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Elitist Remedies? Complaint Resources and Representation in International Human Rights Bodies
Abstract
This article investigates determinants of representation in international human rights bodies. It is argued that socioeconomic factors shape whether human rights abuses translate into complaints to international human rights mechanisms. To seek international remedy, victims of human rights abuse must be aware of remedies, and they require complaint literacy to file complaints. Alternatively, they need ties to skilled networks that might represent their cases. Such complaint resources are systematically shaped by socioeconomic factors, implying that international human rights remedies tend to represent a self-selection of economic elites. The theoretical claims are tested both on the national and individual levels with novel data on the human rights complaint mechanisms operated by the UN Special Procedures (UNSP). While this mechanism is universally open, the follow-up statements of the UNSP reflect socioeconomic disparities both on the national and individual levels. On the national level, human rights abuses translate into more UNSP statements directed at richer countries. On the individual level, lawyers and professors tend to be more likely to be covered by the UNSP. The findings contribute to our understanding of representation in international human rights remedies, suggesting that these mechanisms struggle to reach marginalized groups in low-income countries.
... Specifically, the results indicate that state actors may react to this intrusion not only by employing the usual tactics of backlash (Alter et al., 2016;Madsen et al., 2018) and withdrawal (Pauwelyn & Hamilton, 2018;Soley & Steininger, 2018) but also by refraining from further commitments to the respective legal regime. The suggested learning mechanism sheds light on the limits of individual petition in international human rights law specifically (Steinert, 2024;Montal & Pauselli, 2023;Stiansen & Voeten, 2020), and on a novel aspect of the ongoing process of 'de-judicialization' of international politics more generally (Abebe & Ginsburg, 2019). ...
How do states react to adverse decisions resulting from human rights treaties’ individual complaint procedures? While recent scholarship has shown particular interest in states’ reactions to international court judgments, research on state behavior vis-à-vis an increasing treaty body output remains scarce. I argue that states generally want to avoid the costs implied by adverse decisions, or ‘views’. Rising numbers of rebukes lead them to update their beliefs about the costliness of complaint procedure acceptance in a Bayesian manner. As a result, states become less inclined to accept further petition mechanisms under different human rights treaties. I test these assumptions on an original dataset containing information on individual complaint procedure acceptance and the distribution of 1320 views for a total number of 169 countries ranging from the year 1965 to 2018. Results from Cox proportional hazards regressions suggest that both the number of views against neighboring states and against the examined state itself decrease the likelihood of acceptance of most of the six individual complaint procedures under observation. I also find evidence that this effect is exacerbated if states are more likely to actually bear the costs of implementation. Findings indicate that the omission of further commitment can be a negative spillover of the treaty bodies’ quasi-judicial output.
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 enforcement 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 theory, 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. International organizations can, under certain conditions, provide information on non-compliance that sufficiently pressures governments to change domestic practices and decrease repression.
Quantitative research into the effectiveness of the UN human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) in eliciting remedial responses from states is impeded by a lack of usable data on how states respond to their decisions. The new Treaty Body Views Dataset (TBVD) aims to fill this gap. It comprises details on all published decisions in individual complaints cases issued by the UNTBs between 1979 and 2019 and matches these with information on their state of compliance. The TBVD can be used for research on the activities of the treaty bodies, the nature of the decisions themselves, or state behavior following a decision. An empirical application illustrates how the TBVD can advance knowledge about the factors that correlate with compliance with adverse UNTB decisions. Results show that the likelihood of implementation hinges critically on decision-level characteristics, and reveal differences and similarities between compliance with UNTB decisions and regional human rights court judgments.
This paper integrates the scholarship on compliance with international human rights courts to reflect upon how the literature approaches delays and compliance cycles. Building on this review, we propose a new analytical approach that helps distinguish between reparations prone to immediate or protracted implementation. We introduce two metrics to facilitate the interpretation of delays: the yearly probability of compliance and the expected time to compliance. We also show, using machine-learning tools, how scholars can reconstruct life cycles of compliance. The article illustrates the utility of this approach with an analysis of all cases decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) between 1989 and 2019. This analytical framework provides critical insights for courts and activists seeking to promote interventions at key moments when compliance is most likely. Moreover, the study underscores important lessons for the Inter-American Human Rights System. Current concerns about a compliance “crisis” at the IACtHR partly reflect a failure to distinguish between reparation types and the Court's preference for reparations requiring protracted implementation. By modeling compliance life cycles, our study opens a promising research avenue that can facilitate effectual and timely policy intervention.
A common explanation for state acceptance of the optional individual communications procedures (ICPs) of UN human rights treaties involves costly signalling theory. Commitment to ICPs is said to enable states to signal sincere commitment more credibly. Such signalling, however, is not particularly costly and ultimately a reasonable motive for only a small number of states. For most states that accept ICPs, signalling bears no obvious instrumental value; for many, the global ICPs also overlap with existing and institutionally stronger human rights monitoring mechanisms at the regional level. This begs the question: Why do states seek such overlap and redundancy? Acknowledging the role of preferences for effective human rights protection, we suggest an additional reputational motive that foregrounds the value of consistency in commitments and related reputations. Employing survival analysis and data for six ICPs, we show that ICP acceptance is particularly driven by states that are also subject to institutionally stronger regional human rights courts. Given the marginal benefits in rights protection through adding overlap, we argue that the effects of consistent commitment on the perception of a state’s character provide a persuasive supplementary explanation.
