study are CERD Article 14, CAT Article 22, and the relevant optional proto-
cols of the CCPR, the CEDAW, the CRPD, and the CRC.
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
benet assessments that are aected by the information about increasingly active
treaty bodies issuing more and more decisions in individual cases. Once they experi-
ence the cost implications of an increasing number of adverse decisions, state o-
cials will become wary of their previous cost assessment and adapt it according to
the newly found facts. The pivotal implication of this learning process is that new
information on costs associated with these decisions, or ‘views’,2 can discourage
states from further accession to ICPs. The main aim of this article is not to provide a
general account of ICP commitment but to better understand the role of the suggested
learning mechanism in states’ acceptances of international obligations.
I evaluate the above propositions using survival analysis on data from an origi-
nal dataset that contains information on state acceptance of all active ICPs, and the
distribution and implementation of 1320 treaty body decisions against a total of 169
countries between 1965 and 2018. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that
states learn from views that are issued against other states. First-hand experience of
views, on the other hand, is only associated with a lower probability of ICP accep-
tance if the concerned state is also likely to comply with the substance of the views.
The ndings of this study have major implications for the literature on commit-
ment to and compliance with international human rights treaties and their monitor-
ing bodies (Comstock, 2021; Hathaway, 2002; Huneeus, 2013; Simmons, 2009). By
showing that there is a trade-o between compliant behavior and further commit-
ments, the article highlights possible conicts between the provision of individual
justice and state commitment to international human rights law. In addition, this
study speaks to scholarship on nation-states’ contestation of the global liberal order in
that it provides novel evidence for the notion that states are highly susceptible to the
growing intrusiveness of international organizations into what nation-states regard
as their domestic aairs (Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Eilstrup-Sangiovanni & Hofmann,
2020; Tallberg & Zürn, 2019). Specically, the results indicate that state actors may
react to this intrusion not only by employing the usual tactics of backlash (Alter et al.,
2016; Madsen et al., 2018) and withdrawal (Pauwelyn & Hamilton, 2018; Soley &
Steininger, 2018) but also by refraining from further commitments to the respective
legal regime. The suggested learning mechanism sheds light on the limits of indi-
vidual petition in international human rights law specically (Steinert, 2024; Montal
& Pauselli, 2023; Stiansen & Voeten, 2020), and on a novel aspect of the ongo-
ing process of ‘de-judicialization’ of international politics more generally (Abebe &
Ginsburg, 2019).
2 The benets and costs of individual complaint procedures
As of 2023, eight out of the nine core UN human rights treaties comprise an active
petition mechanism that allows individuals to le complaints if they deem their guar-
anteed rights violated by state entities. If the respective committee has rendered a
2 The outcomes of ICPs are typically referred to by the treaty bodies as ‘views’ or ‘decisions’. Here, I
will use the term ‘view(s)’ to refer to treaty body decisions that establish a violation of a state’s treaty
obligations in an individual case.
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A. J. Ullmann
decision on the merits and established a violation of the underlying treaty in an indi-
vidual case, it issues a ‘view’ that asks the respondent state to provide redress and
reparation to the complainant(s).3 These complaint procedures have become ever
more popular among stakeholders with treaty bodies currently processing several
hundred communications per year.4 Acceptance of ICPs by member states is optional
and done by ratifying or acceding to an Optional Protocol or by making a declaration
under a specic convention article.5 If they are optional, why do states accept such
monitoring mechanisms that allow individuals to challenge their authority?
2.1 ICP acceptance
There are two stages at which treaty commitment provides dierent costs and ben-
ets to the acceding state: (1) when the state enters the treaty and (2) later when it
complies with the treaty (van Aaken & Simsek, 2021, p. 206). As this applies, ceteris
paribus, also to state commitment to ICPs, this section discusses the costs and ben-
ets involved in the ICP acceptance itself before engaging thoroughly with the costs
and benets of compliance with the ICP output in the next section.6
At the initial stage of entering an ICP, the benets of acceptance may seem to
outweigh the costs. Commitment to international human rights norms and their legal
manifestations serves as a marker of legitimate statehood and status within the lib-
eral 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 benets from ICP acceptance, such as development aid or more
favorable trade relations. Smith-Cannoy (2012), who was the rst to study the puzzle
of the acceptance of human rights treaty ICPs as distinct from treaty ratication,
argues that states ratify ICPs to gain legitimacy among external and internal pressure
groups, especially during times of economic hardship. In a study on the CCPR-OP,
Schoner (2023) contends that repressive governments ratify the ICP to increase their
economic benets from aid and trade relations with the European Union. She nds,
however, that this positive eect of economic benets on ICP ratication depends
3 Positive decisions on the merits that do not determine a breach of treaty provisions do not have the same
implications for the responding states and are therefore not examined here.
4 In its latest available annual report, the Human Rights Committee alone notes the processing of 211
communications in one year (HRC, 2022).
5 Although some states require legislative approval for the ratication of international treaties and their
optional protocols, the initial decision to sign the optional protocol or accept the corresponding article
establishing the ICP lies with the executive. Decisions on international commitment are heavily aected
by executives’ logics of self-preservation, even in democratic and parliamentary systems where the
potential inuence of other domestic political actors is greatest (McKibben & Western, 2020; Comstock,
2021). Thus, the main actor in the study of ICP acceptance is arguably a state’s government.
6 Costs and benets are understood here not as mutually exclusive but as the opposite ends of a two-
dimensional utility spectrum.
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
largely on the absence of domestic constraints, that is, domestic institutions that
would increase the costs of commitment by pressuring the government to later com-
ply with the committee’s decisions. In other words, positive inducements towards
ICP commitment at the entry stage are overshadowed by the costs that emerge at the
compliance stage. Thus, reputation benets gained through ICP acceptance can only
be sustained through compliance later on.
The importance of compliance costs for states’ ratication decisions is well under-
stood in the literature on commitment to human rights treaties. In her seminal work
Mobilizing for Human Rights, Simmons (2009, p. 64) argues that “governments are
more likely to ratify human rights treaties […] with which they can comply at a
reasonable cost” and nds that cost avoidance is a fundamental logic behind ratica-
tion or non-ratication of several human rights treaties and the CCPR-OP. Hathaway
(2003, p. 115) points out that countries considering joining an ICP not only take into
account future compliance costs but also “the probability that the costs of compliance
will actually be realized.” She nds support for this assertion in ratication patterns
of the CCPR-OP and CAT Article 22 (Hathaway, 2007).
These studies show that ICP acceptance implies certain utility in and of itself but
that any cost-benet assessment that does not go beyond the initial commitment stage
and also looks at the costs and benets of compliance later on remains incomplete.
Scholarship has thus shifted away from static, macro-level explanations for commit-
ment and compliance and instead acknowledged that “regularly receiving and imple-
menting recommendations from human rights institutions forces states to re-evaluate
and revise the extent of their commitment to and compliance with those human rights
instruments, institutions, and underlying norms” (Haglund & Hillebrecht, 2020, p.
650).
Despite widespread agreement on the relevance of future compliance costs to
treaty ratication, there has hardly been any systematic examination of how states
react to the immediate costs of the treaties’ compliance monitoring mechanisms. As
a basic principle, I expect the logic of costs to become more important the more
eectively a treaty obliges states to align their actions and policies with the treaty
provisions. In this regard, ICPs are arguably among the most rigorous monitoring
provisions available to UN human rights treaty bodies (Cole, 2012; Dutton, 2012, p.
34). Unlike other monitoring mechanisms, such as the treaties’ reporting procedures,
ICPs create very narrow and specic obligations for state parties, if only in individual
cases. More precise obligations, then, also create costs that are more targeted and
appear more urgent than the diuse costs stemming from general provisions (Çalı &
Koch, 2017, p. 49; Fox Principi, 2020). This should make ICP acceptance particu-
larly prone to cost-benet arguments. After all, as Dinah Shelton (Shelton, 2015b, p.
