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The Review of International Organizations
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-024-09564-1
SI: DOMESTIC POLITICS ANDINTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual
petitions’ effect onhuman rights
RachelJ.Schoner1
Accepted: 30 July 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Abstract
Can individual participation in international legal institutions affect state behavior?
Much of the existing literature believes that international law has a limited effect
in the countries where it’s needed the most, especially in the absence of enforce-
ment mechanisms. Focused on repressive regimes, this paper analyzes petitions
(complaints) filed by victims of human rights abuse in United Nations human rights
treaty bodies. As a form of naming and shaming, I theorize that violation decisions–
in which a monitoring body confirms a treaty violation– may improve human rights
when paired with civil society organizations that publicize the decisions. Leveraging
a new dataset, I find that governments improve respect for the most severe abuses
involving bodily harm immediately after violation decisions. In support of the the-
ory, these short-lived effects are driven by petitions where civil society actors are
listed as representation. This work improves our understanding of the role of non-
state actors in global politics and compliance with international institutions. Inter-
national organizations can, under certain conditions, provide information on non-
compliance that sufficiently pressures governments to change domestic practices and
decrease repression.
Keywords United Nations· Human rights· Repression· Civil society· International
law
Responsible editors: T. Renee Bowen, J. Lawrence Broz, Christina J. Schneider
* Rachel J. Schoner
rschoner@tulane.edu
1 Department ofPolitical Science, Tulane University, NewOrleans, LA, USA
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R.J.Schoner
1 Introduction
Can individual participation in international institutions affect state behavior? This
paper analyzes the United Nations treaty system in which victims of human rights
abuse file complaints (also called petitions) and expert committees decide on these
complaints. In most cases, these treaty bodies side with the victim(s) and find gov-
ernments in violation of treaty provisions.1 These decisions, however, are not legally
binding and lack enforcement power. Contributing to our understanding of compli-
ance with the global human rights regime, I find that participation by victims and
subsequent validation from UN treaty bodies can improve the human rights prac-
tices of repressive governments. This speaks to the large literature on compliance
and how international institutions can affect state behavior.
Three governments with varying human rights practices and domestic political
institutions highlight the dynamics of the interplay of this international institution,
its impact on reputation via naming and shaming, and domestic politics: the Repub-
lic of Korea, Algeria, and Belarus. First, the Republic of Korea, a democracy with
overall high respect for human rights, improved its policies and behavior after a
United Nations body repeatedly decided it violated a core human rights treaty. After
over a hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses filed complaints in the United Nations Human
Rights Committee, the Korean Constitutional Court in 2018 ruled that conscien-
tious objection to military service was legal (Umeda, 2018; War Resisters’ Interna-
tional, 2022).2 This positive response and improvement in compliance from a lib-
eral democracy is consistent with existing work on naming and shaming. However,
Algeria and Belarus’ responses are more surprising.
A UN human rights treaty body found Algeria, an anocracy with relatively poor
human rights practices, in violation of core human rights dozens of times in the
early 2000s. Shortly after receiving decisions confirming treaty violations, Alge-
ria improved its practices. Third, Belarus, a highly repressive authoritarian regime,
has received scores of complaints from activists and opposition politicians, particu-
larly focused on the civil law suppressing freedoms of expression and assembly. In
response to the numerous violation decisions from the UN, Lukashenko’s govern-
ment has refused to change this unpopular law, and respect for human rights has
remained stagnant. Nonetheless, in late 2022, Belarus denounced the UN agreement
allowing these complaints, removing this international remedy (Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, 2022). Although this repressive regime did not
improve practices, they clearly disliked being the target of these violation decisions.
These three anecdotes show that these UN decisions elicit responses from govern-
ments, including repressive countries.
1 As of March 2024, the Human Rights Committee found a violation of the Covenant in 73% of submis-
sions: 1,475 out of 2,019 since 1977 (Centre for Civil and Political Rights,2024).
2 Committee violation decisions were not the sole form of naming and shaming and political pressure
resulting in this reform. Rather, multiple organizations and institutions over many years called out these
practices, and alongside international and domestic political actors, successfully pressured the govern-
ment to improve these policies. This paper does not claim violation decisions alone result in improved
practices, but instead are one tool that civil society actors specifically can use to help gain concessions.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
Human rights and international relations scholarship over the past few dec-
ades has largely focused on treaty ratification (Conrad, 2014; Hollyer and Rosen-
dorff, 2011; Vreeland, 2008; Goodliffe & Hawkins, 2006; Hathaway, 2002) and
its effect on compliance (Gauri, 2011; Hafner-Burton & Tsutsui, 2007; Hathaway,
2002; Lupu, 2013; von Stein, 2015). Expanding our understanding of these insti-
tutions, this paper analyzes the specific actions of treaty bodies and the impact on
domestic human rights practices, complementing recent scholarship looking inside
these organizations.3 Scholars of the global human rights regime usually analyze
universal participation or more narrowly study Western democracies (Krommendijk,
2015; McQuigg, 2011). I shift the focus to repressive countries, those that routinely
violate human rights and therefore largely are non-compliers. This is a hard test of
the impact of non-binding decisions in cases where we should be most interested in
the effects of these institutions because existing scholarship posits little to no effects.
Moreover, UN treaty bodies are often the only international remedy available to
these individuals, many without a regional court option.
Despite their non-legally binding nature, I argue that violation decisions can
effectively name and shame repressive countries to improve human rights practices
in the short term. UN treaty body committees, comprised of independent expert
members, are quasi-judicial and relatively objective, lending credibility and valida-
tion to this naming and shaming. This credibility differentiates violation decisions
from other naming and shaming by a variety of actors. Therefore, I theorize that
violation decisions from committees increase reputational costs for governments to
continue repression. Civil society organizations serving as legal representation to
victims play a crucial role in helping file these complaints and also publicizing these
decisions, increasing negative attention on the government.
I focus on the Human Rights Committee (HRC), which oversees the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. As the “centerpiece of United Nations activ-
ities for protecting and promoting human rights” (United Nations Human Rights
Committee 1999), the HRC has the largest participation both in terms of states
allowing individual petitions and petitions filed. I leverage new data from Schoner
(2024) which allow me to (1) disaggregate Committee decisions based on the con-
tent of communications given the wide breadth of the treaty and (2) test the role of
civil society with the involvement of legal representation. By focusing on physical
integrity rights, I find support for the theory: violation decisions– but not the prior
stage of submitting communications or other non-violation decisions– are associated
with improved practices by repressive governments. I find that non-binding deci-
sions by IOs without enforcement power can help improve compliance, but only
when (1) individuals pair up with civil society and (2) IOs confirm the violation.
3 In particular, scholars have focused on the self-reporting mechanism (Karlas,2022; Creamer and Sim-
mons,2020, 2019, 2015), concluding observations (Kahn-Nisser,2024; Kahn Nisser, 2023; Kahn-Nis-
ser,2022, 2021, 2019), and the law-making processes of treaty body experts (Lesch and Reiners,2023;
Reiners,2021).
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R.J.Schoner
Interviews with Committee members and involved civil society organizations
ground this research and highlight core theoretical mechanisms.4
This paper makes contributions to three key literatures: (1) human rights mobi-
lization, (2) institutional design in international organizations, and (3) compliance
with IOs. First, this paper shows that mobilization is not always sufficient. Schol-
ars have long been interested in how non-governmental organizations and individu-
als mobilize around human rights, often using treaties as a focal point (see: Sim-
mons, 2009; Keck & Sikkink, 1998). International institutions can add credibility
to mobilization efforts, increasing the probability of success, but this is dependent
on institutional design. The presence and weight of international political dynam-
ics, non-state actor access, and the specific tasks of IOs are all important differences
across IOs. We must understand what tasks IOs perform (for example, aggregate
state reports), how they carry out their functions, and with whom (who has a seat at
the table and who makes decisions) before considering its output and effectiveness.
Specifically, non-state actors in intergovernmental organizations across issue areas
have attracted growing scholarly attention (see: Brutger, 2023; McNamara, 2019;
Sommerer & Tallberg, 2017; Tallberg etal., 2013). Finally, UN treaty body deci-
sions on individual petitions provide information and reveal non-compliance, a key
function of international organizations (Keohane, 1982, 1984). Treaty bodies are a
prime example of an international organization where states delegate to experts to
implement international law, but also one where the organization is constrained with
moderate levels of legalization (Abbott et al., 2000). This paper shows that even
international organizations that lack enforcement power and produce non-binding
decisions, can, under some conditions, affect state behavior.
This publicized non-compliance increases reputation costs on governments for
continued noncompliance. Even repressive governments care about shaming from
international organizations, and they sometimes respond by improving human rights
practices. Additionally, this work introduces individuals, specifically victims of
human rights abuse, as important actors in global politics. However, they are only
effective when they pair up with more traditionally powerful actors such as non-
governmental organizations and United Nations bodies.
2 International human rights law & UN treaty bodies
Law has increasingly dominated international politics, including human rights, and
this judicialization across issue areas has garnered much scholarly attention, both
empirical and theoretical (Alter etal., 2019). Alongside trade, investment, and inter-
national arbitration, the international human rights regime has numerous interna-
tional legal institutions. It includes tribunals with ad hoc tribunals, the International
4 I contacted all civil society organizations and individuals listed as represented on petitions if informa-
tion was available online. Given low response rates and contacting organizations during the COVID-19
pandemic, I interviewed (virtually) five persons who have served as represented for victims in the Human
Rights Committee. Additionally, I interviewed two former members of the Committee.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
Criminal Court with permanent jurisdiction, multiple regional human rights courts,
and the United Nations human rights treaty system. This paper focuses on the United
Nations treaty bodies which differ substantially from these other institutions because
they are not criminal-focused and, unlike regional courts, cannot produce legally
binding decisions. UN treaty bodies, also referred to as overseeing committees, are
quasi-judicial. In regional courts, judges produce legally binding decisions, but the
institution can lack sufficient power to compel states to comply with its decisions.