This article reports on trends in organized violence, building on new data by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The falling trend in fatalities stemming from organized violence in the world, observed for five consecutive years, broke upwards in 2020 and deaths in organized violence seem to have settled on a high plateau. UCDP registered more than 80,100 deaths in organized violence in 2020, compared to 76,300 in 2019. The decrease in violence in Afghanistan and Syria was countered by escalating conflicts in, for example, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Azerbaijan and Tigray, Ethiopia. Moreover, the call for a global ceasefire following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic failed to produce any results. In fact, the number of active state-based and non-state conflicts, as well as the number of actors carrying out one-sided violence against civilians, increased when compared to 2019. UCDP noted a record-high number of 56 state-based conflicts in 2020, including eight wars. Most of the conflicts occurred in Africa, as the region registered 30 state-based conflicts, including nine new or restarted ones.
Does international attention to political prisoners make them more likely to be released? The political science literature provides theoretical reasons to believe that widely publicizing a case may make regimes both more and less likely to free their prisoners, but to date there has been no systematic examination of this issue. An analysis of political prisoners in China from 1994 to 2017 shows that international publicity of a political prisoner's case will make regimes 70 percent more likely to release them early before sentencing, but has no effect once the prisoner has been sentenced—and may even be counterproductive. This “resistance” to international efforts appears to be more closely related with demonstrating the regime's strength to an international audience rather than to a domestic one. The study shows how fine-grained data on individuals can illuminate the domestic mechanisms behind why states comply with or resist transnational activism and human rights diplomacy.
¿La atención internacional a los presos políticos hace que su liberación sea más probable? En ciencias políticas, la literatura ofrece razones teóricas para creer que la amplia difusión de un caso puede hacer que los regímenes tengan más y menos probabilidades de liberar a sus presos, pero hasta la fecha, esa cuestión no se ha evaluado sistemáticamente. Un análisis del caso de los presos políticos en China entre 1994 y 2017 demuestra que la publicidad internacional hace que los regímenes sean un 70 percent más propensos a liberarlos antes de la sentencia, pero no tiene ningún efecto una vez que el preso ha sido condenado, e incluso puede ser contraproducente. Esta “resistencia” a los esfuerzos internacionales parece tener mayor relación con la demostración de la fuerza del régimen ante un público internacional que ante uno nacional. El estudio muestra de qué manera los datos detallados sobre las personas pueden echar luz sobre los mecanismos internos que explican las razones por las que los Estados cumplen con el activismo transnacional y la diplomacia de los derechos humanos o se resisten a hacerlo.
L'attention internationale accordée aux prisonniers politiques les rend-t-elle davantage susceptibles d’être libérés? La littérature consacrée aux sciences politiques offre des raisons théoriques de croire qu'une grande sensibilisation du public à un cas spécifique peut rendre les régimes à la fois plus et moins susceptibles de libérer leurs prisonniers, mais jusqu'ici, ce sujet n'a pas encore fait l'objet d'un examen systématique. Une analyse portant sur les prisonniers politiques de Chine entre 1994 et 2017 montre que la sensibilisation internationale du public au cas des prisonniers politiques rend les régimes 70 percent plus susceptibles de les libérer rapidement avant leur condamnation, mais que cela n'a aucun effet une fois que le prisonnier a été condamné et que cela peut même être contreproductif. Cette « résistance » aux efforts internationaux semble davantage étroitement liée à la volonté du régime de montrer sa force au public international plutôt qu'au public national. Cette étude illustre la manière dont des données détaillées sur les individus peuvent apporter un éclairage sur les mécanismes nationaux qui expliquent pourquoi les États se conforment ou résistent à l'activisme transnational et à la diplomatie des droits de l'Homme.
International organizations are becoming increasingly powerful. Today, they affect the lives of individuals across the globe through their decisions and conduct. Consequently, international organizations are more capable of violating the human rights of individuals. But how can they be held to account for such violations? This book studies the procedural mechanisms that may hold international organizations to account for their human rights violations. It establishes a general framework for identifying, analyzing, and assessing the accountability mechanisms of international organizations. This general framework is then applied to three distinct cases: the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy missions, refugee camp administration by the UNHCR, and detention by the International Criminal Court. The overall conclusion is that none of the existing accountability mechanisms across the three cases fulfill the normative requirements set out in the general framework. However, there are significant variations between cases, and between different types of accountability mechanisms.
This article studies the consequences of digital surveillance in dictatorships. I first develop an informational theory of repression and co‐optation. I argue that digital surveillance resolves dictators' information problem of not knowing individual citizens' true anti‐regime sentiments. By identifying radical opponents, digital surveillance enables dictators to substitute targeted repression for nonexclusive co‐optation to forestall coordinated uprisings. My theory implies that as digital surveillance technologies advance, we should observe a rise in targeted repression and a decline in universal redistribution. Using a difference‐in‐differences design that exploits temporal variation in digital surveillance systems among Chinese counties, I find that surveillance increases local governments' public security expenditure and arrests of political activists but decreases public goods provision. My theory and evidence suggest that improvements in governments' information make citizens worse off in dictatorships.
International ‘naming and shaming’ campaigns rely on domestic civil society organizations (CSOs) for information on local human rights conditions. To stop this flow of information, some governments restrict CSOs, for example by limiting their access to funding. Do such restrictions reduce international naming and shaming campaigns that rely on information from domestic CSOs? This article argues that on the one hand, restrictions may reduce CSOs’ ability and motives to monitor local abuses. On the other hand, these organizations may mobilize against restrictions and find new ways of delivering information on human rights violations to international publics. Using a cross-national dataset and in-depth evidence from Egypt, the study finds that low numbers of restrictions trigger shaming by international non-governmental organizations. Yet once governments impose multiple types of restrictions, it becomes harder for CSOs to adapt, resulting in fewer international shaming campaigns.