28) has noted aptly, “States do not like to be criticized and they do not like to lose
cases”. I argue that in order to identify the costs and benets of ICPs for states one
needs to look at their procedural outcomes – the views. They call on the respondent
state to take concrete measures to remedy the harm done and rectify the decien-
cies in its practices. Such measures can include the payment of nancial compensa-
tion, medical treatment, reopening of proceedings, or more general recommendations
such as the training of judges and law enforcement, and law amendments. Although
treaty body views are not legally binding, they are the outcome of a “quasi-judicial”
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A. J. Ullmann
process and are dicult for the involved states to ignore (Ford, 2022; von Staden,
2018). Law-making by the UN treaty bodies can translate into a normative quality
that requires states to give up their sovereignty – to some degree – to international
non-state actors (Reiners, 2021; Ulfstein, 2014).
I argue that, with the oldest ICP being active for over 60 years and with well over
1400 adverse views issued under the eight active ICPs (Ullmann & von Staden, 2023,
p. 5), there is enough information available to states that want to assess the actual
costs of commitment.
2.2 ICP compliance
The question of how costs shape state behavior in the area of human rights treaties
has been picked up by several studies, albeit with varying levels of theoretical elabo-
ration (Chayes & Chayes, 1998; Cole, 2012; Downs et al., 1996; Gauri, 2011; Good-
lie & Hawkins, 2006; Mulesky et al., 2020; Vreeland, 2008). All these studies share
the notion that high compliance costs in the future are likely to constitute an impedi-
ment to states’ ratication of human rights treaties in the present. But with what kind
of costs—or benets for that matter—do states face once they have accepted an ICP
and become subject to adverse views?
In light of the present study’s objective, it is helpful to dierentiate the costs of
views along two dimensions: (1) the materiality of the costs and (2) their dependence
on compliance. Table 1 classies four types of costs along these two dimensions. The
dierent types express dierent levels of intrusiveness into the domestic aairs of the
responding state which results in higher costliness. To be clear, all views entail sov-
ereignty costs for states in that they constitute an attempt by an international expert
body to alter domestic rules and procedures. However, if a state chooses not to com-
ply with a view this intrusion remains hypothetical, as it did not lead to any change
in state behavior. A state that does not comply will have to fear mainly reputation
costs – a prospect that should not deter all states equally (Adler-Nissen, 2014; Debre,
2022). If a state chooses to comply, on the other hand, it is directly and concretely
confronted with both the tangible scal costs that stem from implementation and the
possibly more momentous non-tangible political costs that arise with a narrowing of
its policy options. Equally, views that aim at more general state practices will have
stronger cost implications for the responding state than views that demand, for exam-
ple, only damages in the individual case. Generally, I expect views to be perceived
as more costly by states if they are complied with and if they entail consequences
beyond the provision of material remedies. I will describe the four types of costs in
more detail below.
Sanctions A state’s non-compliance with views might result in material costs through
shaming by INGOs or other states. There is evidence that naming and shaming of
international human rights bodies is associated with a decrease in aid ows (Dietrich
Tangible Non-tangible
Non-compliance Sanctions Reputation Costs
Compliance Fiscal Costs Political Costs
Table 1 Types of costs implied
by views
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
& Murdie, 2017; Lebovic & Voeten, 2009; Schoner, 2023), trade (Peterson et al.,
2018), and foreign direct investment (Vadlamannati et al., 2018). Since the treaty
bodies’ reports and views can be understood as naming and shaming devices (Kahn-
Nisser, 2021; Schoner, 2022), it is plausible that they have material consequences
for the shamed state. The treaty bodies’ annual and follow-up reports are publicly
available and provide rst-hand information on a state’s ability and willingness to
protect and promote human rights within their own territory. The emerging practice
among treaty bodies to assign grades in their follow-up reports on views could further
enhance the visibility of non-compliance and mobilize third actors (Kelley & Sim-
mons, 2015). However, it is dicult to trace this mechanism in practice, and to date,
there is no empirical study exploring a possible link between treaty body views and
sanctions. The relatively low visibility of the follow-up reports and the open-ended
nature of the implementation process make the tracing of such a link rather dicult.
Ultimately, the idea that the treaty bodies’ views and reports can lead to material
sanctions remains hypothetical.
Reputation costs Views constitute a public attestation that a state has violated the
obligations it has imposed on itself through treaty ratication. Violating international
commitments signals a willingness to ignore international law and therefore comes
with a loss of reputation (Guzman, 2005). Committing to a human rights treaty while
later not complying with its provisions or its monitoring body’s decisions could harm
a state’s reputation among domestic (Kuzushima et al., 2023) and international audi-
ences and lead to stigmatization and outcasting (Adler-Nissen, 2014; Carraro et al.,
2019; Kelley & Simmons, 2015) and, hence, restrict its future scope of action. A loss
of reputation can translate into a shrinking of future opportunities for cooperation
(Guzman, 2005) and a decrease in soft power to inuence and persuade other states
(Koh, 2007). Reputation costs can occur (1) when the Committee establishes a viola-
tion and, thus, nds that the State party did not comply with the treaty provisions in
a specic case, and (2) when a state does not implement the remedies requested in
a view, in which case they can be understood as the alternative to scal and politi-
cal costs, which emanate directly from the implementation of remedies.7 Reputation
costs are akin to audience costs, which arise when “audiences punish policymakers
for committing to one policy and then reneging on that promise” (Chaudoin, 2014,
p. 235). Such behavior is costly because it gives domestic and international audi-
ences “the opportunity to deplore the international loss of credibility, face, or honor”
(Fearon, 1994, p. 581).
Fiscal costs8 These are the most evident cost implications that stem from the specic
remedies the treaty bodies demand from the violating state. Such costs arise, for
example, in the form of direct payment of nancial compensation to victims, the
7 As a general caveat it should be noted that ICPs are not the most eective mobilizing devices. This is
due to the fact that the treaty bodies’ follow-up procedures to views are so opaque that sometimes even
stakeholders are not informed about new developments in their cases, let alone recognized by a wider
public (Callejon et al., 2019).
8 I borrowed the term from (Gauri, 2011, p. 36).
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A. J. Ullmann
performance of concrete remedial actions such as the granting of medical treatment,
and the reopening of proceedings in individual cases. The mere organizational costs
of setting up a reply to the treaty body’s follow-up mechanism may be regarded as
unpleasant by state authorities. However, general remedies such as training courses
for judges can also fall under this category. Such costs can be translated into mon-
etary expenses and, thus, are easy to pin down.
As an illustration of how direct costs work in this context, consider the view regarding
communication L.N.P. v. Argentina in which the Human Rights Committee (HRCttee)
found that Argentine public ocials’ treatment of the claimant in the aftermath of a
sexual assault amounted to several violations of the Convention on Civil and Politi-
cal Rights (CCPR/C/102/D/1610/2007, 2011, para. 13.9). As an individual remedy,
the HRCttee requested the full implementation of an amicable settlement procedure
between the state and the author of the communication (CCPR/C/102/D/1610/2007,
2011, para. 14). About a year later, the State party informed the HRCttee that it had
taken steps to implement the required individual remedy (HRC, 2013, pp. 143–144).
These included the payment of US$ 53.000 as compensation to the author, a monthly
life pension, the construction of a house for the author and her family, the granting of
a scholarship, and the sanctioning of the doctor who failed to properly examine the
author. These are clear-cut expenses for the State party that arose through the ICP.
Political costs These costs arise when a view has implications that restrict or modify
a government’s policy space and as a consequence “weaken its domestic hold on
power” (Sandholtz et al., 2018, p. 161). This category captures most of what oth-
ers have coined “limited exibility” (Goodlie & Hawkins, 2006, p. 22), and “sov-
ereignty costs” (Abbott & Snidal, 2000; Krasner, 1999; Moravcsik, 2000), both of
which denote the possibility of interference of other states or international organiza-
tions into a state’s ‘sovereign’ freedom to set policies as it sees t. Yet, political costs
refer only to non-pecuniary measures that evince more far-reaching implications in
the responding state’s internal aairs.9 Remedies formulated in treaty body views
may imply dierent degrees of political costs. Individual measures, such as freeing
a publicly known political prisoner, can have political consequences for the gov-
ernment that will exceed the mere nancial or organizational costs of the release.
General measures, such as legislative change concerning a certain issue, are even
more likely to substantially restrict the government’s freedom to choose the policies
it regards as optimal for years to come.