Scholars find compliance with these regional bodies is driven by domestic politics
(Haglund & Welch, 2021; Hillebrecht, 2012, 2014). This work, centered around the
European and Inter-American systems, provides insights into potential pathways for
compliance with the UN human rights treaty system, but the global system faces
increased barriers because it produces only non-binding decisions.5
In contrast to regional courts, scholars are more skeptical of the impact of human
rights treaties. This scholarship has centered on ratification–the most common form
of commitment and what effect this ratification can have on human rights practices.
In recent years, this has expanded to include broader types of commitment, including
reservations/understandings/declarations (Kreutzer & Mitchell, 2024; McKibben &
Western, 2018; Hill Jr. 2016; Neumayer, 2007), allowing individual petitions (Dai &
Tokhi, 2023; Schoner, 2023), and signature/accession/succession (Comstock, 2021,
2022). Of particular interest, scholars have started to look inside the treaty system
to better understand the inner workings of these bodies (Reiners, 2021). State self-
reports have attracted much recent attention (Karlas 2022; Creamer & Simmons,
2019, 2020, 2015) as well as concluding observations (Kahn-Nisser, 2024; Kahn
Nisser 2023; Kahn-Nisser, 2021, 2022, 2019). In particular, recent data collection
efforts have advanced this scholarship (Haglund & Hillebrecht, 2020; Haglund etal.,
2022; Krommendijk, 2015; McQuigg, 2011).
The little existing work on this task of UN treaty bodies- decisions on individual
petitions- disagrees on its effect on compliance, particularly in contrast to other tasks
of the committees. Heyns, Viljoen and Murray (2024); Heyns and Viljoen (2001) are
careful to differentiate these decisions from the core function of monitoring over-
all compliance via state reports and making observations and recommendations to
each state. Heyns and Viljoen (2001), focused on a globally representative sample,
find that governments tend to ignore committee decisions on individual petitions
while Smith-Cannoy (2012) finds there can be meaningful, positive effects. I build
upon the foundational work by Smith-Cannoy, which focuses on new governments
in Eastern Europe and Central Asia across multiple treaties. She finds that govern-
ments, especially with the involvement of NGOs, do respond positively to petitions.
Some compliance studies focus solely on Western, European democracies with
high respect for human rights, ignoring repressive countries completely (Krom-
mendijk, 2015; McQuigg, 2011). Others find compliance is driven by pre-existing
high respect for human rights (Shikhelman, 2019; von Staden, 2022). Compli-
ance is more difficult in repressive regimes– countries that routinely violate treaty
5 von Staden (2022) pushes back against this dichotomy of legally binding and non-legally binding deci-
sions in his analysis of the Committee Against Torture.
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R.J.Schoner
provisions. But, this is where the institution has the most potential for improvement.
Therefore, this paper focuses on these important but often overlooked countries:
repressive governments. I disaggregate repressive countries and explore variation
among non-compliers in terms of both prior respect for human rights and domestic
politics.
Committee bodies monitor the implementation of United Nations human rights
treaties which include making decisions on individual petitions (also referred to as
communications or complaints). All core UN human rights treaties have an individ-
ual petition mechanism.6 Governments allow individual petitions to each treaty on a
state-by-state basis. I present a theory that applies to all United Nations treaty moni-
toring bodies but focus on the focal point of the system, and the most active body:
the Human Rights Committee, which oversees the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights (ICCPR). The ICCPR is one of the broadest treaties, covering
a range of rights, including freedom from torture, the right to a fair trial, the right
to family, and freedom from discrimination. Almost all countries (173) have ratified
the ICCPR, and more governments allow complaints in the HRC by ratifying its first
Optional Protocol (117) than any other treaty body. Since the ICCPR and its First
Optional Protocol were open for ratification in 1966, over three thousand petitions
have been filed, the most among all treaties. Victims themselves must be involved
in the process, submitting the complaint unless there is reasonable justification: the
main victim is missing, detained, or dead; or they have given explicit permission
with reasoning for another person to file on their behalf. Civil society actors cannot
file alone but are often involved with the victim(s), listed as legal representation on
the submission.
This paper analyzes the effect of Committee body behavior on state human rights
practices. Why states select into treaty commitment of various intensities has been
a popular topic of prior research (Dai & Tokhi, 2023; Schoner, 2023; Simmons,
2009), so I do not theoretically or empirically analyze this prior stage. It is impor-
tant to keep in mind that some, but not all, repressive governments invite individual
petitions to the Human Rights Committee by ratifying its First Optional Protocol.
Schoner (2023) finds a combination of international demand, in the form of trade
dependence on the European Union, and perceived domestic political costs, in the
form of institutional constraints on the executive, explain why some states opt-in,
and some opt-out. Additionally, Dai and Tokhi (2023) find that new democracies are
less likely to accept these mechanisms. Here, I am interested in the activity of the
treaty body, and what effect their decisions can have on compliance, so I am only
concerned with those that ratify the ICCPR-OP and allow individual petitions.
Judicial and quasi-judicial bodies can only decide on cases that come before
them. Therefore, treaty body decisions are the result of not only selective state
participation but also dependent on victims of alleged treaty violations submitting
complaints. In a form of the “boomerang” model, individuals and organizations file
6 The individual petition mechanism for one of these bodies, the Committee on the Protection of the
Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, has not yet entered into force. It will
become operative when ten countries make the necessary declaration.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
international petitions to bypass their unresponsive government (Cole, 2006; Keck
& Sikkink, 1998). Cole (2006) presents foundational work on which individuals
file complaints, finding that petitions are more likely where there are more griev-
ances (i.e. worse human rights practices), fewer domestic opportunities to remedy
the issue, and where individuals are culturally empowered. More recently, Schoner
(2024) introduces fine-grained data, focused primarily on repressive governments,
and discusses the high costs these victims face when considering filing a complaint.
Civil society actors help subsidize individuals’ high participation costs. This paper
advances this line of research and argues that civil society involvement continues to
be an important factor, here increasing reputational costs for continued repression
after violation decisions.
3 Theory: Committee violations asnaming & shaming
I argue that Committee violation decisions are best thought of as a form of naming
and shaming. As such, they serve a core function of international organizations, pro-
viding information. Naming and shaming is a common technique among both inter-
governmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
through which actors publicize “bad” behavior (against norms) and/or non-com-
pliance. In this context, naming and shaming is both normative and legal, reveal-
ing human rights violations detailed in the treaty. Committee violation decisions on
individual petitions reveal specific instances of abuse and increase the salience of
these violations, which in turn increases pressure on repressive governments to alter
behavior. Violation decisions are particularly salient because of their (1) personal
narrative and (2) increased credibility from a (relatively) objective international
institution. When civil society actors help publicize these decisions, this can pres-
sure some governments to publicize these decisions.
The large literature on naming and shaming by a variety of actors finds mixed
effects, in large part due to the heterogeneity of actors. Hafner-Burton (2008) states,
“The evidence shows that naming and shaming is not all cheap talk,” (690) but it
can improve, worsen, or have no effect on government abuses. Increasingly, scholars
have broadened the view of naming and shaming to include not just non-governmen-
tal human rights advocacy organizations (Hendrix & Wong, 2013; Meernik et al.,
2012; Murdie & Davis, 2012; Park etal., 2021) but also intergovernmental organiza-
tions including UN treaty bodies (Kahn-Nisser 2019, focused on concluding obser-
vations country reports), the Universal Periodic Review (Terman & Voeten, 2018),
the International Labor Organization (Koliev & Lebovic, 2018), and the UN Human
Rights Commission/Council (Ausderan, 2014; DeMeritt, 2012; Lebovic & Voeten,
2006, 2009; Vadlamannati etal., 2018). As with all forms of naming and sham-
ing, Committee decisions highlight governments’ poor human rights behavior. This
information can then be used by “stakeholders and broader civil society to reveal
and criticize discrepancies between the conduct of governments and their projected
self-images” (von Staden, 2018, 350). However, treaty body decisions on individual
petitions are unique among these organizations and combine elements found in both
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R.J.Schoner
intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. Three main factors differ-
entiate these decisions:
1. States voluntarily delegate this authority (not compulsory jurisdiction). Individual
complaint procedures are optional in terms of separate ratification of Optional
Protocol or declarations to the human rights treaties.
2. Individuals initiate this process, rather than state-to-state or NGO shaming of
states.7
3. The content is focused on individuals and specific instances of violations rather
than aggregate behavior. Victims themselves must be involved in this process;
organizations are unable to file alone without exceptional justification.
The theory below highlights three aspects of UN treaty body decisions which
may make them effective forms of naming and shaming: (1) personal narratives,
(2) increased credibility from relatively objective international institution, and (3)
involvement of civil society to publicize these decisions. I discuss these features in
relation to other actors’ involvement in naming and shaming including human rights
advocacy organizations, other intergovernmental bodies like the Human Rights
Council, and other activities of these same treaty bodies. Comparison across insti-
tutions is beyond the scope of this article, but future work should tease apart these
multiple components and explicitly compare institutions to better understand the
global human rights regime and how naming and shaming works.
3.1 Increased attention andreputation costs
Violation decisions are clearly “naming,” pointing out non-compliance with the
treaty and specific abuses of human rights. It is vital, then, to discuss the “shaming”
component and theorize how repressive actors here feel shame, enough to result in
the government decreasing repression.
UN Committee violation decisions bring negative attention and raise costs to
governments for continued repression, specifically focused on reputation. Naming
and shaming relies on an audience; external actors must care about the behavior.
Further, naming and shaming is effective only when actors care about their reputa-
tion, i.e. what these external actors think (Allendoerfer etal., 2020; Park etal., 2021;
Squatrito etal., 2019). Krain (2012) discusses how naming and shaming the most
severe human rights abuses can effectively pressure for change:
“Naming and shaming should force perpetrators to reduce the severity of these
ongoing atrocities [genocide or politicide] in order to shift the spotlight, save
their reputation, reframe their identity, maintain international legitimacy and
domestic viability, and ease the pressure placed on them by states or IOs.”
