HUMAN RIGHTS TREATY

Do the human rights treaty-monitoring committees do any good? Answer with reference to the Hathaway debate.



Do the human rights treaty-monitoring committees do any good? Answer with reference to the Hathaway debate.



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.

The proliferation of global and regional human rights conventions in recent decades raises intriguing and important questions about their impact and legitimacy. The conventions restrict states' legislative, executive and judicial powers, earlier seen as sovereign prerogatives. The conventions also establish supervisory organs or courts, and are 'living instruments' in that these organs change the interpretation of the conventions over time in response to social changes.

This multi-disciplinary research group brings together legal scholars, social scientists, and normative theorists. It will address three central puzzles in the field of human rights conventions:

•the motivations of states when they enter into the conventions,

•the effects of these conventions on states,

and, in light of these findings,

•whether such conventions are normatively legitimate.

To understand and assess the impact of human rights conventions is of the highest practical political importance, and also of great theoretical interest. Sound conclusions require multidisciplinary contributions from law, empirical political science and normative political theory. The causal analysis of states' choices must draw on legal and political perspectives, the effects on states are both of a legal and political nature, and the normative arguments must draw on a firm empirical and legal understanding of the situation and its causes.

Research on how human rights norms affect the objectives, perceptions and choices of various actors also sheds light on more general issues of global governance:

•the roles of 'principled ideas' - such as human rights ideals - and law when forms of international governance and domestic forces interact, and

•how sovereignty is reconceived in response to, and as ...