Insincere commitments: human rights treaties, abusive states, and citizen activism 9781589018877, 9781589018969, 1589018966

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance
2 Patterns of Commitment
3 Causes of Commitment
4 Individual Petitions in Eastern Europe: Racial Discrimination in Slovakia
5 Hungary and the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
6 The UN Human Rights Committee in Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
7 The Causes and Consequences of Commitment Reconsidered
Appendix
References
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z.

Citation preview

Insincere Commitments

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Insincere Commitments human rights treaties, abusive states, and citizen activism

Heather Smith-Cannoy

Georgetown University Press/Washington, DC

Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC www.press.georgetown.edu © 2012 by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith-Cannoy, Heather M., Ph. D.   Insincere commitments : human rights treaties, abusive states, and citizen activism / Heather M. Smith.    p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-58901-887-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1.  Human rights—International cooperation.  2.  Human rights—Government policy. 3.  Human rights monitoring.  4.  United Nations, Human Rights Committee.  I.  Title   JZ4974.S65 2012   341.4′8—dc23 2011035687 This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. 15 14 13 12    9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing Printed in the United States of America

To my Grandfather Kurt Alexander Julius Gattman (1913–2005), who introduced me to the joys of learning and inspired me to question the world

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Introduction

1

1 

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance

17

2 

Patterns of Commitment

41

3 

Causes of Commitment

64

4 Individual Petitions in Eastern Europe: Racial Discrimination in Slovakia

5 Hungary and the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

6 The UN Human Rights Committee in Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan 7 

92 116

and Tajikistan

139

The Causes and Consequences of Commitment Reconsidered

166

Appendix

179

References

183

Index

199 vii

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Illustrations

Figures 1.1   Pressures on Newly Independent States

23

1.2   How NGOs Enhance Compliance

37

2.1   Cumulative Percentage of Treaty Ratifications per Year

44

2.2   Cumulative Percentage of IPM Ratifications per Year

46

2.3  Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Established and Transitional Regimes

48

2.4  Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Torture: Established and Transitional Regimes

49

2.5  Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Torture: Regime Type

50

2.6   Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Regime Type

51

2.7  Percentage of States Ratifying Human Rights Treaties in Western Europe

52

2.8   Regional Support for Human Rights Instruments

54

2.9  Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Regional Comparisons

55

2.10 Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Racial Discrimination: Regional Comparisons

56

ix

x   Illustrations

2.11 States Receiving the Highest Number of Individual Complaints in the UNHRC: 1976–2010 2.12 States Receiving the Highest Number of Individual Complaints before the CAT: 1984–6/2011

58 59

4.1   Percentage of Unemployment in Slovakia: 1991–95

100

5.1   Percentage of Total Female Representation in Parliament

121

4.2  Total Foreign Direct Investment in US$ Billions Acquired between 1989 and 1997: Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland 101 5.2   Hungarian Elections Returns: 1998

122

Tables I.1   UN Committees Accepting Complaints from Individual Citizens 1.1  Summary of Domestic Economic Pressures on CEE and Central Asian Leaders

1.2  Summary of Global Human Rights Pressures on CEE and Central Asian Leaders

1.3   Implications for Two Alternate Explanations of Commitment 1.4   Implications from Alternate Conceptions of Compliance 1.5  How NGOs Use IPMs to Enhance Compliance with Human Rights Treaties

1.6   Six Implications for Commitment and Compliance

2.1   Government Options with Respect to UN Human Rights Treaties 2.2   Global Ratification Rates of UN Human Rights Treaties 2.3   Individual Petition Ratification Rates

2.4   Total Number of Petitions Submitted to Each UN Treaty Body 3.1   Dependent Variables

3.2   Indicators of Economic Need

3.3   Control Variables from the Literature

3.4  Why Do Countries Accept UN Oversight? Statistical Results of Global Commitment Models 3.5  Why Do Countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia Accept UN Oversight? Statistical Results of Regional Commitment Models: Eastern Europe and Central Asia