7 Individuals must first exhaust domestic remedies before filing a complaint. That is, they must attempt
to resolve the matter by working through the domestic legal system.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
I begin the theory by discussing the government as a strategic actor, whose behav-
ior (within its borders) we are focused on in terms of human rights compliance.8 How
do human rights petitions and subsequent Committee violation decisions affect the
government’s repression calculus? I consider the costliness of this form of naming
and shaming for repressive regimes, how this varies across time and space, and dis-
cuss how states respond to improve their reputation and redirect focus.
Liberal democratic values are a core component of the global world order after
the Second World War, and even more so after the end of the Cold War. All coun-
tries pay some attention to these norms and values by participating in the global
rights regime; every country has ratified at least one of the core UN treaties.9 This
participation by no means signals a sincere commitment to these values (see: Hol-
lyer and Rosendorff 2011; Simmons, 2009; Vreeland, 2008); nonetheless, all coun-
tries, regardless of levels of human rights practices and democracy, pay these norms
some lip service. Moreover, many repressive countries take an additional step
and allow these individual petitions, inviting increased oversight (Schoner, 2023).
Guriev and Treisman (2019, 2022) discuss a new, dominant type of autocrat that
cares about their reputation: “spin dictator” compared to the old dictatorships based
on fear. These dictators are more open to the world, care about global public opin-
ion, and “perform” democracy. Recently, one former Human Rights Committee
member said, “All states care about their reputation.”10
Violation decisions bring negative attention, which governments would- all else
equal- like to avoid, and thus may cause some states to alter behavior out of shame
rather than longer-term norm adoption (Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 2013). Reputa-
tional costs increase with media coverage and both international and domestic pres-
sure, highlighting the importance of organizations with resources for a broader pub-
licity effort. Nassera Dutour, spokesperson for Collectif des Familles de Disparus
en Algérie (Coalition of Families of the Disappeared in Algeria, CFDA), highlights
how the Algerian government values its reputation:
“The thing is, since these recommendations are public, they’re visible by all. So
what we have seen, other associations have referenced those cases, the commu-
nications that have been made regarding Algeria. For example, [they have] ref-
erenced the Boucherf case in Algeria. That has been a problem for the Algerian
government. They are very susceptible. They are very aware of their image, and
they want to keep this image of being better than they actually are.”11
8 I recognize that non-state actors, such as rebel groups and terrorist organizations, can–and often do–
violate human rights. The focus of this paper is governments’ respect for human rights, whose behavior
United Nations treaties seek to govern.
9 There are nine core human rights treaties available here: International Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; Interna-
tional Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination against Women; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrad-
ing Treatment or Punishment; International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant
Workers and Members of Their Families; International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from
Enforced Disappearance; and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
10 Interview on 20 September 2022.
11 Interview on 12 March 2021.
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R.J.Schoner
She was eager to share that the continued filings and responses in the Human
Rights Committee “continues to annoy Algeria as much as possible,” and “The
Algerian government gets angry.”
3.2 Personal narrative
Petitions focus on specific instances of abuse, centered on individual victim(s),
rather than the more common aggregate performance reviews, and thus serve as a
more effective form of naming and shaming. Committees’ more intensive roles in
evaluating state self-reports and producing recommendations concern a state’s over-
all practices. Petitions and subsequent decisions from Committee bodies begin with
victims and concern their own well-being and livelihood. This creates a compelling
and relatable narrative, humanizing human rights violations and evoking an emo-
tional response from an audience.
Research across disciplines shows that “personal narratives appear to be the most
consistently successful, increasing individuals’ knowledge on the issue, their emo-
tional reaction to the issue, and as a consequence, leading them to reject the practice
and participate in a campaign to remand its cessation” (McEntire etal., 2015, 421).12
Personal narratives can help foster inclusion (Adida et al., 2018) as well as miti-
gate negative views (Audette, Horowitz and Michelitch 2021) and increase empathy
for an out-group (Williamson etal., 2021).13 Human rights groups regularly focus
on narratives and storytelling, carefully crafting the most compelling narratives for
their advocacy campaigns. For example, Open Global Rights published an article
entitled “Be the narrative: How embracing new narratives can revolutionize what it
means to do human rights” (Gomez & Coombes, 2019). Similarly, Human Rights
Founders Network discusses storytelling and how “Stories Help Human Rights”
(Network 2013). Large, well-known, international NGOs like Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch regularly publicize individual victims of human rights
abuse in their campaigns.
Schaffer and Smith (2004) detail the history and usage of narratives in human
rights advocacy, including the importance of trauma, traumatic remembering, and
the Holocaust. They discuss the commodification of narratives of suffering on the
global market, where “publishers and media conglomerates recognize that stories of
suffering and survival sell to readers” (12). Human rights advocacy groups strategi-
cally use this powerful device: “In the midst of the transits that take stories of local
struggle to readerships around the world, NGOs and activists enlist stories from vic-
tims as a way of alerting a broader public to situations of human rights violations.
They also solicit and package stories to attract readerships” (14). These narratives
sometimes serve as “lightning rods in rights campaigns” (16) with the potential for
great efficacy.14
12 See also McEntire, Leiby and Krain (2017); Small, Loewenstein and Slovic (2007).
13 This line of research often refers to this process as “prospective-taking.”
14 The author discusses limitations such as depersonalization through recontextualization.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
3.3 Committee credibility
The involvement of a UN treaty body provides third-party credibility to individual
and civil society’s calls for naming and shaming. I focus on the possible effects of
Committee activity– producing decisions– rather than the prior stage of submitting
a petition and argue that improvement in human rights practices is most likely not
after filing a petition but after violation decisions. Committee Views are, on average,
published four years after the communication is submitted, with a large variation. A
petition can result in the following decisions: inadmissible, violation, no violation.15
Before deciding on the merits of a communication, the Committee considers admis-
sibility, the formal requirements including: exhausting domestic remedies, sufficient
substantiation, and ratione temporis (relevant events must occur after the entry into
force of the complaint mechanism for the relevant State party). After deeming the
complaint admissible, the Committee considers the merits of the case and decides
whether there has been a violation of a treaty article. Admissibility and merits are
generally considered simultaneously given resource constraints, and one of the three
decisions (inadmissible, violation, or no violation) is announced without announc-
ing the intermediary stage of admissibility.
The involvement of a non-aggrieved actor helps validate claims of wrongdoing
and calls for change. These violation decisions from a UN treaty body are more
powerful generators of shame than the original abuse itself or shaming from NGOs
(Esarey & DeMeritt, 2017).16 The victim(s) and involved civil society may name
and shame before the Committee producing their final views, including publicizing
the submission of the petitions. This is one component of the near-constant nam-
ing and shaming of repressive governments by non-governmental actors. I argue the
relatively rare involvement of a United Nations treaty body and its more objective
nature adds credibility. Therefore, any positive effect of these petitions would be at
the final stage of Committee public decisions rather than the prior stage of filling.
Park etal. (2021) detail shame in international politics: “It is the public condemna-
tion of human rights violations, rather than the violations themselves, that matter
for third-party actions” (173). While civil society groups can use petitions as a focal
point for their campaigns, Committee violation decisions make these campaigns
more powerful. Committee violation decisions, therefore, should have more substan-
tial effects than petition submissions.
Unlike other intergovernmental bodies, particularly those in the United
Nations, committees overseeing human rights treaties are quasi-judicial. Rather
than politics dominating dynamics among states, these committees operate much
more like a court. Scholarship focused on the political nature of UN IGOs such
as the UN Commission on Human Rights, later renamed the Human Rights
15 In rare cases, the Committee can discontinue the case. This occurs if the matter has been sufficiently
remedied in the interim and the victim agrees to discontinue the case. Alternatively, if the Committee
loses contact with the author/victim, a case can be discontinued.
16 Esarey and DeMeritt (2017) find that UN naming and shaming is more powerful than NGO shaming
by analyzing bilateral aid flows rather than respect for human rights.
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R.J.Schoner
Council (Esarey & DeMeritt, 2017; Hug and Lukács 2014; Lebovic & Voeten,
2006, 2009) and Universal Periodic Review (Terman & Byun, 2022), explores
how global politics affects politics between states, especially aid flows. Whereas
the politicization of the UPR can shift government behavior (Terman & Voeten,
2018), the power of these treaty bodies is in their relatively objective nature,
lending credibility to naming and shaming. Carraro (2019) discusses the impor-
tance of the Committee members themselves and how the “expert nature of
recommendations... are seen as more objective and of a higher quality than the
UPR” (1090). Committees are comprised of independent experts from the human
rights field, detailed further in the Online Appendix A.1 (available online at the
Review of International Organizations’ webpage), and do not serve as govern-
ment representatives.
This does notmean treaty body membership is without critics. I do not argue
committee membership is completely objective, but rather many international
actors perceive the Committee to be fairly credible, especially compared to other
international actors in this space, such the Human Rights Council. Many schol-
ars are critical of treaty body membership, arguing that despite claims of de jure
independence, members are not fully independent from their governments. This
stems in large part from the fact that serving as a member is not a full-time, paid
position, so members must have other jobs. For example, Kahn-Nisser (2024)
finds that the nationality of members of the Committee against Torture matters
for shaming throughout the review process. Other critiques also include a lack
of gender balance and uneven geographic distribution (despite a General Assem-
bly Resolution, discussed in Online Appendix A.1, encouraging consideration of
these factors), which causes some to lament the decreased legitimacy and cred-
ibility of these institutions (Bayefsky, 2001; Hennebel, 2020).
Some argue that this lack of independence and biases in membership decreases
legitimacy which, in turn, decreases potential effects on government behavior.