Multidimensional concepts are non-compensatory when higher values on one component cannot offset lower values on another. Thinking of the components of a multidimensional phenomenon as non-compensatory rather than substitutable can have wide-ranging implications, both conceptually and empirically. To demonstrate this point, we focus on populist attitudes that feature prominently in contemporary debates about liberal democracy. Given similar established public opinion constructs, the conceptual value of populist attitudes hinges on its unique specification as an attitudinal syndrome, which is characterized by the concurrent presence of its non-compensatory concept subdimensions. Yet this concept attribute is rarely considered in existing empirical research. We propose operationalization strategies that seek to take the distinct properties of non-compensatory multidimensional concepts seriously. Evidence on five populism scales in 12 countries reveals the presence and consequences of measurement-concept inconsistencies. Importantly, in some cases, using conceptually sound operationalization strategies upsets previous findings on the substantive role of populist attitudes.
Governments around the world have crafted new laws to threaten, arrest, prosecute and incarcerate online political activists. While the primary effect of online repression is to silence criticism and forestall collective action, a secondary effect is to induce self-censorship among the masses. Yet scant research examines how self-censorship works, nor discusses its implications for entrenching authoritarianism and encouraging democratic backsliding. This article proposes a simple expected utility model of self-censorship, arguing that citizens will more likely self-censor when the expected costs of online political expression outweigh its benefits. Analysing the fourth wave of the Asian Barometer survey of 10,216 respondents across eight Southeast Asian countries, I find that higher income politically engaged social media users are indeed less likely to express their political opinions. Additionally, this correlation holds in states where online repression is most severe, but is non-existent in countries where online repression is moderate or low.
A widespread assumption alleges that human rights are not universal, as they claim to be, but are instead Western oriented. Yet a growing body of research provides evidence that human rights are not just Western. Both perspectives are critical of repressive dimensions in the human rights regime, though they recommend different approaches to addressing them. This article explores both viewpoints from an International Political Theory perspective. Examining the pluralist idea, institutionalization, and application of human rights, the first section argues that human rights are not just Western. The second section investigates why it nevertheless matters to ask whether human rights are Western. This article develops four interrelated criteria: dynamic pluralism, awareness of power and inequalities, contextual universalism, and open normativity. These criteria help determine whether human rights are (not just) Western, and, more importantly, they provide the basis for an emancipatory human rights regime.
Research on the factors and considerations which drive human rights shaming focuses on non-governmental organizations (NGO). This article analyzes an intergovernmental organization’s (IGO) shaming. The article reviews the factors associated with NGO human rights shaming. The article then considers the potential association between these factors and IGO shaming, and the differences between IGOs and NGOs in this context. The potential associations are tested empirically using newly compiled data on the UN’s convention against torture (CAT) committee’s concluding observations country reports, and various specifications and regression methods. The results indicate that voting with the U.S. in the United Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA) is significantly associated with getting a more positive review from the CAT committee and this result is robust in various specifications. Results also indicate that the UN CAT committee’s shaming is associated with media coverage of human rights issues in the reviewed country and with trade and FDI volumes. The article draws conclusions regarding the linkages between funding, information sources and membership structures on the one hand and shaming approaches on the other.
Children’s ability to influence their own lives begins with awareness and knowledge of their rights. This ability is then strengthened with the perception that their rights are respected. Identifying the factors that affect these components of rights acquisition is crucial to promote children’s agency and growth into active citizenship. This article details a study on 8-year-old children’s understanding of their rights and their opinions about respect for their rights in 16 countries using the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (ISCWeB). Multivariate linear regression models were constructed to study the correlates of children’s rights outcomes. Within the study sample (N = 17.369), a minority of the children were aware of children’s rights and knew about the rights they had. However, the majority of the children felt that their rights were respected. Children’s responses showed great variation by country in every dimension of the investigated rights. Depending on the country, children’s rights outcomes were most powerfully explained by three indicators: family deprivation and home and school climates. The lower the deprivation score was and the stronger the perceptions of being heard at home and school were, the more aware children were, the more knowledge they had, and the more respect for children’s rights from adults they perceived.
Introduction: Mothers’ knowledge of child health is associated with their children’s well-being, and depends on their educational level and social support networks. In India, literature on social support networks as determinants of maternal knowledge of child health is scarce. This research was aimed to fill this gap, focusing on social determinants of maternal knowledge in rural Odisha, India.
Methods: A multistage cluster sampling design was adopted for the present study and 379 mothers (age: M = 28.79, SD ± 4.03) were randomly selected by eight villages. A mixed-method research was used to integrate quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis.
Results: Chi square test showed that a low level of maternal knowledge was statistically significant associated with the scheduled tribes/caste, a low level of education, the poorest wealth category, and with early marriage and young maternal age at first birth. The presence in own social support networks of high-educated (ϐ = 0.06, P < .001), female (ϐ = 0.04, P < .01) and old-age (ϐ = 0.05, P < .05) people, and healthcare providers (ϐ = 0.01, P < .01) as members was found to be positively related to a high level of maternal knowledge. Surprisingly, the presence of female (ϐ = 2.68, P < .05) and high-educated people (ϐ = 0.59, P < .05), and at least one healthcare provider (ϐ = 0.33, P < .05) as social support networks members was statistically significant associated with a high level of maternal child-health knowledge also in low-educated mothers.