An example of political costs stemming from UN treaty body views is the communi-
cation Yuri Bandajevsky v. Belarus. In 1999 Bandajevsky, then professor and rector
of a public medical institute, was arrested on corruption charges and later sentenced
to 8 years of imprisonment. The victim turned to the HRCttee, claiming that his
conviction was politically motivated and likely triggered by a critical report of his
on the eects of the Chernobyl disaster on Belarus, “which was very dierent from
9 They largely stem from those remedies that Dinah Shelton has called ‘non-monetary remedies’ (Shelton,
2015a).
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
the ocial position of the Government“ (CCPR/C/86/D/1100/2002, 2006, para. 3.9).
The assertion that Mr. Bandajevsky was a political prisoner due to his open criticism
of state authorities was also conrmed by Amnesty International (Amnesty Interna-
tional, 2001). In March 2006, the HRCttee found Belarus to have violated several
treaty provisions through the arbitrary arrest of Mr. Bandajevsky (HRC, 2006). Five
months after the issuance of the HRCtte’s view, the victim informed the committee
that he was released from prison without compensation (Human Rights Commit-
tee, 2007, p. 660). The view implied high political costs because, for the Belarusian
government, the freeing of a public gure who dares to openly criticize government
decisions constitutes a potential threat to its autocratic rule.
By creating a broad spectrum of liabilities, ICPs make it hard for states to escape
the costs of views, particularly if they choose to comply with the latter. Granted, the
costs implied by a single view should be (mostly) negligible for states, which makes
them low-impact events.10 This means that the experience of a single view may not
have a measurable eect on state behavior concerning the acceptance of ICPs but that
the accumulation of several views and their implied costs should make an impression
on states. Given that compliance with views usually takes several years (Ullmann &
von Staden, 2023, p. 11), the costs of multiple views against the same state are likely
to build up over the years. Since I expect states to have a vested interest in avoiding
these costs, I suggest that views provide information for states on the ‘true’ costli-
ness of ICPs. The next section will set out the mechanism through which state actors
process the information that views entail about the costliness of ICPs and what this
may mean for states’ willingness to accept them.
3 Treaty body views and state learning
I have shown above that the treaty bodies’ views can imply very specic costs for
the respondent state. Another characteristic of the procedure is the high uncertainty
as to whether costs will occur and when. Consider that, empirically, the distribution
of views among member states casts doubt on the notion that better human rights
practices will lead to fewer rebukes. In fact, it is even possible that a country’s over-
all respect for certain human rights and its likelihood of receiving views are not
related at all.11 Over the years, countries such as South Korea, Australia, Denmark,
and Uruguay have received a considerable number of views despite their democratic
credentials and their reputation as human rights-respecting states. Thus, states receiv-
ing high numbers of views do not necessarily have a bad human rights performance
in general. Since ICPs concern only singular cases, their acceptance can turn out to
involve considerable costs even to states whose laws and practices are generally in
line with treaty provisions. Additionally, a signicant backlog in the processing of
complaints makes it even more dicult for states to anticipate when and how often
10 Compare with Poulsen and Aisbett’s high-impact event of investment treaty arbitration, where already
the experience of a single BIT claim aects states’ decisions to ratify more BITs (2013, p. 292).
11 In my dataset, the number of views per country is only weakly correlated to civil and political rights (r
= -0.097), and to physical integrity rights (r = -0.086).
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A. J. Ullmann
they are going to receive a view (Callejon et al., 2019). This creates uncertainty
which, in turn, has strong implications for supposedly rational state actors trying to
calculate the costs and benets of ICP acceptance. That is because if a state cannot
realistically extrapolate the volume of complaints it will receive from the ICP under
consideration,12 that state will nd it impossible to make a rational choice on its
acceptance. Even for states with democratic credentials and high legal and bureau-
cratic capacities, making such calculations can be challenging and can result in errors
(Putnam, 2020, p. 34). This is why I expect states to be highly susceptible to the
information about the costs of ICP commitment implied by views.
I argue that, at an early stage of the ratication process, each state makes its own
assessment of the costs of commitment by extrapolating the probability of being
targeted by views from a place of uncertainty. At this stage, the benets involved
in commitment mentioned earlier may override fears of compliance costs and lead
states to accept one or more ICPs. However, after the state has witnessed a grow-
ing number of views against itself or others, it can update its earlier conclusion and
expect higher costs as a result of which its ratication of further ICPs becomes less in
line with its preference for cost avoidance and, thus, less likely. Certainly, the costs
implied by ICP jurisprudence can be understood as costs that are dicult to avoid
ex post by the states receiving the views, as the decision to ratify the ICP generating
these views is not easy to reverse.13 Yet, I argue that once a new ICP under a dierent
human rights treaty is opened for ratication states will incorporate in their decision-
making the information on future costs provided by the precedents of earlier ratied
ICPs, as exemplied by the UK case above.14
More precisely, I expect this process to resemble a Bayesian updating mechanism
where the probability of a state accepting an ICP depends on the state’s updated belief
about the costliness of acceptance. Such updated belief is the result of the state’s prior
belief about the costs and benets times the new information on the likelihood of
costs provided by views. In other words, in an uncertain environment, views can be
seen as carriers of information about the true costliness of ICP acceptance. Building
on its initial cost assessment, the state takes this information into account and makes
a new cost-benet analysis. This updated cost-benet assessment informs subsequent
state action. If, in the new assessment, the costs exceed the benets for the state, it
will not accept a further ICP. The more views a state receives over time, the higher its
certainty regarding the probability of costs. The Bayesian updating mechanism thus
serves mainly as an ideal type for the basic idea of a rational actor updating its beliefs
based on observed events in a situation of uncertainty (Checkel, 2001, pp. 555–557;
Meseguer, 2006; Dunlop et al., 2020).
12 By ‘receiving views’ I refer to the situation in which a state is subject to at least one treaty body decision
which establishes a human rights violation by that state and calls for remedial action.
13 Denunciations and withdrawals from human rights treaty ICPs are uncommon. The high audience costs
involved in denunciations make them highly unlikely. To date, there have been only three denunciations of
ICPs by Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Belarus which have denounced the CCPR-OP in 1998, 2000,
and 2022 respectively. The denunciations have certainly also been triggered by the rising numbers of views
against those countries.
14 Admittedly, this implies the assumption that states do not dierentiate too much between the ICPs of
dierent UN human rights treaties.
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
As an ideal type, the updating framework is subject to several qualications in
practice. Most importantly, although states make rational choices according to their
preferences, one of which is to avoid costs that exceed related benets, this “intend-
edly rational” behavior is bound by a “human cognitive/emotional architecture”
(Frieden, 1999, p. 41; Jones, 1999, p. 298).15 I posit that the imperfect processing of
new information does not invalidate the underlying rational updating mechanism but
only exposes it to some constraints.
First, bounded rationality means that the avenues through which states receive
information on ensuing costs are likely to play a role. Since the treaty bodies regu-
larly publish their views in follow-up reports and also include them in their annual
reports to the UN General Assembly, states can gain access quite easily to informa-
tion on views against other states. States could learn from other states’ cost experi-
ences and in light of new information could reassess their own risk of receiving
costly views (Acemoglu et al., 2011; Smith & Sørensen, 2000). Poulsen and Aisbett
(2013) have traced such a learning mechanism in the case of bilateral investment law.
They have found evidence that states are less likely to sign bilateral investment trea-
ties the more states within their region have been aected by litigation resulting from
these treaties. There is no compelling reason why states should not learn from other
states also in the area of human rights treaties. For example, there is evidence that
European states closely monitor judgments of the European Court of Human Rights
against other countries to avoid future litigation against themselves (Küçüksu, 2023).
It seems plausible that states would also take into account the treaty bodies’ decisions
against other states.