Some critiques may be well-founded, but there is still reason to believe there
could be positive effects, which is worth exploring and testing potential effects.
Moreover, much of the critical discussion and empirical findings such far (par-
ticularly Kahn-Nisser (2024)) is focused either on the membership as a whole
or on state reviews, not on individual communication decisions. Cole (2011)
explores the determinants of Human Rights Committee decisions, considering (1)
the characteristics of countries against which a communication is filed, (2) the
nature of the claim itself, and (3) the composition of the HRC (988). Importantly,
this analysis revealed “few overt biases” as member nationality did not matter for
decisions on communications (997).
Despite critiques of expert members, some applaud the perception of the Com-
mittee, arguing it has "enjoyedan outstanding ‘international reputation that imparts
a great moral authority’ for decades, which is a result of its composition, among
other things (Nowak, 2005, 894-5)” (Jelić & Mührel 2022). I argue that treaty bod-
ies can provide credibility, complementing non-governmental advocacy organiza-
tions. Committees can add to reputation costs for violations of human rights when
they side with victims of human rights abuse and find the government in violation of
the treaty. This leads to the following hypothesis:
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
H1: Violation decisions, but not their prior petition submissions, will improve
human rights practices.
3.4 Civil society
Civil society organizations publicize the work of treaty bodies, bringing attention to
states’ non-compliance. They play a crucial role in the prior stage of submitting peti-
tions by informing victims of this international remedy and protecting them from
potential state retaliation (Schoner, 2024). These organizations file petitions as part
of their broader mobilization efforts, and their involvement continues throughout the
process, including publicizing favorable decisions from monitoring bodies.
Depending on the type and scale of the organization, civil society organizations
may post on their website, release reports, hold press conferences, inform foreign
governments, and/or network with other organizations and activists. They release
information to the media, both domestically and internationally, and offer inter-
views. Civil society actors send this information to other actors, including other
international organizations, powerful states and organizations such as the United
States and the European Union, and larger, more well-known organizations such
as Amnesty International. For example, the Collectif des Familles de Disparus en
Algérie (CFDA) is an NGO focused on achieving truth and justice for the families
of the disappeared.17 The CFDA has filed 15 communications against Algeria in the
Human Rights Committee concerning the enforced disappearances committed in the
1990s. In addition to their international legal filings, they advocate in a variety of
domestic and global institutions. The CFDA regularly advocates in the European
Parliament, European Council, and the European Commission as well as UN bodies
in Geneva. Additionally, they attend the African Commission on Human and Peo-
ples’ Rights and events such as the World Social Forum (Collectif des Familles de
Disparus en Algérie, 2022b).
CFDA, a self-described “small organization,”18 regularly partners with larger
organizations to advocate against the Algerian government for improved human
rights and seeks global media attention. Recently, CFDA partnered with 15 other
organizations, including Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, and
Human Rights Watch, to publish a joint press release supporting the European Par-
liament’s calls for action on Algerian human rights and demanding broader “collec-
tive public action from the international community” (Amnesty International, 2020).
CFDA states the goal of this press release was “to urge the European Union and its
Member States to more severely condemn the management of human rights by the
Algerian authorities, during a meeting held between the European Union and repre-
sentatives of the Algerian government which took place a few days after the publica-
tion” (Collectif des Familles de Disparus en Algérie, 2022a)
17 There were widespread enforced disappearances in the 1990s in Algeria. CFDA was created in 1999
and has continued its advocacy through today.
18 Interview with Nassera Dutour, spokesperson for the CFDA, on 12 March 2021.
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R.J.Schoner
CFDA strategically advocates and publicizes these decisions to a broad, global
audience. A recent Al Jazeera article (Osman, 2021) summarized the work CFDA
and other organizations have done in the Committee:
“After families could not obtain redress at the domestic level, several turned
to the United Nations human rights mechanisms. However, the authorities
refused to respond to individual complaints and resorted to the charter to chal-
lenge their admissibility, stating the text provided a ‘global framework’ and
constituted, in itself, a domestic remedy addressing the issue of the missing.
To date, the UN Human Rights Committee has issued 44 decisions on Alge-
rian cases, but none has been implemented.”
Similarly, Amnesty International’s 2007 report detailed the 2006 HRC Adop-
tion of Views concerning the unlawful detainment without trial and torture of Malik
Medjnoun.19 The US State Department report also notes these decisions: “In March
2006 the UN Human Rights Committee issued its first decision on enforced disap-
pearances in the country. The Committee found that the government violated several
provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights when it failed
to protect the rights and life of Salah Saker and Riad Boucherf, who disappeared in
1994 and 1995 respectively” (Refworld, 2008).
I theorize the involvement of civil society organizations in the petition process
will increase the effectiveness of Committee violation decisions. It is important
to distinguish this specific form of participation, in the form of representing the
victim(s) in the treaty body, from broader civil society activity. These organizations
are specifically invested in the case, already devoting resources to filing the petition.
These organizations can be domestic-oriented NGOs like the CFDA in Algeria, but
they may also be international and involved in many countries, such as the World
Organization Against Torture.20 This leads to the following hypothesis:
H2: Violation decisions will improve human rights practices concerning peti-
tions with involvement of civil society actors.
4 Research design
I begin by defining the repressive sample, a subset of countries that (1) ratify the
ICCPR-OP allowing individual petitions and (2) routinely violate human rights
detailed in the same treaty. New data on petitions in the Human Rights Commit-
tee detail the nature of the alleged violations, involvement of civil society actors,
19 Communication No. 1297/2004 submitted by Ali Medjnoun regarding his son, Malik Medjnoun, on
11 June 2004. Committee deemed Algeria in violation on 14 July 2006.
20 The World Organization Against Torture is headquartered in Switzerland. They have filed peti-
tions against Côte d’Ivoire (Communication No. 1759/2008), the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(2214/2012), Libya (1422/2005 1143/2002 1776/2008 1295/2004), Paraguay (1828/2008, 1829/2008),
Sri Lanka (1250/2004), and Russia (1447/2006).
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
relevant dates, and Committee decisions (Schoner, 2024). I test the theory focused
on the macro-level response from the government focused on physical integrity
rights, a subset of rights covered in the ICCPR. I extend the theory and test for
micro-level compliance, analyzing targeted remedies given to the specific complaint
(Ullmann & von Staden, 2023). I leverage the plausibly exogenous timing of the
Committee decisions, years after petitions are submitted, which the State party can-
not reliably anticipate. Additionally, I explore possible alternative explanations and
discuss naming and shaming by other international actors.
4.1 Repressive sample
First, I include only countries that have ratified the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights’ First Optional Protocol allowing individual petitions. Because
this paper is concerned with the activity of the treaty body and its violation deci-
sions, I exclude countries that do not allow these petitions. I avoid comparing states
that receive violation decisions with those where these decisions are not possible.
For example, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea(DPRK) has ratified the
ICCPR but not the Optional Protocol allowing individual petitions. Therefore,
despite being a highly repressive country, I exclude the DPRK from this analysis
because victims of human rights abuse are not able to file petitions, on which the
Committee produces decisions.
Second, I restrict the sample to repressive governments, those that routinely vio-
late human rights detailed in the ICCPR. The effect of UN treaty body decisions
in these countries is of high interest because the UN is often the only international
remedy in these countries.Numerous countries allow access to regional courts that
are far more popular and produce binding decisions. For example, in 2016, the Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights received roughly the same number of peti-
tions in one year as the Human Rights Committee had received throughout its his-
tory. Many of these repressive countries are not parties to these regional courts, so
the UN treaty system is the only recourse outside of domestic institutions to these
victims. Additionally, this focused sample is a hard test of the theory, but one in
which scholars are particularly interested in because these non-compliers are the
main targets of these international institutions.
Following a large focus in scholarly work (Schoner, 2023, 2024; Cordell etal.,
2022; Hill Jr. and Jones 2014; Conrad, 2014; Murdie & Davis, 2012), I focus on a
subset of the human rights detailed in the International Covenant on Civil and Politi-
cal Rights that protect bodily autonomy: physical integrity rights. Physical integrity
violations include torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearance. This
is the most common group of rights contested in the HRC, alongside judicial issues
concerning the right to a fair trial.21 Analyzing a group of similar rights allows for
21 Approximately half of the petitions concern judicial issues, and approximately half concern physical
integrity rights. These two categories are not mutually exclusive as one petition can deal with both tor-
ture and an unfair trial, for example.
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R.J.Schoner
some strategic substitution (Dragu & Lupu, 2021; DeMeritt & Conrad, 2019; Payne
and Abouharb 2016; Lupu, 2013), where governments may improve practices not
specifically contested in the violation decisions. Repression is costly, and govern-
ments consider both the benefits of improving (or not worsening) their reputation
and the costs of changing strategically imposed repression. If a policy under contes-
tation is considered too costly to change, the regime may decide to improve respect
for related, but not identical, rights.
I measure repression using a latent measure of respect for physical integrity (PI)
rights from Fariss (2014) and Schnakenberg and Fariss (2014) where higher values
indicate greater respect and better practices. Countries enter the sample at the time
of OP ratification, if they have a value below 0.1, continuing prior analysis of repres-
sive countries’ decision to ratify the Optional Protocol (Schoner, 2023) and victims’
decisions to file petitions (Schoner, 2024). It is important to note that states ratify
the Optional Protocol at various times, so states do not enter the sample all together
(therefore, we have an unbalanced panel). I use 0.1 as a threshold for repression;
states with a latent measure below 0.1 are considered “repressive.” Creating a
dichotomous indicator of repression from a continuous latent variable involves
creating a (arbitrary) threshold. This threshold aims to capture those with low and
medium respect for human rights, excluding those countries with high respect for
human rights. Schoner (2023) explores how changing this threshold does not change
the sample drastically.