Conclusions: Maternal knowledge of child health does not depend only on the levels of mother’s education, but also on the presence of an effective social support network that include female and high-educated people, and healthcare providers as members. Therefore, policymakers should promote social support networks in order to improve maternal knowledge of child health.
In Strategies of Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights, I look at the nature of human rights challenges in two enduring liberal democracies, Germany and the United Kingdom. Employing a comprehensive data set that covers the compliance status of all European Court of Human Rights judgments rendered until 2015, I present a cross-national overview of compliance that illustrates a strong correlation between the quality of a country's democracy and the rate at which judgments have met compliance. Tracing the impact of violations in Germany and the United Kingdom specifically, I detail how governments, legislators, and domestic judges responded to the court's demands for either financial compensation or changes to laws, policies, and practices.
Framing my analysis in the context of the long-standing international relations debate between rationalists who argue that actions are dictated by an actor's preferences and cost-benefit calculations, and constructivists, who emphasize the influence of norms on behavior, I argue that the question of whether to comply with a judgment needs to be analyzed separately from the question of how to comply. According to von Staden, constructivist reasoning best explains why Germany and the United Kingdom are motivated to comply with the European Court of Human Rights judgments, while rationalist reasoning in most cases accounts for how these countries bring their laws, policies, and practices into sufficient compliance for their cases to be closed. When complying with adverse decisions while also exploiting all available options to minimize their domestic impact, liberal democracies are thus both norm-abiding and rational-instrumentalist at the same timein other words, they choose their compliance strategies rationally within the normative constraint of having to comply with the Court's judgments.
International human rights institutions often rely on “naming and shaming” to promote compliance with global norms. Critics charge that such institutions are too politicized; states condemn human rights violations selectively, based on their strategic interests, while protecting friends and allies. In this view, politicization undermines shaming’s credibility and thus its effectiveness. This paper offers an alternative account of such institutions and the mechanism by which they promote human rights. We argue that interstate shaming is an inherently political exercise that operates through strategic relationships, not in spite of them. While states are less likely to criticize their friends and allies, any criticism they do offer is more influential precisely because of this pre-existing partnership. We test this argument through quantitative analysis of the most elaborate human rights mechanism in the international system: the United Nations Universal Periodic Review. We find that states are more lenient towards their strategic partners in the peer-review process. Yet when they do criticize, their recommendations are accepted more often than substantially identical recommendations emanating from other states with fewer strategic ties. Insofar as shaming disseminates powerful signals regarding political relationships between states, these interactions can be meaningful and influential, even as they remain selective and politicized.
Does being named and shamed for human rights abuse influence the amount of foreign aid received by the shamed state? Recent research suggests that the impact of public censure may depend on the political relationship between donor and recipient. We argue that donors deriving a direct political benefit from the aid relationship (such as a military advantage or the satisfaction of a domestic political audience) will ignore or work against condemnation, but donors with little political interest in the recipient (who give aid for symbolic or humanitarian reasons) will punish condemned states. We also argue that the size of prior aid packages can be used as a holistic measure of the donor?s political interest in the aid relationship because mutually beneficial aid packages are subject to a bargaining process that favors recipients with more to offer. We find that condemnation for human rights abuse by the United Nations is associated with lower bilateral aid levels among states that previously received small aid package, and with equal or higher bilateral aid to states already receiving a great deal of aid. The source of shaming also matters: We find that public shaming by human rights NGOs is not associated with decreased aggregate bilateral aid.
Glass Half Full? assesses the extent to which development banks and their complaint mechanisms are
equipped to handle complaints from affected people. What the report finds is that even though complainants are undoubtedly better off than they would be in the absence of any complaint procedure, the outcome rarely provides adequate remedy for the harms experienced by people and communities. This is largely due to the
development banks themselves, which undermine the effectiveness of their own complaint
mechanisms by limiting their mandate and failing to uphold their own responsibilities in the
complaint process. The banks impede the accessibility and effectiveness of the complaint
mechanisms from the very beginning by failing to require their borrowers to tell project-affected
people about their existence. Even more critically, the banks have limited the mandates of the
mechanisms so that they cannot issue binding decisions. Rather, the outcome of complaints
depends primarily on the good will of the banks or their borrowers: unless governments and
companies voluntarily agree to resolve the conflict through dialogue, or the bank voluntarily
agrees to address violations of its policies exposed through an investigation conducted by the
mechanism, complainants are left without a solution
How and why does information become currency in human rights advocacy? Human rights organizations (HROs) produce media content in an increasingly diverse manner today across multiple platforms, for divergent purposes, and for distinct audiences. Advocacy practices are no longer confined to fact-based reporting aimed at exposing abuse. The sheer magnitude of resources expended in communication evidences the early stages of a shift in which HROs widen their broadcast and target mass audiences. However, human rights scholarship has not adequately addressed this new trend, which has the capacity to radically alter the advocacy landscape. Moving beyond the traditionally narrow focus on “naming and shaming,” we contend that a critical, detailed approach to understanding the strategic use of information will reveal a more complete image of how HROs build influence through their communications strategies. Expanding upon Keck and Sikkink's concept of “information politics,” we develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes a set of practices we call media advocacy. Three unique modalities of media advocacy (juridical, revelatory, and activating) capture a robust portrait of information politics in twenty-first century human rights advocacy. Our innovative tools disclose specific operational and pragmatic implications for HROs, as well as help structure future research in this area.