6 20 21

29 33 35

39 42

45 45

57

66 68

71 72 84

Acknowledgments

M y i n t e r e s t i n human rights and global mechanisms of justice developed early in response to conversations with my grandfather. He told me of his experiences as a young man escaping Nazi Germany and showed me pictures of our family members who were not as lucky as he. His experiences led me to question the role of the international community in such egregious violations of human rights. How could it be that there was no opportunity for individuals to challenge their government’s malicious behavior at the global level? My years as an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) provided a rich intellectual environment within which to examine questions of justice, human rights, and international law. Mark P. Petracca and Alec Stone Sweet were particularly inspiring mentors from whom I learned about these subjects. These curiosities were piqued when, as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), I came across an Amnesty International campaign to persuade governments to ratify individual petition mechanisms attached to human rights treaties. Individual petition mechanisms provide citizens the opportunity to file grievances with the United Nations if their governments violate their rights as guaranteed by the treaties. The project that followed seeks to understand the role these mechanisms play in securing individual rights through institutions of global justice. This book is the product of that inquiry. I have been so fortunate to conduct this research with a supportive academic community, skilled research assistants, and a very patient, understanding family. The errors and omissions remain my own, but the project is considerably better than it would have been without this network of support. During my time as a graduate student at UCSD I benefited immensely from the mentorship of Miles Kahler and Kristian Gleditsch. For their continued willingness to support my work and provide constructive feedback, I am very grateful. The xi

xii   Acknowledgments

Women in Conflict Studies Group led by Bret Ashley Leeds, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, and Kelly Kadera also supported my early work on this project and has remained a constant source of support. Mentors at Lewis & Clark College have been instrumental in shaping my academic development and the work in this project—Bob Mandel deserves special recognition for reading countless drafts, providing constructive feedback, and patient guidance. My sincere thanks to Cyrus Partovi, Cari Coe, and Kira Petersen, also at Lewis & Clark College, for their incredible support and friendship. I am also grateful for the generous financial assistance provided by the college toward the completion of this work. Many thanks to Charles Lipson and Duncan Snidal for inviting me to present a chapter of this work at the University of Chicago’s Research Colloquium on ­International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES). The Center for the Study of Democracy at UCI graciously hosted me as a visiting scholar during the fall of 2010. Members of the Political Science Department at UCI provided a wonderful environment in which to complete the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to Deborah Avant, Ben Bishin, Mark Berlin, Feryal Cherif, Bernard Grofman, Diana Kapiszewski, Patrick Morgan, Mark Petracca, Charles Anthony Smith, Wayne Sandholtz, and Yuliya Tverdova. I am indebted to Charles Anthony Smith for his years of friendship and support and for facilitating a book workshop through the UCI Department of Political Science and the Center for the Study of Democracy in the spring of 2010. My sincere appreciation goes to Don Jacobs and the staff of Georgetown University Press for their support and guidance toward the completion of the book. Todd Landman, professor of government and director of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, deserves very special recognition for his help and guidance on this project. Region and country experts patiently endured my questions, sent drafts of their unpublished work, and generally helped me to understand the politics of the four European and Central Asian countries examined in this book. Eva Fodor, Karen Henderson, Eugene Huskey, Kevin Deegan Krause, and Gabriela Wasileski were particularly instrumental in this regard. Wendy Wong at the University of Toronto has been a constant source of moral support and friendship. Andrew Foote, Jenny Garcia, Monika Magyar, Saynozium Nurov, Jake Owens, and Margaret Williams provided excellent research assistance. There is no question that I could not have completed this work without my very small but truly incredible family. To my mom, Adele, and my sister, Stacy, thank you for your constant love and support and for always helping me find ways to laugh and keep going. To Dad and Veronika, my thanks to you for your love. DC, I am so grateful for your patience and understanding, I cannot tell you how much I have and continue to appreciate all of your love and support.

Abbreviations

AI

CAT

Amnesty International

Convention Against Torture

CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women CERD

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

ERRC

European Roma Rights Centre

COHRE Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions EU

European Union

FIDESZ  The Federation of Young Democrats (Hungary) FKGP

The Independent Smallholders Party (Hungary)

HZDS

The Movement for a Democratic Slovakia

HRW ICC

ICCPR IGO IMF

IPM

KDH

KDNP

Human Rights Watch

International Criminal Court

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights intergovernmental organization International Monetary Fund

Individual Petition Mechanism

The Christian Democratic Movement (Slovakia)

The Christian Democratic People’s Party (Hungary) xiii

xiv   Abbreviations

MDF

The Hungarian Democratic Forum

NEKI

The Legal Defense Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities

MSZP NGO

OSCE SDL SNS

SZDSZ UN

The Hungarian Socialist Party nongovernmental organization

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe The Democratic Left (Slovakia) Slovak National Party