I opt to focus on repressive countries rather than autocratic countries because
poor human rights practices are of greater interest in this situation than domes-
tic political institutions.22 This paper’s motivating interest relies on countries that
routinely violate human rights rather than domestic institutions which concentrate
power in a small group of individuals. Figure1 shows this repressive sample. Coun-
tries in blue are analyzed here, those that allow individual petitions to the HRC,
while countries in red are given as a comparison group, measured as repressive (at
the time of ICCPR treaty ratification) but do not ratify the OP allowing individual
petitions and thus are excluded from this analysis.
After repressive countries enter the sample, there is a large variation in continued
human rights practices.23 Many countries greatly improve their respect for human
rights over the decades after ratification. For example, the Republic of Korea meets
the definition of repressive when it ratified the ICCPR-OP in 1990 but later democ-
ratizes and significantly improves human rights. Similarly, Uruguay, Estonia, and
Croatia all contemporaneously have high respect for human rights although they
were considered repressive at the time of OP ratification.24
22 Previous work centers on autocratic participation in human rights treaties (Conrad,2014; Hollyer and
Rosendorff, 2011; Vreeland,2008) although newer studies highlight the importance of human rights
practices over institutions (Schoner,2023; Shikhelman,2019). Of course, there is a correlation between
repression and democratic domestic institutions: non-democracies are also more repressive.
23 Appendix Figure A.1, where each line represents a country, shows the large heterogeneity in this sam-
ple.
24 Uruguay ratified the ICCPR-OP in 1970, Estonia in 1991, and Croatia in 1995.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
I restrict the sample based on the dependent variable because there are heteroge-
neous treatment effects for states with high respect for human rights and those with
low or medium respect. Moreover, current fine-grained data for Committee violation
decisions are only available for this sample, not the full, global sample. Because I
am interested in estimating treatment effects for low- and middle-respect countries,
once states reach this sustained threshold, I consider them in the “high” respect cat-
egory, and they drop out of the sample. States drop out of the sample if and when
they surpass this threshold, 0.1, for three consecutive years.25 I note this removes the
uncommon possibility of improving above this threshold but reverting. Improvement
is largely sustained, so this graduation specification is not very sensitive. Thirty-one
countries improved respect for human rights above 0.1 for at least one year, and 26
countries improved for at least 3 consecutive years, exiting the sample. The sample
includes 56 repressive countries beginning the year of their ICCPR-OP ratification,
ranging from 1969 to 2011, through 2016,26 and the unit of analysis is country-year.
4.2 Dependent variable
The dependent variable is human rights practices. I focus on macro-level, aggregate
human rights practices (de facto behavior rather than de jure laws) at the country-
year unit of analysis and use respect for physical integrity, the same variable used
25 As an alternative, and more restrictive, specification, I use the mean respect for human rights as the
improvement threshold (approximately −0.535.). This restricts the sample size and power, but the results
are robust (with decreased statistical significance).
26 Data on HRC petition decisions was updated in 2023. The average of four years from submission to
decision was elongated because of COVID-19. Additionally, availability for other variables limits the
sample to 2016. Importantly, no countries in this sample denounce the ICCPR-OP during this period.
Fig. 1 Repressive sample
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R.J.Schoner
to create this repressive sample. Broader human rights practices are more impor-
tant as a test for broader compliance and effectiveness rather than targeted, personal
remedies. This is the central focus of the Human Rights Committee, and personal
remedies are secondary.27 This also allows for a wider comparison; we can com-
pare countries that receive an unfavorable decision from a Committee in a given
year to another repressive country that has not received any Committee decisions.
Analyzing targeted compliance necessitates narrowing the sample to countries that
receive a Committee decision. The broader analysis captures some aspects of pos-
sible strategic substitution, not focused on one person or one policy. Figure2 shows
the distribution of the dependent variable for both the full repressive sample (all 56
countries for the entire period) and the restricted sample of interest, where countries
exit after improving repressive practices.The DV ranges from −2.82 to 2.76 with a
mean of −0.54 and a standard deviation of 1.07.
The results presented here use a latent measure of respect for PI rights (Fariss,
2014; Schnakenberg & Fariss, 2014). Using a variety of input measures, these com-
monly used data incorporate the changing standard of accountability over time,
which biases report-based measures. Additionally, these data have broad temporal
and spatial coverage. Other measures of human rights practices were previously
standard in scholarly empirical analysis, specifically CIRIGHTS (Mark, Cingranelli
and Filippov 2024; Mark et al., 2023) and Political Terror Scale (Gibney et al.,
2022). While I opt for Fariss’ latent measure for theoretical and methodologicalrea-
sons, these findings are robust to alternative dependent variables.28
4.3 Explanatory variable
The key explanatory variable is Committee violation decisions. These come from an
original dataset of 978 petitions filed against 44 repressive countries (56 countries in
total but 12 have had no petitions filed against them in the Committee), introduced in
Schoner (2024). This new dataset allows me to distinguish the rights under contesta-
tion for each submitted complaint. Many petitions include allegations of a variety of
rights violations, and I code a petition as “physical integrity” if a physical integrity
right, such as torture and the right to life, is listed as one of the alleged violations.
Table1 shows the number of total decisions (or Views) from the HRC against each
repressive government, the number of violation decisions, and the number of violation
decisions on physical integrity rights (each a subset of the previous category/column)
totaling 587 petitions. The full data, without countries exiting with improvement, is
shown in Appendix Table1 containing 987 petitions. The data are skewed, with most
28 Table A.5 shows robust results from the Political Terror Scale using an average of the three inputs: Amnes-
ty International, Human Rights Watch, and US State Department. I reverse the PTS for intuitive comparison,
where higher values indicate greater respect for rights. The CIRIGHTS dataset has limited coverage for the
sample, decreasing the statistical power. The results using CIRIGHTS are shown in Table A.6.
27 Interview with former HRC member on 20 September 2022.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
countries (and thus most country-years) without any petitions filed or decisions, and the
statistical analysis is robust to excluding key outliers. Figure3 shows submission and
violation decisions over time, concentrated on physical integrity rights submissions.
After a victim or victims file a complaint in a treaty body, there are three main
outcomes: inadmissible, no violation, and violation.29 Most petitions against repres-
sive countries result in violation decisions: 80% of all submissions result in violation
decisions, and similarly 86% of physical integrity petitions result in violation deci-
sions. The HRC deems 16% of submissions inadmissible, and if they decide on the
merits, the vast majority of petitions result in violation decisions. The Committee
29 There are two other uncommon outcomes: admissible and discontinuance. Rarely, the Committee will
release an intermediary stage of admissible, before deciding on the merits of the case. There are four
“admissible” outcomes in the data, where final views are not found. Additionally, committees can decide
to discontinue a case. This happens for two main reasons (1) the matter has in the interim sufficiently
been remedied by the state or (2) the Committee has lost touch with the author. Fourteen cases (out
of the 978) were discontinued by the Committee. Seven were discontinued because the Committee lost
touch with the counsel/author and was unable to gather more information. In the other half of discontin-
ued cases, the matter was sufficiently remedied.
Full Sample
Restricted Sample
−3 −2 −1 01
23
PhysicalIntegrity Rights
Density
0.00.1 0.20.30.40.5 0.6
Fig. 2 Distribution of the dependent variable
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R.J.Schoner
Table 1 Violations in the Human Rights Committee
Country Total Decisions Violation Deci-
sions
Physical Integrity
Violation Deci-
sions
Belarus 122 104 17
Russia 63 33 18
Uruguay 48 42 36
Uzbekistan 43 36 29
Colombia 36 19 10
Algeria 27 25 24
Tajikistan 25 22 21
Democratic Republic of Congo 21 18 14
Libya 21 20 18
Sri Lanka 21 16 12
Turkmenistan 17 16 15
Philippines 17 13 10
Peru 15 14 10
Zambia 15 10 8
Cameroon 11 9 6
Kazakhstan 9 7 3
Nepal 9 9 9
Panama 8 2 1
Ecuador 5 5 4
Georgia 5 5 5
Togo 5 4 1
Venezuela 4 3 1
Chile 4 0 0
Azerbaijan 4 3 2
Equatorial Guinea 4 4 4
South Korea 4 3 0
Dominican Republic 2 2 1
Bolivia 2 2 2
Croatia 2 1 1
Bulgaria 2 0 0
Côte d’Ivoire 2 1 1
Central African Republic 2 2 1
Angola 2 2 2
South Africa 2 1 1
Turkey 2 2 0
Mexico 1 0 0
Nicaragua 1 1 1
Paraguay 1 1 0
Yugoslavia 1 1 0
Sierra Leone 1 1 0
Tunisia 1 0 0
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
rarely finds that, in admissible decisions, a repressive government did not violate the
ICCPR treaty. Narrowed to physical integrity, Fig.4 shows the number of submis-
sions and their outcomes in the relevant repressive sample.
To test Hypothesis 1, I run a model with PI petitions filed in a given year and
a model with their subsequent PI violation decisions. The maximum value of PI
petition submissions for a country-year is 10: Uruguay (1981), Algeria (2008),
and Turkmenistan (2012). The maximum value of PI violation decisions, the main
explanatory variable, in a given country-year is 8: Uruguay (1981), Uruguay (1983),
and Algeria (2013). The models include contemporaneous count variables, capturing
a simultaneous relationship among the variables within a given year. To further test
the theory, I analyze no violation and inadmissible decisions from the Committee.