This study seeks to understand distance from health facilities as a barrier to maternal and child health service uptake within a rural Liberian population. Better understanding the relationship between distance from health facilities and rural health care utilization is important for post-Ebola health systems reconstruction and for general rural health system planning in sub-Saharan Africa.
Cluster-sample survey data collected in 2012 in a very rural southeastern Liberian population were analyzed to determine associations between quartiles of GPS-measured distance from the nearest health facility and the odds of maternal (ANC, facility-based delivery, and PNC) and child (deworming and care seeking for ARI, diarrhea, and fever) service use. We estimated associations by fitting simple and multiple logistic regression models, with standard errors adjusted for clustered data.
Living in the farthest quartile was associated with lower odds of attending 1-or-more ANC checkup (AOR = 0.04, P < 0.001), 4-or-more ANC checkups (AOR = 0.13, P < 0.001), delivering in a facility (AOR = 0.41, P = 0.006), and postnatal care from a health care worker (AOR = 0.44, P = 0.009). Children living in all other quartiles had lower odds of seeking facility-based fever care (AOR for fourth quartile = 0.06, P < 0.001) than those in the nearest quartile. Children in the fourth quartile were less likely to receive deworming treatment (AOR = 0.16, P < 0.001) and less likely (but with only marginal statistical significance) to seek ARI care from a formal HCW (AOR = 0.05, P = 0.05). Parents in distant quartiles more often sought ARI and diarrhea care from informal providers.
Within a rural Liberian population, distance is associated with reduced health care uptake. As Liberia rebuilds its health system after Ebola, overcoming geographic disparities, including through further dissemination of providers and greater use of community health workers should be prioritized.
National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation. Our first main finding is that all types of human rights institutions improve long-term physical integrity outcomes but not civil and political rights practices. This finding may reflect a greater worldwide focus on physical integrity violations such as torture, and also many countries' propensity to resist Western civil and political rights standards. A second main finding is that time matters: in the cases we observe, initial increases in rated abuse levels were followed by improvements. These initial increases may be due to closer scrutiny or the expanded scope of what constitutes human rights abuses. Our results call for rethinking the concept of decoupling in the sociology of human rights and other focal areas.
International human rights treaties have been ratified by many nation-states, including those ruled by repressive governments, raising hopes for better practices in many corners of the world. Evidence increasingly suggests, however, that human rights laws are most effective in stable or consolidating democracies or in states with strong civil society activism. If so, treaties may be failing to make a difference in those states most in need of reform — the world's worst abusers — even though they have been the targets of the human rights regime from the very beginning. The authors address this question of compliance by focusing on the behavior of repressive states in particular. Through a series of cross-national analyses on the impact of two key human rights treaties, the article demonstrates that (1) governments, including repressive ones, frequently make legal commitments to human rights treaties, subscribing to recognized norms of protection and creating opportunities for socialization and capacity-building necessary for lasting reforms; (2) these commitments mostly have no effects on the world's most terrible repressors even long into the future; (3) recent findings that treaty effectiveness is conditional on democracy and civil society do not explain the behavior of the world's most abusive governments; and (4) realistic institutional reforms will probably not help to solve this problem.
This third edition provides an analysis of the law governing international and domestic remedies for human rights violations. It reviews and examines the texts and the jurisprudence on this key area of human rights law. It is an essential practical and theoretical resource for negotiating and litigating issues of redress for victims. The book incorporates the major developments in remedial human rights jurisprudence. Internationally, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court have issued reparations guidelines; the International Court of Justice has for the first time awarded compensation for human rights violations; the International Law Commission has considered the humanitarian responsibility of international organizations; and new international petition procedures and policies on redress have entered into force. Regionally, in Asia and Africa, human rights bodies have adopted new human rights accords and legal judgments; in Europe, the human rights case load unceasingly increases. Nationally, the jurisprudence of historical reparations has come to the fore, as has the juridical consideration of economic and social rights. All of these developments are analysed in context.
How do authoritative international bodies decide that states have complied with their orders? Compliance research has mostly focused on how states react to rulings and how interest groups mobilize for and against compliance. Less has been said about how international bodies certify compliance with their orders in contexts of conflicting interests and incomplete information. Because in theory the seal of compliance could be given to different types and volumes of state actions, we argue that when nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) monitor implementation closely, international adjudicators will be more demanding in compliance certification, resulting in more protracted compliance monitoring processes. We test our expectations in the case of the Inter- American Commission of Human Rights and find that recommendations take longer to reach status of full compliance when more NGOs act as petitioners and when they have more experience with monitoring compliance. If NGOs help that more effective implementation receives an international organization's seal of approval, large numbers of orders without full compliance might not necessarily be bad news about human rights on the ground.
Sanctions are among the most frequently used foreign policy tools to address human rights violations, but they can be highly politicized. Since the early 2000s, human rights sanctions have been increasingly triggered by standardized rankings of states’ performances. While research on economic statecraft suggests that coercive measures based on cross-national assessments may be less influenced by strategic considerations, scholarship on rankings highlights how standardized performance indicators can also be political. This paper investigates whether sanctions based on standardized human rights assessments are also influenced by senders’ strategic political and economic interests. Empirically, we examine the case of United States human trafficking sanctions that combines universal rankings in the first stage and country-specific sanctions waivers in the second. The analysis leverages novel data on all Trafficking in Persons (TIP) rankings by the US State Department and presidential sanctions waivers from 2003 to 2018. Despite the TIP report's reputation as a reliable indicator, we find that both stages in the process of imposing human trafficking sanctions are driven by strategic attempts to minimize the economic and political costs of sanctions for the US. These findings have broader implications for the reputation and effectiveness of other human rights rankings by the US.