States may monitor treaty body views against any state to receive information
about the potential of receiving views against themselves. In this case, the overall
activity of treaty bodies under their ICP may already convey important information
for states considering ICP acceptance. Yet, availability heuristics could attenuate
the impact of all views issued by the treaty bodies on state behavior as state actors
are likely to use cognitive shortcuts and limit the information they process using
geographical, cultural, and temporal boundaries (Weyland, 2008, p. 292). Bound-
edly rational states could thus be more strongly aected by the experiences of states
within their immediate neighborhood or of like-minded states than by the experi-
ences of all states globally. Again, research on bilateral investment treaties has shown
that state behavior is aected by the experiences of other states in relative geographi-
cal proximity (Poulsen & Aisbett, 2013) but not by the experiences of all other states
(Haftel & Thompson, 2018). Geographical proximity might not be the only catalyst
for learning, however. Research has shown that International Organizations (IOs) are
“important channels through which states can inuence, and be inuenced by, the
behavior of others” (Greenhill, 2015, p. 3). The experience of states that are mem-
bers of the same regional IO as the learning state, may thus also have an impact on
ICP acceptance. Finally, states may be particularly prone to learn from like-minded
states. For example, Pegram (2010) has shown that democracies mainly emulate
15 Note also that for analytical purposes, I make the simplifying assumption that states prefer low-cost
outcomes to high-cost outcomes and will pursue a strategy for achieving their most preferred possible
outcome. Compare the denition of preferences by Frieden (1999, p. 41).
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A. J. Ullmann
the design of national human rights institutions from states with a similar political
regime. Learning from like-minded states is not restricted to democracies, however,
as research on cooperation between autocracies in international fora has shown (von
Soest, 2015; Debre, 2022).
Thus, I expect that:
H1a: A state is less likely to accept an ICP, the more views the UN human rights
treaty bodies have issued against any other states.
H1b: A state is less likely to accept an ICP, the more views the UN human rights
treaty bodies have issued against other geographically or politically proximate states.
Second, bounded rationality also implies that rst-hand information, i.e. the expe-
rience of receiving views against oneself, will probably have an even greater impact
on a state’s cost-benet analysis than learning about the costs through the experiences
of other states. Research on experiential learning has emphasized the essential role
of direct experience in learning processes (Levy, 1994, p. 305; Haftel & Thompson,
2018). The expectation that states are most aected by direct experience of views is
expressed in the following hypothesis:
H2: A state is less likely to accept additional ICPs, the more views the UN human
rights treaty bodies have issued against that state.
These rst two hypotheses express the varying degrees of immediacy of the infor-
mation on costs at the global, regional, and state levels. I expect that as immediacy
increases, the new information on costs will make a bigger impression on states and
increasingly aect the likelihood that they will withhold future ICP acceptances.
Third, my learning argument is based on a logic of consequences, which implies
that dierent cost/benet structures have dierent eects on states. I have argued
above that the costliness of views depends on both the materiality of the remedies
and the degree of compliance. The determining factor behind the materiality of views
could be the nature of the remedies. General remedies that demand actions beyond
the single case typically have high political as well as reputation costs that outweigh
most individual remedies. Immaterial remedies such as legislative amendments are
typically subsumed under the ‘general’ category because they target collective actors
rather than individuals.16 Tackling structural issues that go beyond the respective
individual human rights violation should be perceived as particularly costly and thus
should have a stronger impact on a state’s decision to ratify another ICP.
H3a: The more views a state has received that demand general remedies, the less
likely that state is to accept additional ICPs.
The assertion that the costliness of views depends on the state’s propensity to com-
ply with the remedies that they contain can be ascertained more easily. Both scal and
16 Note, that this is not a perfect operationalization of the materiality dimension of costs. This is because
the cost implications of dierent remedy categories are not as clear cut as one would imagine. First, indi-
vidual measures, such as freeing a political prisoner, can imply considerable political costs to a govern-
ment that go well beyond the mere organizational costs. Second, all too often the treaty bodies include
in their views the “obligation to prevent similar violations in the future” which seems to demand more
far-reaching action that addresses the structural problems behind a violation but does not give any guid-
ance on how this should be achieved. Even the treaty bodies themselves do not seem to consider the imple-
mentation of the “future” remedy a necessary condition for granting a ‘full compliance’ rating (see, e.g.,
communication number CCPR/C/48/D/314/1988 which was closed with a satisfactory nding without any
implementation of general remedies according to Annual Report A/64/40 p.161).
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
political costs will only occur once a state takes concrete measures to implement the
remedies. On the other hand, although non-compliers may face audience costs and
possibly sanctions, costs of non-compliance are less direct and less likely to occur.17
I contend that the actual implementation of remedial measures should be more costly
than neglecting them and will likely have a more profound learning impact on state
actors. Thus, I expect the direct negative eect of views on the responding state’s
further ICP ratication behavior to be strongest if that state actually complies with
them. The enhancing eect of direct costs on the suggested mechanism is expressed
in the following hypothesis:
H3b: The more likely a state is to comply with the remedies contained in the views
it has received, the less likely that state is to accept additional ICPs.
4 States’ acceptance of ICPs: empirical analysis
To test my hypotheses, I examine states’ acceptances of six of the eight active ICPs
under the UN human rights treaties.18 With a total number of 168 countries and data
from the years 1965 to 2018, my primary data set is composed of 10,476 possible
country-years. However, the observation periods and composition of states are dif-
ferent for each ICP, which lets these numbers vary between analyses. The reason for
this variance is that I only examine for each ICP those country-years that are ‘at risk’
of accepting the ICP. A state enters the risk set, i.e. is observed, the year it has rati-
ed the human rights treaty underlying the respective ICP and drops out of the risk
set the year after it has accepted the ICP.19 This allows me to take into account the
selection eect of treaty ratication and examine only those states that have a certain
probability of accepting the ICP at some point in time. For example, France, Mexico
and Belize have all ratied the CAT in 1986. However, France made the declaration
under CAT Article 22 in 1988, Mexico in 2002 and Belize has to date not accepted the
ICP. The years each state is under observation for the analysis of the CAT ICP thus
are 2 years (France), 16 (Mexico), and 32 (Belize). Consequently, I create for each
ICP a separate data set that is based on the primary data set but includes a unique set
of country-years and is analyzed in separate regression models.20
The main challenge with the data described above is that it contains right-cen-
sored observations, i.e. all the states that have ratied the treaty but not (yet) the
corresponding ICP at the end of the observation period. Common linear regression
17 Both costs critically depend on an informed third actor that is able to sanction decision-makers for their
backpedaling–a requirement that is not always met, especially in non-democratic systems.
18 Table 1.A in the Appendix lists key data on the six ICPs. I could not include in my analysis the CESCR-
OP and CED Article 31 because until December 2018 they have been accepted by only 17 and 20 states
respectively. This means there are too few acceptance ‘events’ to draw meaningful conclusions from the
regressions (Peduzzi et al., 1995).
19 CEDAW-OP, CRPD-OP, and CRC-OP3 became open for ratication only in 1999, 2006, and 2011
respectively. In these three cases, countries that have ratied the original treaty enter the risk set starting
in the year of adoption of the OP.
20 The observation periods for the CERD ICP contain 5286 country-years, 2231 for the CCPR-OP, 2206
for the CAT ICP, 3994 for the CEDAW-OP, 1665 for the CRPD-OP, 1364 for CRC-OP3.
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A. J. Ullmann
models would treat these observations as non-acceptances and thus lose important
information. To account for this, I employ survival analysis, which considers the time
between a xed starting point (treaty ratication) and a terminating event (ICP accep-
tance) (Bradburn et al., 2003). By incorporating information from right-censored
observations, the chosen method avoids underestimation of the true but unknown
time to event. More specically, I use Cox proportional hazards regression, which
allows me to determine how my independent variables inuence the occurrence of
the event of ICP acceptance at any point in the observation period.21
4.1 Dependent variable
I examine a state’s decision to accept an ICP by either ratifying a treaty’s optional
protocol or making a declaration of acceptance under the article that establishes the
ICP. The binary dependent variable takes a value of 1 for each year a country has
accepted an ICP and a value of 0 if otherwise.