It is reasonable to measure the variables in the same year given the Commit-
tee’s expectation for a quick response from the State party. The end of each viola-
tion decision ends with the following: “The Committee wishes to receive from the
State party, within 180 days, information about the measures taken to give effect
to the Committee’s Views.” I expect any effects to be short term because of short-
lived media cycles, where the core mechanism is civil society advocacy and pub-
licity. Media cycles, both domestic and international, move quickly and focus on
the day’s news and abuses. Because respect for human rights is a sticky measure,
improvement may be within the same year or the following year. I do not expect this
to have a long-lasting effect because short term improvement appeases critics while
minimizing costs. I analyze treatment effects over time and find, as expected, there
are no pre-treatment effects, displayed in Table6. Additionally, I note that the timing
of committee decisions is plausibly exogenous, alleviating anticipatory concerns and
Table 1 (continued)
Country Total Decisions Violation Deci-
sions
Physical Integrity
Violation Deci-
sions
Guatemala 0 0 0
Honduras 0 0 0
El Salvador 0 0 0
Brazil 0 0 0
Bosnia and Herzegovina 0 0 0
Romania 0 0 0
Estonia 0 0 0
Niger 0 0 0
Guinea 0 0 0
Chad 0 0 0
Republic of Congo 0 0 0
Uganda 0 0 0
Somalia 0 0 0
Djibouti 0 0 0
Malawi 0 0 0
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R.J.Schoner
suggestive for causal inference. Countries do not anticipate the timing of these deci-
sions, evidenced by the large variation in time from submission to final decision.30
To test Hypothesis 2 concerning civil society involvement, I include a dichoto-
mous indicator of whether each petition (and therefore the subsequent violation
decision) has listed third-party representation. 57% of violation decisions con-
cern petitions with third- party involvement.31 Listed represented may be a human
Zambia
Yugoslavia
Venezuela
Uzbekistan
Uruguay
Tur kmenistan
Turkey
Togo
Tajikistan
Sri Lanka
South Korea
South Africa
Russia
Philippines
Peru
Paraguay
Panama
Nicaragua
Nepal
Mexico
Libya
Kazakhstan
Georgia
Equatorial Guinea
Ecuador
Dominican Republic
Croatia
Côte d...Ivoire
Congo − Kinshasa
Colombia
Central African Republic
Cameroon
Bolivia
Belarus
Azerbaijan
Angola
Algeria
1980 1990 200020102020
Date
Country
Legend
Submissions
Violation Decisions
Fig. 3 HRC physical integrity activity over time
31 Because the unit of analysis is country-year, it is not suitable to include an interaction term for rep-
resentation, which is a petition-level characteristic. Anindicator of representation at the petition-level
aggregated to country-year is the number of petitions (or violation decisions) as included in the current
analysis.
30 Interviews with HRC expert members support this. Governments are notified when a communica-
tion is received by the Committee and are also allowed tosubmit information in response to the allega-
tions. The author can respond to the state’s comments, to which the government may yet again respond.
Thegovernment is aware the case is in its early stage. Aside from this initial response, governments are
not made aware of the timing of any potential decision.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
rights organization such as Track Immunity Always (TRIAL International, based in
Geneva, Switzerland), World Organization Against Torture (also based in Geneva),
or Kazakhstan International Bureau on Human Rights and Rule of Law. Alterna-
tively, the representation may be a single individual. This often is a staff member
from such an organization or law firm (which may not be easy to determine from
publicly available information), or an individual lawyer. These lawyers generally
cannot publicize the decisions like civil society organizations, but often there is an
organization behind the scenes. For example, numerous lawyers including Shane H.
Brady and André Carbonneau represented the many petitions filed by Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses. All JWs filing complaints are represented by counsel, and these two law-
yers (who represented the majority of submissions) are at the same Canadian law
firm: W. Glen How & Associates LLP. There is JW organizational power behind
this, connecting victims to these lawyers, so a record of only lawyers and not organi-
zations does not preclude the involvement of broader organizations with the ability
to publicize the decisions and increase pressure on the regime. Although this loses
some variation, this dichotomous indicator picks up the primary concept, capturing
whether there is a third party (that is, neither the victims themselves nor the alleged
violator State party) involved with additional resources to publicize the decision.
4.4 Estimation
I run an OLS regression with clustered standard errors by country, a lagged depend-
ent variable because past levels of repression significantly predict repression (Dav-
enport, 1995; Poe and Tate 1994), country fixed effects, and a linear time trend. I
run four models with each of the four explanatory variables of interest separately:
petition submissions, violation decisions, violation decisions without representation,
and violation decisions with representation. Additionally, I include a model with
violation
Submissions
Inadmissible
Fig. 4 Committee decisions on physical integrity rights
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R.J.Schoner
three variables: submissions and violation decisions with and without representa-
tion.32This specification helps address heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. The
presence of civil society has been strongly linked to respect for human rights (see:
Chaudhry, 2022; Wong, 2012; Keck & Sikkink, 1998), so I include a measure of
domestic civil society in all models. I distinguish this from my measure of civil soci-
ety involvement in submitted petitions because of (1) potential international actor
involvement in complaints and (2) the representation measure is more specific and
captures specific vested interest and involvement rather than the broader domestic
environment. I use Varieties of Democracy’s (V-Dem) civil society index which
asks, “How robust is civil society?” (Coppedge etal. 2021; Pemstein etal., 2021).
I include controls standard in the literature: judicial independence (Linzer &
Staton, 2015; Staton etal., 2019), presence of war (civil or international), (logged)
population, and (logged) GDP.33 The Appendix presents models with year fixed
effects (instead of a linear time trend) in Table3 with similar results. I also present a
first difference model where the dependent variable is the change in physical integ-
rity rights in a given country-year, and Appendix Table A.4 shows the results are
robust to this alternative specification34. Appendix Tables A.8 and A.9 shows that
the results are robust to including additional controls that measure global openness:
trade as a percentage of GDP (Arel-Bundock, 2022; World Bank, 2022) and IGO
membership (Pevehouse etal., 2020).35
5 Empirical results anddiscussion
The core empirical finding is shown in the coefficient plot Fig.5 with the full results
shown in Table2. In support of my theory (H1), I find that violation decisions in the
HRC are associated with increased respect for these rights at standard levels of sta-
tistical Coefficient estimates and 95% confidence intervals significance. The results
suggest that violation decisions do significantly improve respect for human rights
in a given country-year. However, an increase in the number of petitions filed in the
HRC is not associated with any change in respect for PI rights. This lends support
to the theoretical importance of the Committee’s third-party legitimacy and suggests
33 I measure the presence of civil or international war from Gleditsch etal. (2002). I use World Bank
Development Indicators for both population and GDP, logging both given their skewed distributions
(Arel-Bundock 2022; World Bank 2022). Appendix Table A.7 shows results are robust to substituting
regime type using Polity (Marshall and Gurr 2020) for judicial independence.
34 There is much debate on the use of lagged dependent variables (see: Wilkins 2018; Keele and Kelly
2006); dependent variables can be problematic if the error term is serially correlated. For both theoreti-
cal and methodological reasons, I opt for the lagged dependent variable in the main specification, but the
results are robust to alternatives without a lagged dependent variable.
35 The results in Table A.8 are robust for including logged GDP (as shown) and also removing this vari-
able. The results of interest in Table A.9 are robust to changing total IGO memberships to new IGO
memberships, although the IGO variable loses significance.
32 Only three of the four variables are included in this full model, leaving violation decisions (from
model 1) out, because of collinearity. Violation decisions is simply the sum of violation decisions with
and without representation.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
this response is not due to only the mobilization of the victims and/or organizations.
Furthermore, inadmissible decisions and no violation decisions do not have any sig-
nificant effect, shown in Appendix Table A.10.36
Figure6 shows the treatment effect for violation decisions (not specific to rep-
resentation) over time, with 95% confidence intervals. I include lag and lead vari-
ables in models with a change in respect for human rights respect as the dependent
variable.37As expected, I find no significant effects for pre-treatment; that is, phys-
ical integrity violation decisions are not associated with respect for human rights
in the previous year(s). This figure shows again that there is a contemporaneous
effect: violation decisions affect practices in the same year, but there is no continued
improvement. Because the dependent variable is the change in practices in a given
country-year (and Table2 includes a lagged dependent variable) and there is no sub-
sequent decrease in practices after the treatment, this positive change is sustained. In
other words, countries do not improve practices and then decrease to revert to pre-
treatment levels.
The key independent variable, violation decisions, is statistically significant but
substantively small, explaining a small amount of variation in the dependent vari-
able. This is not surprising because repression is a complex political behavior with
numerous input factors. However, any statistically significant change in respect for
human rights is important. The dependent variable measures abuses including tor-
ture and extrajudicial killing, so a very small increase indicates a reduction in bodily
harm and killings.
36 I run models with the following explanatory variables focused on PI rights, both with and without
violation decisions: (1) no violation decisions, (2) inadmissible decisions, and (3) pooled variable includ-
ing the prior two categories. Given the low number of these decisions (and particularly no violation deci-
sions), I include the third variable combining inadmissibility and no violation decisions.
37 I opt for this specification here to avoid the lagged dependent variable. These models still take into
account prior respect for human rights but in a different way.
Petition Submissions
ViolationDecisions
ViolationDecisions:WithRepresentation
ViolationDecisions:NoRepresentation
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
Coefficient estimatesand 95% confidence intervals
Fig. 5 HRC activity effect on respect for physical integrity rights
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
R.J.Schoner
To test Hypothesis 2, I separate violation decisions on whether the victim is rep-
resented by a third party. The statistically significant relationship in the core model
is driven by violation decisions that list third-party representation. Decisions with-
out a third party listed are not significantly associated with any change in repression.
This lends empirical support to the second hypothesis, highlighting the importance
of civil society involvement.
Thus far, the analysis has focused on only one subset of rights covered by the
Human Rights Committee: physical integrity rights. Here, I substitute alternative
civil and political rights for the dependent variable, leaving PI violation decisions as
the explanatory variable. If we think there is minimal strategic substitution, or sub-
stitution only within PI rights, then we should not see any effect of PI violation deci-
sions on other rights such as the freedom of association and freedom of expression.