Nongovernmental organizations are central to contemporary global governance, and their numbers and influence have grown dramatically since the middle of the twentieth century. However, in the last three decades more than 130 states have repressed these groups, suggesting that a broad range of states perceive them as costly. When they choose to repress NGOs, under what conditions do states use violent strategies versus administrative means? The choice depends on two main factors: the nature of the threat posed by these groups, and the consequences of cracking down on them. Violent crackdown is useful in the face of immediate domestic threats, such as protests. However, violence may increase the state's criminal liability, reduce its legitimacy, violate human rights treaties, and further intensify mobilization against the regime. Therefore, states are more likely to use administrative crackdown, especially in dealing with long-term threats, such as when NGOs influence electoral politics. I test this theory using an original data set of administrative crackdowns on NGOs, as well as violent crackdown on NGO activists, across all countries from 1990 to 2013. To shed light on the strategic decision between violent or administrative crackdown, and how states may perceive threats from domestic and international NGOs differently, I provide a case study from India. I conclude by discussing the implications of this crackdown for the use of civil society actors by the international community, as well as donors and citizens in the global South.
States may use repression to control establishments such as the media and civil society organizations (CSOs). Yet, repressing the media and CSOs may backfire and trigger anti-government opposition. I study the effects of state repression targeting the media and CSOs on the onset of violent and nonviolent anti-government opposition by employing a global panel dataset with a timespan between 1961 and 2013. The findings suggest that repression of the media and CSOs have a divergent impact on anti-government opposition: repression of the media is the major driver of nonviolence, but it has no effect on the onset of violent opposition; repression of CSOs matters only for violent opposition, but not for nonviolence. I explain this result by concentrating on the different ways in which repression targeting the media and CSOs affect the resources and opportunity for mobilization, with a focus on the diversity of mobilization pools available for anti-government opposition.
Los estados pueden recurrir a la represión para controlar a instituciones como los medios de comunicación y las organizaciones de la sociedad civil (Civil Society Organizations, CSO). Sin embargo, la represión de los medios de comunicación y las CSO puede resultar contraproducente y desencadenar una oposición contra el gobierno. Me dedico al estudio de los efectos que tiene la represión estatal orientada hacia los medios de comunicación y las CSO en el surgimiento de la oposición violenta y no violenta contra el gobierno. Para ello utilizo un conjunto de datos de paneles globales de un período de tiempo entre 1961 y 2013. Los resultados sugieren que la represión de los medios de comunicación y las CSO tienen un impacto divergente en la oposición contra el gobierno: la represión de los medios de comunicación es el principal motor de la oposición no violenta, pero no tiene efectos sobre el surgimiento de la oposición violenta; la represión de las CSO tiene importancia solo en el caso de la oposición violenta, pero no en el caso de la oposición no violenta. Para explicar este resultado me concentro en las diferentes maneras en que la represión orientada hacia los medios de comunicación y las CSO afectan los recursos y las oportunidades de movilización, con un enfoque en la diversidad de grupos de movilización de oposición contra el gobierno.
Des États peuvent avoir recours à la répression pour contrôler des entités telles que les médias et les organisations de la société civile (OSC). Cependant, la répression des médias et des OSC peut être contreproductive et déclencher une opposition antigouvernementale. J’étudie les effets de la répression étatique ciblant les médias et les OSC sur le déclenchement d’oppositions antigouvernementales violentes et non violentes en employant un jeu de données portant sur un panel mondial et sur la période 1961-2013. Mes conclusions suggèrent que la répression ciblant les médias et les OSC a un impact divergent sur l’opposition antigouvernementale: d’une part, la répression ciblant les médias est le principal moteur de l’opposition non violente, mais elle n’a aucun effet sur le déclenchement d’une opposition violente, et d’autre part, la répression ciblant les OSC n’a de l’importance que pour l’opposition violente, mais pas pour l’opposition non violente. J’explique ce résultat en me concentrant sur les différentes façons dont la répression ciblant les médias et les OSC affecte les ressources et l’opportunité de mobilisation en mettant l’accent sur la diversité des viviers de mobilisation disponibles pour l’opposition antigouvernementale.
The Chinese regime is well known for the large-scale detention of dissidents and ethnic minorities. However, little is known about the fates of Chinese political prisoners. This study investigates determinants of the duration of political imprisonment in China. I argue that the duration of political imprisonment is shaped by (a) the perceived threat of individuals’ actions, and (b) their ethnic and religious identities. Drawing on the Chinese political prisoner database, I investigate predictors of the duration of political imprisonment with survival models. Since preceding actions shape detention times, I hand-code each prisoner's criminalized actions that led to incarceration. The evidence suggests that the Chinese regime conditions the duration of political imprisonment on prisoners’ demands and their collective action potential. The findings further demonstrate that ethnic Uyghurs and Tibetans are imprisoned significantly longer than non-minority political prisoners. Additional analyses demonstrate that ethnic Uyghurs are also significantly more likely to die in prison.