4.2 Independent variables
The independent variables of main interest are three measures that capture, rst, the
cumulative number of views issued by all treaty bodies against all countries other
than the observed country (Views Globally). This is the rst measure that is intended
to capture the eect of new information on views against other states, as expressed
in H1a. Second, the eect of cost information owing from the more immediate
neighborhood is measured by the cumulative number of views issued against all
other countries within the region22 of the observed country (Views per Region). As
alternative operationalizations of this variable, I also test the cumulative number of
views against all states within the regional organization with the highest authority
the respective state is a member of (Hooghe et al., 2017)23 and the yearly number of
views against like-minded states based on the regime type measure by Maerz et al.
(2023). Third, the cumulative number of views issued by all UN human rights treaty
bodies against an individual country in each year (Views per Country) is intended
to reect the costs of views concerning each country individually to test the eect
suggested in H2. All measures of views are lagged by one year. Data for these vari-
ables is taken from the Treaty Body Views (TBVD) Dataset (Ullmann & von Staden,
2023), which contains information on 1320 communications that resulted in views
issued by the eight treaty bodies with active ICPs between 1979 and 2018. I use the
cumulative number of views as a measure since I expect the costs of one single view
to be relatively marginal whereas repeated rebukes should increase the costs and be
more strongly felt by states. The fact that the implementation of views can take up
21 Since the model includes time-varying covariates, I run all regressions through the episode splitting
method which lets each observation period start with the beginning of a year and end with the next year
(Allison, 2014). Standard errors are clustered at the country level. As a robustness check, I also ran the
analyses using binary logistic regression with clustered robust standard errors. The results, which are
reported in Table 10.A. in the Appendix are largely consistent with the results of the Cox regressions.
22 These are Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania.
23 These are ASEAN, COMESA, ECOWAS, EU, LOAS, OAS, and SADC.
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
to thirty years and more (Ullmann & von Staden, 2023) adds to the notion that the
costs of views at the state level can accumulate over the years. To account for the pos-
sibility that the impact of views on states’ decision-making decreases after a certain
number of views, I additionally run all main models with the natural logarithm of the
views variables.24
The eect of the number of views per country could be subject to some qualica-
tions. First, views vary in the degree to which they touch upon issues that are sensi-
tive to certain states and thus may be more or less strongly felt by the responding
state. To measure the issue sensitivity of the views, I create a Sensitive Views variable
that only counts the views that concern issues that should be least popular for the
responding state as deduced from its normative position in the Human Rights Coun-
cil’s universal periodic review (Terman & Búzás, 2021).25 Second, views that have
been rendered against the responding state within the more recent past may weigh
more strongly in states’ decisions to ratify an ICP than views that have been issued
multiple years ago. To account for the possible importance of temporal immediacy, I
test measures that only count the number of views a state has received within the last
three and ve years preceding the year of observation.
H3a stipulates that views that provide for general remedies that go beyond the
reparation and restitution for the individual violation(s) will have a stronger nega-
tive eect on ICP acceptance than views that do not require such remedies. To test
this claim, I create a Weighted Views per Country variable that reects the Views per
Country variable but multiplies all views that include at least one general remedy by
two.
H3b expresses my expectation that receiving views will be more costly if the state
complies with them. A straightforward way to approach this question in my model is
the addition of an interaction term between the Views per Country variable and a vari-
able that measures implementation. To obtain a measure that reects the propensity
of states to comply with the views they receive, I resort again to the TBVD Dataset
(Ullmann & von Staden, 2023), which includes an indicator reecting the degree to
which the state party implemented the remedies of respective views until the respec-
tive year. This indicator is based on the information provided in the treaty bodies’
follow-up reports. More specically, I use the TBVD’s aggregate compliance all
indicator which considers all available compliance information and a lack of compli-
ance information as non-compliance. Although this is a suboptimal approximation of
the true state of compliance, it better captures compliance with views than proxies
such as a state’s general human rights performance. The Average Compliance score
is calculated by taking the mean of the TBVD’s aggregate compliance all scores for
all views a country has received from the year of the rst view to the observed year.
It ranges from 0 (no view has been complied with) to 1 (all views have been fully
24 The results are reported in Table 11.A in the appendix and partly speak in favor of a decreasing eect
of higher numbers of views.
25 Since I do not have information on the underlying issue of each view, I use the following coding
scheme: for those states that Terman and Buzas (2021, p. 495) call ‘Civil Libertarians’, I code all views
by the CESCR as sensitive because socioeconomic rights are the least popular issue within this group. For
states in the other three groups, I code all views by the HRCttee and the CAT as sensitive because civil and
political as well as physical integrity rights are the least popular issues among these states.
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A. J. Ullmann
complied with) and is available for each country that has received at least one view
from the treaty bodies since 1979. Since the Average Compliance score is only avail-
able for states that have received views within the observation period, its interaction
with the Views per Country variable weights the number of views for each country
according to the degree to which they are complied with.
It should be noted that the large majority (76%) of all views were rendered by the
HRCttee, which monitors compliance with the CCPR. What is more, most other ICPs
became active only years after the majority of CCPR-OP ratications had already
occurred. This means that there is very low variation in the Views per Country vari-
ables in the case of the CCPR-OP – and possibly CERD Article 14 – which can create
the problem of monotone likelihood because one or several levels of the Views per
Country variables only receive censoring times (Heinze & Schemper, 2001). Conse-
quently, the parameter estimates will converge toward innity and cannot be inter-
preted.26 I will not report the results for the Views per Country variable(s) for the
CCPR-OP and CERD Article 14 where this is the case.
The rst view establishing a violation was issued in 1979 by the HRCttee and
the number of views rose constantly over the years to around 80 per year in the
2010s. The cumulative number of views increased most distinctly within the last 30
or so years with over 70% of all violations found only between 1997 (212) and 2018
(1320). It follows that there is a risk of serious correlation between my indepen-
dent variables and time, which would violate the proportional hazards assumption
underlying the Cox regression model and potentially bias model estimates. Thus, I
controlled for non-proportional hazards using Schoenfeld residuals and added inter-
actions with time to all variables with a p-value lower than 0.1.
4.3 Control variables
The analysis also includes other variables shown to inuence commitment to human
rights treaties and their ICPs to eliminate possible confounders. Summary statistics
and a correlation matrix on the main variables used can be found in Table 2.A and
Fig. 1.A in the Appendix.27
The degree of democracy practiced by a country is a widely accepted determi-
nant of both treaty ratication and ICP acceptance (Cole, 2012; Hathaway, 2007;
Sandholtz, 2017; Simmons, 2009). The substantive argument is that democracies are
staunch supporters of the normative substance of human rights treaties, which does
not oblige them to drastically adapt their laws and practices. I use V-Dem’s electoral
democracy index as a measurement of a country’s adherence to democratic princi-
ples.28 Following Simmons (2009), I use a squared term of the democracy index in
the analysis of the CCPR-OP to better capture her argument about the heightened
propensity of more mature democracies to ratify the two ‘bill of rights’ treaties.
26 See, for example, Columns 2–5 of Table 4.1.A in the Appendix.
27 The appendix is available online on the Review of International Organizations website.
28 This index is based on a comparatively minimalist notion of democracy and thus the democracy indi-
cator that is least correlated with other variables in my models, such as the respect for physical integrity
rights. Replacing it with other democracy indices does not substantially change the results.
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
ICP acceptance may not only depend on the nature of the political regime overall
but also on the occurrence of regime change. Newly democratized states may want
to lock-in human rights policy (Moravcsik, 2000; Simmons, 2009), and newly auto-
cratic states could want to signal continuity to domestic and international audiences
(Hong, 2016; Smith-Cannoy, 2012) but may also be particularly opposed to ICP
acceptance due to their general rejection of the contents of the treaties (Meyerrose &
Nooruddin, 2023). Democratic regime changes should thus increase the probability
of ICP acceptance, while the eect of autocratic regime changes is ambiguous. To
account for the impact of regime changes, I include in the models the regime trans-
formation indicator by Maerz et al. (2023a), which reects whether an autocratic (-1)
or democratic (1) regime change occurred, and lag it by one year.