Figure7 shows the coefficient plot from these new regressions and compares them
to the main results shown earlier, with the full regression output in Table A.11 in the
Table 2 Respect for physical integrity rights
+ p < 0.1, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001
Standard errors are clustered by country
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Petition Submissions 0.006 0.003
(0.013) (0.012)
PI Violation Decisions 0.024**
(0.008)
Decisions: With Representation 0.039* 0.038*
(0.016) (0.016)
Decisions: No Representation 0.004 0.001
(0.004) (0.006)
Civil Society Index 0.197
(0 . 137)
0.195
(0 . 138)
0.194
(0 . 138)
0.193
(0 . 139)
0.196
(0 . 136)
Judicial Independence − 0.127
(0.229)
− 0.124
(0 . 233)
− 0.121
(0 . 235)
− 0.126
(0 . 234)
− 0.120
(0 . 234)
War − 0.229***
(0 . 039)
− 0.230***
(0 . 039)
− 0.234***
(0 . 039)
− 0.231***
(0 . 040)
− 0.233***
(0 . 039)
Population (ln) − 0.237
(0 . 146)
− 0.262
(0 . 156)
− 0.237
(0 . 147)
− 0.255
(0 . 154)
− 0.223
(0 . 152)
GDP (ln) 0.038 +
(0 . 021)
0.037 +
(0 . 021 )
0.036 +
(0 . 021)
0.037 +
(0 . 021)
0.036 +
(0 . 021)
Time 0.007*
(0 . 003)
0.008*
(0 . 004)
0.007*
(0 . 003)
0.008*
(0 . 004)
0.007 +
(0 . 003)
DVt − 10.857***
(0 . 025)
0.858***
(0 . 026)
0.852***
(0 . 025)
0.858***
(0 . 026)
0.853***
(0 . 025)
N 992 992 992 992 992
R20.944 0.944 0.944 0.944 0.944
R2adjusted 0.941 0.940 0.941 0.940 0.940
Country FE X X X X X
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
0.04
0.02
0.00
−0.02
t−3t−2 t−1
tt+1 t+2t+3
Coefficients and95% CIs
Fig. 6 Treatment effects over time
PI ViolationDecisions
PI ViolationDecisions:WithRepresentation
FreedomofAssociation
Freedom of Association
Freedom of Expression
Freedom of Expression
Physical Integrity
Physical Integrity
0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06
Coefficient estimatesand 95% confidenceintervals
Fig. 7 Physical integrity decisions’ effect on different human rights
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R.J.Schoner
Appendix.38 As expected, violation decisions concerning physical integrity rights
have no statistically significant effect on the freedoms of association or expression.
5.1 Targeted compliance withdecisions
In addition to the aggregate respect for PI rights, I analyze miro-level compliance
for all violation decisions against repressive countries, incorporating the broad set of
rights covered in the Human Rights Committee. Do repressive regimes comply with
adverse views from the Committee? The theory and previous empirical analysis are
focused on broader practices, but does this also apply to personal remedies? This
inherently restricts the analysis to only states that have received violation decisions.
I extend the theory to targeted compliance and posit that states are more likely to
comply with violation decisions when the victim(s) are represented by counsel, with
third-party representation.
Recent data from Ullmann and von Staden (2023) detail views from UN human
rights treaty bodies and compliance in follow-up reports to each petition. Compli-
ance data is only available for a portion of all decisions, restricting the sample fur-
ther. For the relevant repressive sample, there are 560 decisions in the dataset, and
250 have follow-up information, to which I match with representation data from
Schoner (2024). Compliance is uncommon but certainly not rare; out of these 250
views, 72 (29%) have at least partially complied with the Committee’s decision.
Table3 shows compliance with petitions against repressive governments by repre-
sentation.39There is no discernible evidence that representation makes a difference
in extracting personal remedies from a government.40 In other words, individuals
with representation in the Human Rights Committee are no more likely to receive
personal remedies from their government than those without.
The extensive data collection effort by Ullmann and von Staden (2023) is
restricted to where states submit follow-up information to the Committee, which
is not commonplace. This limits the inferences we can make about this analysis,
which is why I opt instead to focus on more aggregate measures of compliance. The
Appendix displays the missingness of this data across years in FigureA.2 countries
in Figure A.3. Missingness is skewed towards more recent years; most decisions
since 2007 lack compliance data. This also concentrates on a handful of countries,
the main targets of violation decisions, such as Belarus and Russia.
39 This analysis uses the partial compliance dummy variable from Ullmann and von Staden (2023),
which takes the value of 1 if their “Compliance Score All” all variable takes a value of 0.5 or higher and
a value of 0 if otherwise.
40 Both a chi-squared test and a Fisher’s exact test find no statistical support of a relationship between
the two variables.
38 There is a high correlation between civil society and each of these indicators of freedom (association
and expression): correlation coefficient over 0.88 for both (compared to 0.17 between PI rights and civil
society). Therefore, I exclude this control variable from these models.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
5.2 Discussion
The empirical analysis highlights the importance of considering compliance as a
theoretical and empirical concept. Violation decisions do not have a uniform and
positive effect, and they do not result in the petitioner achieving their own goals
in many cases. Petitions often seek both individual, targeted remedies (including
financial compensation, release from prison, information about a missing relative, or
removal of barriers to passport renewal) and broader reforms from the government.
This analysis finds that governments often ignore targeted compliance, which the
Committee and international community are not as focused on compared to broader
human rights practices. Petitions are focused on specific instances of abuse, and
this serves to convincingly put a face and emotionally relate to abuses and abstract
repression. Despite this personalization, responses are focused on broader change, in
response to the demand for more systemic change. For example, Algeria has ignored
the Committee’s recommendations so far, evidenced by the data analyzed here as
well as an interview with CFDA. Nonetheless, their respect for physical integrity
rights improved respect for physical integrity rights in the 2000s, especially in the
second half of the decade, which coincided with several Committee violation deci-
sions. This is well-explained by the statistical models.
If governments are ignoring personal remedies but improving aggregate rights,
what is happening on the ground that is being reflected in these indicators? Impor-
tantly, human rights are a sticky measure and do not change quickly or by large mag-
nitudes, this effect is reflected in the same year. In response to violation rulings,
repressive governments may shift to other tools of repression or other less repres-
sive tactics to maintain power. Some tactics are easier to hide. Even different meth-
ods of the same tactic, some are noticeably “cleaner” (Rejali, 2009). Additionally,
regimes may increase their oversight of more localized violations, informing them
of increased international scrutiny. These regimes are not stopping repression but
rather tightening and adjusting, resulting in slightly lower levels overall.
The empirical analysis finds a significant pattern across many countries over
time, but this does not all countries improve human rights practices after violation
decisions. Belarus has ignored many petitions and violation decisions concerning
the same issue: suppression of the freedoms of expression and assembly. President
Lukashenko has not changed this civil law. Numerous petitions also detail allega-
tions of torture and enforced disappearances. We could theorize why this might
be the case: Belarus has strong ties to Russia, a major power unconcerned with
human rights, so Lukashenko may not be as sensitive to its reputation in this area
as other countries. We can contrast Belarus with Algeria, which has strong ties to
Table 3 Compliance with
petitions by representation Representation
No Yes
Compliance No 100 78
Yes (partial) 45 27
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R.J.Schoner
the European Union given its economic flows and location. Future research should
explore these dynamics: sensitivity to human rights reputation and naming & sham-
ing given ties to diverse major powers.
The statistical analysis above suggests a positive relationship between violation
decisions- particularly those with civil society involvement- and human rights prac-
tices. This correlation is a significant contribution to our understanding of treaty
body activity and human rights effectiveness, complementing work by, for example
by Heyns, Viljoen and Murray (2024); McQuigg (2011); Heyns and Viljoen (2001).
Thus far, the analysis does not help identify and support the causal mechanism. The
theoretical development involves interviews to ground claims with practice-on-the-
ground expertise– to support theoretical components. Here, I discuss the mechanism
in light of existing qualitative work and additional interviews.41
There is ample scholarship on treaty effectiveness, but the growing qualitative
work does not focus much on individual petitions and Committee decisions on
these communications. These studies, however, can provide light and support for
the causal mechanism suggested in this paper. Human rights regime scholarship has
long emphasized the importance of civil society actors in translating treaties and
ideas into improved domestic practices (see: De Búrca2017; Smith-Cannoy, 2012;
Simmons, 2009). I expand on De Búrca theory of “experimentalist governance”
which pushes back against critics of the human rights regime and argues that the
regime can be effective in improving human rights on the ground. This dynamic
theory of interaction between global and local actors details how civil society mobi-
lizes against governments both internationally and domestically. I extend this theory
focused on Committee concluding observations to violation decisions on individual
petitions.
There are two main pathways through which naming and shaming can improve
respect for human rights: domestic and international. I depart from and complement
the qualitative focus on domestic pathways for mobilization (for example, see Merry,
2009) in part because of the current study’s focus on repressive regimes, which
often limit domestic and institutional pathways for mobilization. I argue that interna-
tional reputation is the key through which violation decisions from treaty bodies can
improve human rights practices. Given the lack of awareness of these human rights
institutions, let alone more complicated components such as the individual petitions
rather than just treaty (Heyns, Viljoen and Murray 2024; Schoner, 2024), I argue
this naming and shaming occurs with an international audience.
Interviews with the representation of victims that have brought complaints
against multiple states including Tajikistan and Kazakhstan highlight the importance
of reputation and an international audience.42 It is not media coverage but rather
international factors that cause governments to respond positively to Human Rights
Committee, and reputation is front and center. Victims’ representation uses both
legal and diplomatic means to achieve their goals, including informing the European
41 The interviews throughout this paper are with NGOs and UN Committee members and exclude gov-
ernment.