The global movement for racial justice and the rise of anti-Asian hate at the height of the pandemic have called new attention to race and racism in international politics. Although critical theorists have decried the “norm against noticing,” other scholars of international relations have long sidestepped the possible role of race in shaping contemporary international affairs. New studies of hierarchy in international relations open the door for new understandings of race in world politics. We propose an analytic framework for the relationship between racial hierarchy, international law, and foreign policy, demonstrating that race can help explain patterns of interstate interactions that sustain an unequal global order. Positing two faces of racism in international relations, we examine how race biases international law in practice and affects the assessment of foreign threats and national interest. We discuss key methodological challenges in empirical research on race in international relations, focusing on issues of measurement, aggregation, and causation.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Conventional wisdom treats politicization in the international human rights regime as invariant: for any given violation, states condemn adversaries while coddling friends. However, we find that politicization patterns vary markedly across human rights issues. Some norms are more politicized than others, and states are more likely to punish geopolitical partners on certain violations. We offer a novel theory of politicized enforcement wherein states punish human rights violations discriminatively based on their perceived “sensitivity” for the target state. Using data from the UN Universal Periodic Review, an elaborate human rights mechanism, we show that states tend to criticize their adversaries on sensitive issues that undermine the target regime’s power and legitimacy while addressing safer topics with friends. By uncovering a strategic logic of human rights enforcement, this research contributes new theoretical insights on the relationship between norms and power politics in global governance.
Can international human rights law be applied and enforced in a part of a State's territory outside its effective control? This study provides a step by step analysis to show how it can. International human rights law can normalise an imperfect, defective situation through pragmatic interpretation; it imposes obligations both on the territorial State on account of its sovereign title and residual effectiveness on the one hand, and on any subject of international law exercising territorial control over the area on account of its effective control on the other. By considering effectiveness beyond formal normative sources and titles of the subjects implicated in the territorial situation, international human rights law is interpreted and applied in a manner which renders human rights practical and effective. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of State practice regarding various subjects implicated in the territorial situation, applicable legal sources and major geographic areas.
Formal racial equality is a key aspect of the current Liberal International Order (LIO). It is subject to two main challenges: resurgent racial nationalism and substantive racial inequality. Combining work in International Relations with interdisciplinary studies on race, I submit that these challenges are the latest iteration of struggles between two transnational coalitions over the LIO's central racial provisions, which I call racial diversity regimes (RDRs). The traditional coalition has historically favored RDRs based on racial inequality and racial nationalism. The transformative coalition has favored RDRs based on racial equality and nonracial nationalism. I illustrate the argument by tracing the development of the liberal order's RDR as a function of intercoalitional struggles from one based on racial nationalism and inequality in 1919 to the current regime based on nonracial nationalism and limited equality. Today, racial nationalists belong to the traditional coalition and critics of racial inequality are part of the transformative coalition. The stakes of their struggles are high because they will determine whether we will live in a more racist or a more antiracist world. This article articulates a comprehensive framework that places race at the heart of the liberal order, offers the novel concept of “embedded racism” to capture how sovereignty shields domestic racism from foreign interference, and proposes an agenda for mainstream International Relations that takes race seriously.
A wealth of literature argues that domestic institutions can sometimes restrain government repression. In this article, we highlight an institution tasked specifically with protecting and promoting human rights: the National Human Rights Institution (NHRI). Although common international standards exist, NHRIs exhibit substantial variation in their organization, the rights that they protect, the activities they permit, and the manner in which they appoint their members. Scholarship to date has conceptualized and measured NHRIs dichotomously; an NHRI either exists or it does not. We present data that highlights NHRI heterogeneity collected via content analysis of NHRI annual reports, NHRI websites, national constitutions, government legislation, and other sources. Using these data, we show NHRIs that can publish their findings and NHRIs that can punish offenders are each associated with less state torture. These data will allow future researchers to better explore important questions regarding NHRI origins, design, processes, and effectiveness.
International human rights mechanisms’ efficiency is normally linked to the work of independent experts keen to push the boundaries of accountability, against recalcitrant states determined to defend their sovereignty. As a corollary, progress in this field is associated with the creation and maintenance of political free spaces. Another common presumption, rather than fact, is a belief in a differentiated “North” versus “South” approach to the promotion and protection of human rights, that finds solid ground within the prevalent human rights discourses repeated by governmental and non-governmental actors. Through the lenses of the UN Special Procedures, In Defense of Politicization of Human Rights: The UN Special Procedures challenges these and other presumptions informing doctrinal studies, policies, and strategies to advance international human rights. In seeking to debunk commonly held views about the role of politics in human rights at the international level, this book constitutes the first comprehensive study of the Special Procedures as a system covering their history, methods of work, institutional status, and relationship with other politically driven organs and processes affecting their development. The perspective chosen to analyze the human rights mechanisms most vulnerable to political decisions determining their creation, renewal, and operationalization casts a new light on the extent to which these remain the cornerstone of global accountability in protecting the inherent dignity and worth of individuals as well as groups.
Can the creation of court-mandated accountability institutions improve human rights? In this article, we investigate the extent to which court-ordered accountability institutions decrease government repression in the form of police violence. We argue that the creation of regional bodies to which citizens report allegations of police abuse provides “fire-alarm” oversight by which police officers can be monitored for abuses of power. To test the implications of our theory, we take advantage of variance in the implementation of Prakash Singh and Others v. Union of India and Others, a 2006 judgment by the Supreme Court of India requiring states and districts to establish local Police Complaints Authorities (PCAs). Using a difference-in-difference design, we show the implementation of state PCAs to be associated with statistically and substantively significant decreases in human rights violations by Indian police officers.