I also control for the human rights performance of a country, as measured by
V-Dem’s ‘Gender equality in respect for civil liberties’ Index for the CEDAW-OP,
and Fariss’ physical integrity rights scores (Fariss, 2019) for the remaining ICPs.29
The eects of regional socialization and peer pressure (Hathaway, 2003; Smith-
Cannoy, 2012; von Stein, 2016) are accounted for by including the regional ratica-
tion rate, i.e. the percentage of states that have accepted the respective ICP among
all states within the main regional organization.30 The regional ratication rate con-
stitutes a possible mediating variable since more views may aect the willingness
of other states in the regional organization, which decreases the willingness of the
observed state to accept. To account for such a possible posttreatment eect, the vari-
able is lagged by two years (Dworschak, 2023).
As more auent societies are generally more open to ICP acceptance (Simmons,
2009), all models also factor in the log of GDP per capita.
A further contention posits that countries with a common law tradition are less
inclined towards ICPs because, in those countries, governments fear the active incor-
poration of treaty body jurisprudence by independent national courts (Simmons,
2009). I control for this by including an ordinal variable that reects whether a state
follows a common law tradition (2), has a mixed system with common law elements
(1), or follows another law tradition (0).
5 Results
Table 2 shows the hazard ratios with the corresponding 95%-condence intervals
for the three independent variables that capture the cumulative number of views at
the global, regional, and country levels. The complete results of the Cox regressions
are reported in Table 4.1.A to 9.3.A in the Appendix. Note that I report the hazard
ratios, which are the exponentiated coecients. A hazard ratio above 1 indicates that
29 To my knowledge, there are no indicators for measures that capture childrens’ rights, the rights of per-
sons with disabilities, or enforced disappearances comprehensively over all states and years under obser-
vation. Another diculty comes with the fact that most measures of civil and political rights, such as the
Freedom House indices, are heavily correlated with my democracy indices. I resort to the Fariss score as
a more general measure of human rights compliance because is least correlated with V-Dem’s democracy
indices and it outperforms other human rights measures in terms of temporal and spatial coverage.
30 See footnote 23 for a list of the regional organizations used.
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A. J. Ullmann
the variable is positively associated with the probability of ICP acceptance, whereas
a hazard ratio below 1 indicates that as the value of the variable increases, the prob-
ability of ICP acceptance decreases.
5.1 Learning from others
The results reported in the rst row of Table 2 lend support to my expectation that
the number of views the treaty bodies are issuing against all other states makes the
acceptance of ICPs less likely. More precisely, the Views Globally variable is associ-
ated with a decrease in the ‘risk’ of acceptance of the CCPR-OP by 0.3%, of CERD
Article 14 by 0.8%, of CAT Article 22 by 0.5%, the CEDAW-OP by 4.5%, the CRPD-
OP by 5.7%, and of the CRC-OP3 by 4.2%.31 The next row reveals a similar pat-
tern, in which an increase in the number of views against other states within the
observed state’s region decreases the state’s risk of acceptance of all observed ICPs.
This nding is consistent across the two alternative measures of proximity: views
against other states in the main regional organization and views against states with a
similar regime type.32 This supports H1b as states seem to be aected by the experi-
ences of neighboring and like-minded states. Note that in three of the six instances,
the negative association of the Views per Region variable with ICP acceptance is
stronger than in the case of the Views Globally variable. This lends only partial sup-
port to the expectation that states are aected more strongly by more immediate cost
information. The discrepancy between the estimates for the two variables is particu-
larly wide in the cases of CERD Article 14 and CAT Article 22 on the one side and
CRPD-OP and CRC-OP3 on the other. States accepting the rst two ICPs are more
strongly aected by views against other countries within their environment than by
any other states whereas states accepting the latter two ICPs are less strongly aected
in their decision by views against neighbors. This pattern also emerges for the other
variables measuring views per group: ratication of the CRPD-OP and the CRC-OP3
is even positively associated with the Views per Regional Organization and Views per
Regime Type variables. This may be explained by the varying membership composi-
31 Note, that due to the low number of events, the results of the regressions for the CRC-OP should be
interpreted with caution (Peduzzi et al., 1995).
32 As can be seen in columns 3 and 4 in Table 4.2.A to 9.2.A in the Appendix.
Table 2 Results for the main variables of interest
ICP CCPR-OP CERD Art. 14 CAT Art. 22 CEDAW-OP CRPD-OP CRC-OP3
Views Globally 0.997*** 0.992*** 0.995*** 0.955** 0.943*** 0.958***
(0.99–0.99) (0.99–0.99) (0.99–0.99) (0.99–0.99) (0.91–0.96) (0.93–0.97)
Views per Region 0.989*** 0.970*** 0.981*** 0.963*** 0.992*** 0.986***
(0.98–0.99) (0.95–0.98) (0.97–0.99) (0.95–0.97) (0.98–0.99) (0.97–0.99)
Views per Country 0.732 0.262** 0.811*1.161*** 1.010 0.979
(0.25, 1.21) (-0.69, 1.22) (0.48–1.14) (1.07–1.25) (0.98–1.04) (0.93–1.02)
Observations 1,706 4,686 1,900 2,055 1,237 1,094
Events 94 52 53 83 66 32
Note: 95%-condence intervals in parentheses. Results for control variables in baseline models not
reported.*p < 0 .1; **p < 0. 05;***p < 0.01
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
tions of these ICPs. Among the observed ICPs, CERD Article 14 and CAT Article
22 are the ICPs with the highest average democracy score among its member states
(V-Dem polyarchy score of 0.74 and 0.72 respectively) whereas states that have rati-
ed the CRPD-OP and CRC-OP3 have the lowest average democracy score (0.60
and 058 respectively). Democracies could be more likely to cooperate with and learn
from other states, especially through regional organizations (Linos, 2011; Manseld
& Pevehouse, 2008), than authoritarian regimes, whose cooperation is more strongly
driven by ideas of national sovereignty and non-interference (Debre, 2022). To test
this claim, I plot the marginal eects of the Views per Regional Organization variable
across a binary regime type variable that distinguishes between autocracies (AUT)
and democracies (DEM) taken from the ERT dataset (Maerz et al., 2023).33 Fig-
ure 2 supports my assertion of a stronger learning mechanism from fellow regional
organization member states among democracies for all ICPs except the CCPR-OP
and CRC-OP3.34 Why do democracies ignore information coming from neighboring
states in the latter two cases? An ad hoc explanation may be that democracies con-
sider civil and political, and children’s rights as too central to their own identity so
that adverse views against other states do not discourage them from ICP ratication.
5.2 Learning from direct experience
While the aforementioned ndings underline the role of learning from other states,
H2 expresses my expectation that the rst-hand experience of states with ndings of
violations against themselves is an important driver of the posited learning eect. The
results in the third row in Table 2 seem to substantiate this assertion only partially.
The hazard ratios for the Views per Country variable point in the hypothesized direc-
tion in the cases of CERD Art. 14, CAT Article 22, and the CRC-OP, although they
only reach levels of statistical signicance in the rst two instances. Hence, it is only
in those two cases that I nd evidence that a state’s subjection to views is a strong pre-
dictor of its additional ICP acceptances per se. Note, however, that – as conjectured
– the lower hazard ratios suggest a stronger negative impact of direct experience of
views relative to views against other states. Results for the alternative measures of
the Views per Country variable that only count the views within the last three and ve
years and those concerning sensitive issues are reported in Table 4.3.A to 9.3.A in the
Appendix and reveal a very similar pattern.
The results for the CEDAW-OP in Table 2 even run contrary to my expectations
and suggest a positive association between the number of views a state has received
and that state’s willingness to accept the ICP. Why would states be encouraged to
ratify the CEDAW-OP when they have received views from the other treaty bodies?
This might be due to the nature of the rights covered by this treaty. Although women’s
rights are still largely violated in most states around the world (Richards & Haglund,
2015; WomenStats, 2024), they seem to be a popular human rights issue that many
33 As can be seen in Fig. 2.A in the Appendix, these ndings are robust to an alternative binary regime type
measure which I coded based V-Dem’s electoral democracy index with a threshold value of 0.5.
34 The according p-values are 0.405 (CCPR-OP), 0.043 (CERD Art. 14), 0.135 (CAT Art. 22), < 0.000
(CEDAW-OP). <0.000 (CRPD-OP), 0.850 (CRC-OP3).