The Alliance of Free Democrats (Hungary) United Nations

UNHRC United Nations Human Rights Committee ZRS

Slovak Workers Party

Introduction

In the wake of World War II, the international community has made great progress toward promoting democracy, the rule of law, and a common set of human rights protections for the world’s population. Today, more than 48 percent of states in the international system are democratic, meaning that countless more individuals have access to institutions of national justice than at any other previous point in history (Marshall and Cole 2009, 15). Between 1947 and 2007, more than one hundred new global human rights treaties emerged, covering a range of issues from prohibitions on torture and children in battle to apartheid in sports. And governments are signing on, making public commitments to protect the human rights of their citizens. Yet for all of the progress on global human rights in the twentieth century, a series of battles remain. Though governments are quite willing to sign their names on the dotted line and send human rights treaties through the domestic ratification process, this readiness to commit has not yet translated into improved respect for human rights (HafnerBurton and Tsutsui 2007; Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, and Meyer 2008; Hathaway 2002). Instead, many governments appear to be making these global commitments precisely to eschew real changes in their domestic human rights laws. However, a series of new battles between governments and their citizens are making government policies of sustained resistance to calls for the domestic incorporation of global human rights norms more costly for governments to maintain. The principle players in these battles are not powerful civil rights leaders or politicians. Rather, they are the mothers and wives of men who are being tortured, forced to confess guilt, and sentenced to death in countries like Uzbekistan. Individuals from the Roma minority (pejoratively referred to as gypsies) are challenging what was, until recently, legal discrimination against them by the Slovakian government. With considerable assistance from the Organization for Security and ­Cooperation in 1

2    Introduction

Europe, citizens from the small Central Asian country of Tajikistan have challenged government restrictions on due process protections for the criminally accused. Until 2005, Hungarian women possessed no legal right to obtain restraining orders against abusive spouses. After a brutal beating by her husband landed her in the hospital, one Hungarian woman, known only by her pseudonym Ms. A.T., bravely challenged this omission in Hungarian law. Ms. A.T. and individuals like her have emerged as pioneers in the battle over basic human rights protections between citizens and their governments. What is perhaps even more surprising is that these relatively weak individuals are emerging victoriously from these battles. Ms. A.T. in Hungary, in conjunction with nongovernmental organizations, successfully agitated for new rights, and the Roma in Slovakia are now protected by new antidiscrimination legislation. Even where these individuals are not able to stem the tide of government repression with the introduction of new legislation, the battles themselves have served as a catalyst for other relevant changes in human rights protections. The United Nations served as the stage on which all of these battles were fought. Paradoxically, these governments empowered their citizens with the opportunity to sue them for human rights violations at the United Nations. Citizens have seized this opportunity, filing more than two thousand claims against their governments since this right was first introduced in 1965. Citizens from Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries have sued their governments at the UN for particularly grave violations of basic human rights. Citizens from Tajikistan have filed more than thirty-five complaints against their government before the UN Human Rights Committee. The complaints, mostly from the mothers and wives of men accused of crimes and held by the government, paint a startling picture of government abuse. The complaints against Tajikistan allege that government security forces employ torture to procure confessions, and then proceed with prompt executions. This book is an attempt to understand why a government like Tajikistan, which engages in routine violations of human rights, would empower its citizens with the right to individual petition to the UN treaty bodies, and to explore the consequences of that decision on domestic rights protections. I will examine both the conditions surrounding commitment to and compliance with UN treaty ­bodies among countries in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. The UN serves as a potent tool for citizens in these regions to expose government abuse. This book challenges those like former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, who criticized the UN as an enfeebled institution. In 1994 Bolton famously argued that “the [UN] Secretariat building in New York has thirty-eight stories. If it lost ten stories today it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. The United Nations is one of the most inefficient intergovernmental organizations going.”1 If one condemns the UN as a feckless institution, one overlooks an important source of leverage through which otherwise powerless citizens demand change from their governments. The right to directly petition the UN has become an im-