Cambridge Core - Social Theory - The Closure of the International System - by Lora Anne Viola
Cambridge Core - UN and International Organisations - The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention - by Jared Genser
This article explains temporal variation in repression as a function of the “dissident calendar,” the set of events that serve as natural focal points for coordination. The core argument is that regimes can anticipate the events that create these focal points and engage in preemptive repression to survive their passing. This dynamic produces predictable, often cyclical patterns in repression. An analysis of dissident detentions in China from 1998 to 2014 shows that “focal events” alone appear to be responsible for more than 20 percent of dissident detentions over the analysis period. Such detentions tend to be shorter and rely less on formal criminal procedures, suggesting a “catch-and-release” dynamic. Additional analysis of detentions in Tibet shows how the calendar may vary by issue or group.
Despite the growing tendency worldwide to lower the starting age of English education, our knowledge of how young students learn English over time remains limited. Particularly limited is our knowledge of how parental socio-economic status (SES) influences their children's English learning. This study investigated the role of parental SES in Chinese middle school students' English learning over time. The participants were 189 middle school students and their parents who were drawn from two distinct socioeconomic areas. Students were followed for three years from the seventh to ninth grade (ranging in age from 12 to 15). Each year, students took the Cambridge ESOL tests and filled out surveys concerning their English learning and motivation. Their parents also filled out extensive surveys regarding family background, resources, and parenting styles and beliefs. We found significant relationships between SES and parents' attitudes towards the role of English, parenting styles, Chinese books available at home, parental involvement in children's English learning, and parental beliefs and expectations toward their children's English learning ability. We also found that SES, parenting styles (autonomous style rather than controlled style), and parental beliefs and expectations were positively associated with students' English performance.
This paper presents the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure of acute poverty, understood as a person’s inability to meet simultaneously minimum international standards in indicators related to the millennium Development Goals and to core functionings. It constitutes the first implementation of the direct method to measure poverty for over 100 developing countries. After presenting the MPI, we analyse its scope and robustness, with a focus on the data challenges and methodological issues involved in constructing and estimating it. A range of robustness tests indicate that the MPI offers a reliable framework that can complement global income poverty estimates.
Although the United Nations Commission on Human Rights served as the primary forum in which governments publicly named and shamed others for abusing their citizens, the practices of the commission have been largely ignored by political scientists. To address that deficiency, this study analyzes the actions of the commission and its members' voting records in the 1977–2001 period. It establishes that targeting and punishment by the commission decreasingly fit the predictions of a realist perspective, in which naming and shaming is an inherently political exercise, and increasingly fit the predictions of a liberal “reputation” perspective, in which governments hold others to their promises, and a constructivist “social conformity” perspective, in which governments distribute and respond to social rewards and punishments. With the end of the Cold War, the commission's targeting and punishment of countries was based less on partisan ties, power politics, and the privileges of membership, and more on those countries' actual human rights violations, treaty commitments, and active participation in cooperative endeavors such as peacekeeping operations.
While research has addressed the effects of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) advocacy on human rights outcomes, less is known about how INGOs choose advocacy targets and tactics. We combine insights from political economy and constructivism to understand how INGOs come to choose targets and tactics through the concepts of information and leverage politics, first articulated by Keck and Sikkink (1998), and salience politics, or the need to select cases that energize organization members and donors. INGOs select potential targets for advocacy and choose their tactics based on considerations of leverage potential and political salience, both of which are a function of potential target states’ aid, trade, and security linkages with major Western powers. Using data on Amnesty International’s written advocacy efforts - background reports, press releases, and new data on Urgent Actions - we find robust evidence that Amnesty International accounts for these linkages with Western powers in choosing targets for its advocacy campaigns.
During the past three decades national human rights institutions (NHRIs) have spread to more than one hundred United Nations (UN) member states and become key to human rights enforcement and democratic accountability. Given that NHRIs can take on a life of their own even under adverse conditions, why do governments in the developing world create permanent, independent national bodies with statutory powers to promote and protect human rights? Human rights international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are crucial for global diffusion. They empower local actors and influence governments in favor of NHRI adoption by mediating the human rights and NHRI discourses and mobilizing shame internationally. An event history analysis offers robust evidence that controlling for the UN, regional organizations, and other rival factors, human rights INGOs have systematic positive effects on diffusion. The case studies of South Korea and Malaysia provide process-tracing evidence that the hypothesized causal mechanisms are operative.
Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economic grievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest on questionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups’ settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specifications.
After four years in operation the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is subject to criticism, and various scholars and practitioners alike present and discuss reform proposals. In the present paper we study systematically the controversial decisions in the UNHRC. We find that controversial proposals are introduced by countries with a blemished human rights record, and that in the votes on these proposals the council members belonging to the European Union (EU) vote very distinctly from the remaining members and have preferences quite different from those member states that violate human rights. Extending an empirical approach frequently used in parliamentary research we can also show that in votes in the UNHRC preferences of member states dominate over their membership to particular blocs. As controversial votes also heavily polarize the UNHRC we argue that the problems faced by the UNHRC’s predecessor, namely the Commission on Human Rights, have reappeared.
Given the myriad of human rights abuses that occur globally and daily, why are some nations on the receiving end of a substantial amount of international opprobrium, while others receive far less attention and condemnation? The authors contend that the increasing presence of human rights organizations in such states is the critical link between the local and the international. Increases in the number of such groups contributes significantly to the generation of Amnesty International urgent actions, one of the most-often-utilized tools in naming and shaming campaigns against human rights abusing regimes. The authors find strong support for nearly all their hypotheses.