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A. J. Ullmann
dierent states can agree on irrespective of their ideological or cultural background
(Terman & Búzás, 2021; Comstock & Vilán, 2024). Thus, states may, in general, be
more open toward ratifying the CEDAW-OP, than toward other ICPs. States that use
ICP ratication as a signaling device to internal and/or external audiences may be
particularly likely to ratify the CEDAW-OP when they learn that ICPs ‘do bite’ as this
makes ratication more costly and thus more eective (Hafner-Burton et al., 2015;
Schoner, 2023). Research has shown that autocracies ratify the CEDAW because the
women’s rights treaty allows them to signal adherence to democratic norms while
bearing only relatively low political costs (Donno et al., 2022). This would mean
that the CEDAW-OP attracts a relatively large number of ‘insincerely committing’
governments that understand views against themselves primarily as a way to make
their commitment more convincing, e.g. to shield them against domestic opposition
forces. Surely, this logic only makes sense if these states keep actual costs low by not
complying with the views they receive. Such insincere commitments would bias any
direct eect of views because if states do not experience views as particularly costly,
they will probably not make a lasting impression on them.
5.3 Learning conditional on remedial scope and compliance
H3a and b state that the eect of the Views per Country variable may depend on two
intervening factors—the amount of costs that the responding state has to bear via
implementation and the scope of remedial action. The results of the Cox regressions
reported in Fig. 2 provide supportive evidence for one assertion but not the other. The
plot reports for each ICP the hazard ratios rst of the Views per Country variable,
second of the Weighted Views per Country, and third of the interaction term between
the Views per Country and the Average Compliance variables. The biased results for
the CCPR-OP are excluded intentionally – as explained on page 19. It reveals that
the Weighted Views per Country variable yields quite similar hazard ratios as the
basic Views per Country variable. Thus, giving more weight to views that contain
general remedies has no impact on the eect of the number of views a state receives
on its decision to accept either of the ve ICPs. In the case of CAT Article 22, general
remedies even seem to weaken the negative eect of views. Since the CAT governs
human rights norms that are often perceived as a threat to regime survival (Conrad
& Ritter, 2013), views that target the laws and practices of the respondent state con-
cerning physical integrity rights may be more readily rejected than views that only
aim for restitution in an individual case. Views that are not implemented, in turn, will
likely be less eective in changing state behavior towards ICP acceptance.
Figure 2 provides supportive evidence for this assertion. It shows that there is a
negative association of the interaction between the Views per Country and the Aver-
age Compliance variable with the acceptance of CERD Article 14, CAT Article 22,
the CEDAW-OP, and the CRPD-OP. The correlation between the interaction term and
ICP acceptance is also considerably stronger now as expressed by lower hazard ratios
compared to those obtained for the Views per Country variable alone. However, the
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
interaction eect fails to reach statistical signicance in the case of the CRC-OP3.35
An ad hoc explanation for this nding could be that it is the only ICP in our sample
that remained virtually inactive during the observation period.36 Based on this infor-
mation, states could extrapolate a comparatively low risk of being scrutinized under
this ICP, despite their rst-hand experience of the costliness of views from other
ICPs. Either way, the CRC case is also the least informative one, as it oers only very
low numbers of events (acceptances) per variable. This means that coecients are
prone to bias, and thus, statistics to test their signicance can lose validity (Peduzzi et
al., 1995). Interestingly, in the case of the CEDAW-OP, the interaction term indicates
a strong negative association with acceptance while the other two Views per Country
variables suggest a positive association. In other words, states that receive views and
do comply with them have a signicantly lower probability of accepting this ICP than
states that do not receive views or receive views but do not comply with them. This
lends support to my assumption that the positive correlation between the number of
views per country and CEDAW-OP ratication that I found earlier is mainly due to a
high number of ‘insincere commitments’ that are not followed by compliance.
To make more sense of the interaction eect, I illustrate it in Fig. 3 using marginal
eects plots.37 The plots conrm that the higher the Average Compliance value, the
stronger the negative eect of the Views per Country variable on the acceptance of
the four ICPs. Put dierently, the more likely a state is to implement the views it
receives, the stronger the inhibiting eect of those views on the acceptance of most
of the examined ICPs. Complying states also have a lower hazard of accepting the
ICPs of the CAT, and the CRPD the more views have been rendered against countries
within the same region or regional organization, as can be seen in Fig. 5.A and 6.A in
the Appendix. This underscores the importance of compliance costs (scal and politi-
cal) in triggering the learning mechanism, as expressed in H3b.
6 Discussion
I nd evidence for the hypothesized learning eect for some of the examined ICPs
but not all. In line with H1, states seem to be deterred from accepting all six examined
ICPs by the information provided by the total number of views that are ‘out there’
independent of whether they are subject to any such decision themselves. Equally,
states react to the number of views that are issued against like-minded and neighbor-
ing states, as conjectured in H1b. For three ICPs, the learning eect is amplied by
geographic and political proximity. In sum, the ndings provide encouraging support
for my claim that states use the information on the prevalence of views against other
states to recalibrate their cost assessments concerning additional ICP acceptances.
35 Full results for the interaction terms for all examined ICPs are reported in column 5 in Table 4.1.A to
9.1.A in the Appendix.
36 The CRC only issued three adverse views in 2018, the last observation year.
37 CCPR-OP and CERD Article 14 are not included in Fig. 3 because in these cases, the coecients of
the interaction term are biased because of the problem of monotone likelihood, which I explain in more
detail on page 19.
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A. J. Ullmann
As to my second hypothesis, I nd only partial evidence that states also learn
from their own experiences. The results of the survival analysis suggest that the more
views states had to respond to directly, the less likely they are to accept the ICPs of
the CERD and the CAT. Crucially, I nd that this association between views and
ICP acceptance depends to a large part on the propensity of the respondent state to
comply with the views it has received. Indeed, my ndings support H3b, which states
that being subject to views only aects states in their choice of ICPs when the views
trigger concrete scal and political costs for the states through the implementation
of remedies. By implication, this means that the indirect costs resulting from non-
compliance, such as audience costs and economic sanctions, are relatively toothless
in preventing states from ICP acceptance.
For some of the ICPs examined, however, I could nd no evidence to support the
claim that the learning eect is most eective when states are directly confronted
with the views. The non-ndings add some important qualications to the results of
this study. For one, they point to the fact that the ICPs in my sample vary in terms
of the rights they cover. However, the nature of the rights that are monitored by each
ICP are consequential for the learning mechanism. The implications of views on
state behavior may vary from little or no impact to very strong reactions depending
on which state is addressed and which rights are invoked. For example, the protec-
tion of physical integrity as well as civil and political rights is perceived by several
states across the globe as sovereignty-threatening but is actively promoted by others
– mostly Western, democratic, and liberal states (Meyerrose & Nooruddin, 2023).
Additionally, in democracies, a stronger inuence of civil society on decision-mak-
ing processes could be counteractive to the suggested learning eect: domestic stake-
holders could be encouraged by views to pressure their government and legislature
into more ICP acceptance. By implication, one would expect that states that adhere
to principles of liberal democracy are less susceptible to the acceptance-decreasing
eects of rising numbers of views. Yet, the interactions depicted in Figs. 1 and 2.A
(Appendix) insinuate that the more democratic a state the more likely it is to learn
from views against itself and other states when it comes to the acceptance of the ICPs
of the CERD, the CEDAW, and the CRPD. The fact that the proposed learning eect
is particularly strong among democracies deciding on ICPs that protect vulnerable
populations and weakest for ICPs that monitor ‘classic’ civil and political, as well
as physical integrity rights may be explained by a higher ‘tolerance of pain’ among
(liberal) democracies when it comes to the latter group of rights. Furthermore, rela-
tively potent human rights groups in the area of physical integrity rights could be
particularly successful in pressuring democratic decision-makers into the acceptance
of CAT Article 22 if the state has already received views under the CCPR-OP.38 This
would suggest that democracies are better learners but only in issue areas that are
sensitive to them.39
38 The fact that the interaction between the number of views per country and a measure of civil society
repression (see Fig. 3.2.A) delivers results that are largely congruent with the interaction with the liberal
democracy measure lends support to this reading.