42 Interviews on 18 May 2023 and 07 June 2023.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
Union of violation decisions. They visit and talk to embassies, including Germany,
the US, and Canada. Although these decisions are not legally binding, one repre-
sentative views them similarly to legally binding decisions because of the expecta-
tions and effects. Specifically, he details the expectations from the Committee after
ratifying the Optional Protocol: “You have to do it [implement decisions]– even if
you don’t do it, it’s going to be really embarrassing to you internationally. Because
the cases are going to keep coming, and you’re going to have to deal with this every
year. They’ll file another case, and file another case and file another case. And that
gets their attention.” In terms of pressuring governments and the bigger picture of
improved human rights practices, he continues to explain that “Human Rights Com-
mittee rights decisions are really, really helpful.” This representative explains the
importance of reputation and international audience:
“It’s good to feed the EU what the Human Rights Committee has said because
there’s either funding or discussions of collaboration agreements with the coun-
try. They’ll raise it with countries like Tajikistan: ’Look you’ve got to stop doing
this because we’re not going to do business with you, or we expect certain things.’
That might not solve it, but it will put it on their radar as something that’s an irri-
tant and they need to do something about it. And doing something about it may
be stop harassing the [victim’s] community for a period of time. In terms of com-
pliance, what is the ultimate goal here, when you’re working with a systematic
problem... it may be that you’d be happy that they just don’t do it as much.”
5.3 Alternative explanations
Committee decisions are only one form of naming and shaming. UN treaty bodies
like the Human Rights Committee do not operate in a vacuum, as numerous other
actors and institutions, both non-governmental and intergovernmental, are active in
calling out violations and pressuring for improvement. Does naming and shaming by
other organizations correlate with the HRC violation decisions? Could these alterna-
tives be driving the results?
This is unlikely because these violation decisions occur years after the initial human
rights abuse (with the intermediate stage of filing the complaint), when other forms of
naming and shaming are concentrated. It is important to note that the statistical correla-
tion shown in this article does not show the mechanism, which relies on other actors to
increase pressure for change. The involvement of civil society drives the results, and
qualitative evidence from interviews supports the role these actors play, including the
importance of a global audience. Violation decisions do not operate alone, as political
pressure from outside actors increases reputational costs. This section explores poten-
tial alternative explanations from both intergovernmental and non-governmental actors.
Existing data for naming and shaming is rather limited.43I analyze three alter-
native actors involved in naming and shaming– (1) IGO: Human Rights Council
43 Recent data by Zhou, Kiyani and Crabtree (2022) makes a significant contribution by expanding the
scope.
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R.J.Schoner
(DeMeritt & Conrad, 2019), (2) INGO human rights organizations (Murdie & Davis,
2012), and (3) reports from both the US State Department and Amnesty Interna-
tional (Zhou, Kiyani and Crabtree 2022)– and show they are not correlated with
the number of violation decisions from the Human Rights Committee. These cor-
relations, as well as a discussion of this data and coverage limitations, are shown in
the Appendix. Additionally, I control for these alternative measures in the statistical
models, shown in the Appendix Tables A.13 and A.14. There is very little corre-
lation between violation decisions and these measures, in part because of the tim-
ing; violation decisions are far removed from the initial instances of human rights
abuse as victims must first exhaust domestic remedies and then wait multiple years
for the Committee process to produce a decision. Including these alternative sources
of naming and shaming as controls decreases the number of observations, removing
over 40% of the data. Including Council and NGO naming and shaming causes the
core variable of interest, violation decisions, to lose statistical significance. Remov-
ing country fixed effects, however, results in a positive correlation significant at the
α = 0.1 level. This is not conclusive but suggests decreased sample size causes a
power problem.
Comparing Human Rights Committee activity to regional courts provides a better
comparison for concerns of alternative explanations. UN treaty bodies only produce
non- binding decisions, compared to the legally binding nature of regional courts’
rulings. Both treaty bodies and regional courts decide on individual instances of
abuse. Therefore, we should expect a similar positive relationship between regional
courts and human rights practices. The HRC does not allow cases to be submitted
to another system while they’re being considered, reducing confounding concerns;
the Optional Protocol requires that: “The same matter is not being examined under
another procedure of international investigation or settlement” (UN General Assem-
bly Resolution 2200A (XXI) 1966). Here, I control for several variables capturing
regional court systems. The main results are robust across all new specifications,
increasing our confidence that Human Rights Committee violation decisions do
have some effect on respect for human rights. I control for regional court jurisdic-
tion– that is, if individuals can file a complaint in a regional court (Inter-American,
European, or African).44I use an aggregate “regional court” variable as well as dis-
aggregate to the three regional court jurisdictions in Table A.15. Additionally, I use
existing data to control for regional court activity for both the Inter-American Court
(Pérez-Liñán, Schenoni and Morrison 2023b, a) and European Court (Stiansen &
Voeten, 2020, 2021).45 Appendix Table A.16 show the results are robust; violation
decisions from the Human Rights Committee are still associated with increased
respect for physical integrity rights.
44 For comparison across regions, I control for acceptance of the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights.
45 I narrow European Court decisions to violations of articles 2 (right to life), 3 (torture), and 4 (slav-
ery) to capture physical integrity violation rulings. These 1213 violation rulings are heavily concentrated
against Russia and Turkey. The Inter-American data, unfortunately, do not have similar details, so these
are all violation rulings regardless of the topic. The number of violation rulings, due to the different insti-
tutional structures of these regional systems, is much less: 131.
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Naming andshaming inUN treaty bodies: Individual petitions’…
The African (jurisdiction) and European courts (jurisdiction and physical integ-
rity violation rulings) are associated with greater respect for physical integrity
rights. Variables for the Inter-American Court, however, are not statistically signifi-
cant. This may be due to the role of the Inter-American Commission, which receives
all complaints against Organization of the American States members and refers a
small number, if jurisdiction allows, to the Court. Additionally, given data limi-
tations, violation rulings included for the Inter-American Court contain all rights
across types, not just physical integrity. In sum, regional courts are also important,
strategic actors affecting human rights practices, but this does not takeaway from the
seemingly independent, additional role of the Human Rights Committee. UN treaty
bodies produce decisions on human rights violations that correlate with improved
respect for bodily autonomy. Other institutions play similar roles, as complementary
actors in the global regime.
6 Conclusion
United Nations human rights treaty bodies are quasi-judicial institutions that lack
enforcement power. Therefore, the functions of these committees are best thought of as
naming and shaming. Committees produce Views on petitions, deciding whether alle-
gations made by victims disclose violations of treaty provisions. I argue these petitions,
focused on individual circumstances of alleged abuse, are effective personal narratives,
differentiated from other forms of naming and shaming commonly used in intergov-
ernmental organizations. Further, the violation decisions provide legitimacy and cred-
ibility to civil society’s near- constant pressure. Civil society plays an important role
in publicizing these decisions which can harm states’ reputations. Focused on repres-
sive regimes, I find statistical support for this theory. Committee violation decisions are
associated with improved respect for physical integrity rights when third-party actors
are involved. Although these effects are substantively small, any change in respect for
human rights is meaningful because the data reflect human welfare and suffering, cap-
turing the presence and severity of severe abuses including torture and political killings.
These findings increase our understanding of how international organizations
work. First, non-state actors can improve state compliance. This paper adds to a
growing literature on non-state actor access in international institutions, and the role
third parties play in international politics (see: Brutger, 2023; McNamara, 2019;
Sommerer & Tallberg, 2017; Tallberg etal., 2013). Civil society plays a crucial role
in both filing these complaints (Schoner, 2024) and publicizing the decisions. There
is a wide variety of legal representation, and these actors may be domestic or inter-
national. Future research should explore this variation in civil society actors.
Second, this research contributes to the large literature on the role of international
organizations and institutional design. UN treaty bodies, as many IOs do, provide
information and identify non-compliers (Keohane, 1982, 1984). Committees provide
additional information to domestic and international actors, supporting civil soci-
ety’s more constant naming and shaming. Both domestic politics, particularly civil
society activity, and international relations combine to affect compliance. The find-
ings here show that quasi-judicial international institutions, that lack enforcement
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R.J.Schoner
power and have low levels of obligation (Abbott et al., 2000), can be an effective
forum for naming and shaming.
This paper frames UN treaty body decisions on individual petitions as a form of
naming and shaming, situating it against work on other non-governmental and inter-
governmental organizations theoretically discussing the differences among various
actors. Future work should explicitly compare international institutions in human
rights and explore institutional differences in effectiveness. There is theoretical work
to be done exploring naming and shaming given the widespread use of this concept
across many different actors and institutions. Furthermore, naming and shaming in
intergovernmental organizations is not limited to the Human Rights Committee or
even human rights as an issue area. The Paris Agreement, for example, functions
primarily through naming and shaming (Falkner, 2016).
Human rights institutions have the potential to have a real effect in the most
repressive countries, where there is the most concern and greatest potential for
improvement. By involving relevant third-party civil society actors, victims of
human rights abuse can effectively improve government practices, if the govern-
ment is sensitive to its global reputation.However, there is an important distinction
between targeted, personal remedies and broader improved compliance. Individuals
may forgo targeted compliance for broader human rights improvements.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1007/ s11558- 024- 09564-1.
Acknowledgements For their helpful feedback, I thank Katherine Beall, Brian Greenhill, Emilie Hafner-
Burton, Laurence Helfer, Courtney Hillebrecht, David Lake, Michael-David Mangini, Anna Meyerrose,
Gino Pauselli, Emily Ritter, Christina Schneider, Alastair Smith, Calvin Thrall, Erik Voeten, Jim Vree-
land, Noah Zucker, and Kelebogile Zvobgo, and audiences at William & Mary, Princeton University,
University of California, San Diego, and ActInCourts Workshop, APSA 2022, and PEIO 2023.
Funding This research was supported by the University Association for Contemporary European Studies
and University of California, San Diego’s International Institute.
Data availability Data to reproduce all the statistical analysis in this article is available in the link to the
supporting information. The data analyzedfor the current study with corresponding code is available at
the Review of International Organizations’ webpage.
Declarations
Ethics Approval This study has been certified exempt from the University of California, San Diego Human
Research Protections Program.
Competing interests The author reports no conflict of interest.
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 Com-
mons 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:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/.
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