39 The best way to test this claim would be via the ratication of the CESCR-OP, which concerns the most
sensitive issues for liberal democracies: social and economic rights (Terman & Búzás, 2021). Unfortu-
nately, this was not possible due to methodological reasons (see footnote 18).
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
The results for the interaction terms depicted in Figs. 2 and 3 reveal another inter-
esting pattern: the association between the number of views per (complying) country
and ICP acceptance becomes weaker and loses in statistical signicance the more
recently the observed ICP became operative. This is another indication that states do
make a dierence between dierent ICPs. Since the majority of all views issued by
the treaty bodies stem from the CCPR-OP, it is striking that the views correlate most
strongly with the acceptance of ICPs that overlap with the CCPR-OP either tempo-
rally or substantively, or both. CAT Art. 22 is connected to the CCPR-OP in that it
also covers physical integrity rights. CERD Art. 14, which became active in 1982, is
temporally closest to the CCPR, which became active in 1976. The other three ICPs
are younger and cover dierent sets of rights than the CCPR. Thus, past activities of
the HRCttee are not necessarily interpreted by states as an indication of the future
activities of the CRPD and the CRC, for example. This would make the acceptance
of the latter ICPs less dependent on the views issued under the former ICP. In more
general terms this would mean that the proposed learning mechanism depends on a
high degree of comparability between the institution issuing the rebukes and the insti-
tution under consideration, both in terms of substance and temporal development.
It should be noted that alternative explanations for ICP commitment may have
higher explanatory value than the feedback eect of views. The results from all
regression models suggest that any eect of the number of views on ICP acceptance
will be much smaller than other determining factors such as the degree of democracy
or the nature of the law system in the responding state. Also, the number of views
could possibly have a countervailing eect on ICP acceptance in that they encour-
age domestic and international stakeholders to pressure governments into accepting
Fig. 1 Interaction between views per regional organization and regime type. Note: Points show simu-
lated relative hazards of views per regional organization on ICP acceptance for dierent regime types
based on 1000 simulations
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A. J. Ullmann
further ICPs, for example through recommendations in the Human Rights Council’s
Universal Periodic Review. The fact that, despite these circumstances, the patterns
outlined above are traceable across the majority of the six examined ICPs despite
existing dierences between the treaty bodies regarding their issue area, processes,
and legitimacy is noteworthy and speaks in favor of the robustness of the proposed
learning mechanism.
Fig. 2 Predicted ICP acceptance - views per country and compliance interaction. Note: Points represent
the hazard ratios for the depicted variables from separate regressions. Grey bars show 95% condence
intervals. Results of the full models can be found in Table 4.1.A to 9.1.A in the Appendix
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
7 Conclusion
How do states react to interferences by international human rights bodies? Focusing
on the individual complaint procedures of the UN human rights treaty bodies, this
study has shown that states become less willing to bind their hands through such
institutions the more information they have on mounting costs that ensue after com-
mitment. Specically, it has presented evidence that the outcomes of the ICPs can be
understood as carriers of information about the ‘true’ costs involved in ICP accep-
tance which can lead states to update their cost-benet assessments and become more
reluctant to accept ICPs in the future. The results of the analysis further underline that
this learning mechanism is driven by a logic of cost avoidance as the number of views
only aects a state’s decision to accept more ICPs if that state also bears the costs of
their implementation.
These ndings have implications for several research agendas within International
Relations. First, this study nds evidence that some costs triggered by treaty body
Fig. 3 Marginal eect of views per country on ICP acceptance - dependent on compliance
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A. J. Ullmann
views matter more to states than others. Reputation costs or economic sanctions that
result from non-compliance with views are less eective in triggering state learning
than the scal and political costs stemming from compliance. Thus, in the context of
human rights ICPs, the former costs do not seem to have the same impact on states
as in other areas (Chaudoin, 2014; Tomz, 2007). The direct costs stemming from
the implementation of remedies, on the other hand, can have a substantial impact on
states’ willingness to commit to ICPs. This nding is in line with research on bilateral
investment treaties that shows that the learning eect of states is stronger the more
immediately states experience the costs of their commitments, albeit only if they
have to suer the actual costs (Haftel & Thompson, 2018; Poulsen & Aisbett, 2013;
Thompson et al., 2019). More generally, this implies that states are particularly care-
ful about relinquishing sovereignty to IOs if they are under strong pressure to comply.
Second, this study speaks to scholarship on state engagement with international
legal institutions. The proposed learning mechanism can be understood as an under-
theorized reaction of states to the unexpected consequences of treaty commitment
beyond known strategies such as the inclusion of exibility mechanisms or reserva-
tions (Helfer, 2013; Hill Jr, 2016; Koremenos, 2005), and withdrawal (Pauwelyn &
Hamilton, 2018; Soley & Steininger, 2018). If states learn about circumstances that
alter their previous cost-benet assessment so that the initial commitment is no longer
in their interest but cannot—or do not want to—target the institution that is creating
the costs directly, they may turn away from comparable institutions in the future. The
result is a quiet disengagement from the monitoring regime overall. This may be read
as a novel ‘shadow eect’ of international courts and tribunals that also stems from a
politics of resistance to judicial authority but ends not in preemptive reform but in the
non-acceptance of adjacent legal instruments (Pavone & Stiansen, 2022; Küçüksu,
2023). Additionally, the study adds to research on international courts’ strategies to
react to backlash (Larsson & Naurin, 2016; Stiansen & Voeten, 2020) by suggesting
that judicial restraint towards compliant states could be a strategy of international
judicial bodies not only to mitigate backlash but to avoid disengagement from indi-
vidual complaint mechanisms altogether.
Third, the study has implications for research on international human rights law. It
sheds light on a potential conict between the provision of individual justice through
compliance with views (Fox Principi, 2017; Murray, 2020; Ullmann & von Staden,
2023) and the goal of a global net of international human rights institutions (Com-
stock, 2021; Goodman & Jinks, 2013; Simmons, 2009) because it shows that more
compliance can lead to less commitment. The results of this study should not serve to
play these two objectives o against each other but to recognize that the road to more
eective and encompassing human rights protection is not always straightforward.
Crucially, this study does not set out to provide a general account of ICP acceptance
but rather aims for a better understanding of state learning from the outcome of inter-
national monitoring mechanisms. A more positive conclusion from the results may
be that states take these mechanisms very seriously and adjust their future decisions
accordingly.
Surely the fact that states can accept multiple ICPs under the UN human rights
treaty body system is a critical precondition for the proposed form of state reaction to
interventions by international monitoring bodies. The UN treaty bodies show a high
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Reconsidering the costs of commitment: Learning and state…
degree of procedural and organizational similarity that may not be met by comparable
monitoring institutions, for example, in other issue areas. Yet, it is conceivable that
whenever the possibility to commit to a similar institution exists, states may resort to
this form of quiet resistance long before they engage in more visible backlash strate-
gies (Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Walter, 2021). In broader terms, this study suggests that
over time states learn about the implications of their international commitments and
adjust their decisions to join similar arrangements accordingly. Interference by one
institution can decrease the chances of commitment to another institution that gov-
erns the same issue area and/or was formed at the same point in time. Should future
research establish the proposed state reaction in other issue areas as well, this would
have strong implications for an international system that is increasingly dened by
overlap and redundancy between institutions (Alter et al., 2016; Haftel & Lenz, 2022;
Panke & Stapel, 2023).
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11558-024-09565-0.
Acknowledgements I thank Andreas von Staden, Başak Çalı, Andrea Liese, Nina Reiners, Christoph
Steinert, and my colleagues at the UP LSIB/IO Research Colloquium and the KFG Title Page w/ ALL
Author Contact Info. Berlin Potsdam Research Group for their helpful comments and recommendations.
I also thank Claudia Abmeier, Larissa Wehrle, and Aranka Balint for their helpful research assistance.
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Data Availability The dataset generated for the current study is available through the Review of Interna-
tional Organizations’ website.
Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate Research for this article was supported by Deutsche Forsc-
hungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 417704617. The author has no
competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Conflict of interest The author certies that he has no aliations with or involvement in any organization
or entity with any nancial interest or non-nancial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed
in this manuscript.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use
is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission
directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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