Introduction    3

portant avenue through which citizens challenge their governments. For individuals in countries who can be abducted by government security forces, tortured to confess guilt, and then executed, any global mechanism for challenging government abuse is significant. In countries where it is not a crime to discriminate against women or racial minorities, the right to petition the UN treaty bodies for redress can be the only hope that these communities have to improve their plight. These battles at the UN between Central Asian and Central and Eastern European citizens and their governments strike at the very heart of basic civil liberties. Insincere Commitments addresses two questions. First, why do governments, particularly those engaged in sustained patterns of rights violations, empower their citizens to file claims against them at the United Nations? A central argument of this book is that governments in Central Asian and Eastern European countries grant their citizens this right insincerely, as a way to mediate domestic economic pressures and address the policy recommendations of Western audiences. Ratifying treaties that explicitly give their citizens the right to petition the UN treaty bodies is a cheap signal that newly independent governments employ for the consumption of global audiences. Second, this work explores how the right of individual petition to the UN treaty bodies can enhance state compliance with human rights treaties. There is a great deal of scholarly disagreement about the impact of human rights treaties. Some scholars note considerable improvements in human rights following commitment (Simmons 2009) and others decry these instruments as hollow, even counterproductive to human rights protections (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2007; Hathaway 2002). Insincere Commitments shifts the debate away from the treaties and toward the specific provisions that grant individuals the right to petition the UN. When citizens, even those who are relatively powerless by themselves, partner with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), they have promoted positive changes in human rights. Not all of the changes explored here signal dramatic shifts in policy—but in countries with nonexistent due process protections for capital crimes, even modest changes can be important.

Why Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe? Scholars have identified a fascinating pattern of commitment to human rights treaties among fourth-wave democracies (those that became democratic between 1990 and 1994).2 Despite poor levels of respect for domestic human rights following their transitions, these governments ratify human rights treaties at startling rates. In fact, for certain treaties they are more apt to ratify than are old established democracies for whom ratification is presumably less costly (Landman 2005; Simmons 2009).3 Indeed, Landman’s pioneering analysis of the empirical ­determinants of commitment suggests that fourth-wave democracies have been

4    Introduction

more likely to ratify treaties with fewer reservations, understandings, or declarations (RUDs) than their democratic predecessors (118). His findings also implicate fourth-wave democracies in higher rates of human rights violations (118). New democracies simultaneously repress human rights at home while making global, public commitments to respect those rights. By ratifying without RUDs, these governments—perhaps inadvertently—make deeper commitments to their citizens’ human rights than their more democratic predecessors who routinely place numerous conditions on their commitments.4 In an effort to understand high rates of commitment despite low levels of human rights protections, this inquiry focuses on the factors that contribute to commitment among Central and Eastern European (CEE) governments, many of which are fourth-wave democracies. To date, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which these battles at the UN between European citizens and their governments affected human rights protections in these regions.5 This is likely a result of the fascinating and voluminous work devoted to exploring the interactions between CEE governments and European institutions (Schimmelfennig 2008; Schimmelfennig, Engert, and Knobel 2006; Cichowski 2007; Pridham 2005; Vachudova 2005; Kelley 2004). However, examining the causes of commitment to and effects of individual petitions at the UN in a domestic environment dense with European institutions and support for civil society allows us to consider how the interactions between global and regional institutions impact human rights protections. Fourth-wave democracies in Central and Eastern Europe are not alone in exhibiting high levels of commitment without reservations to human rights treaties. Autocratic governments that routinely repress their citizens’ human rights in Central Asia ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at high rates. By 2000, every country in Central Asia except Kazakhstan had ratified. One explanation for this pattern focuses on human rights treaties as a low-cost method for signaling commitment to global norms (Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, and Meyer 2008). Yet these governments also granted their citizens the right to petition the UN treaty bodies for treaty violations. Citizens have seized on the opportunity to pressure their governments to improve basic human rights protections. Ratification of human rights agreements among repressive, autocratic regimes has often been dismissed as cheap talk because autocrats do not face the same domestic constraints to promote compliance with treaty commitments as democracies.6 The high rate of commitment to individual complaint mechanisms among Central Asian autocracies, however, is more puzzling. Unlike the treaties themselves, which impose few costs, empowering individuals with the ability to petition the UN treaty bodies carries modest exposure costs for all governments that are forced by their citizens to defend their human rights practices at the UN. Quite apart from their Central and Eastern European peers, Central Asian governments function in an environment void of powerful regional institutions.

Introduction    5

These governments restrict the activity of civil society actors by burdening them with onerous registration requirements. Central Asia, therefore, provides a powerful counterweight to Central and Eastern Europe by allowing us to isolate the effects of a free and active civil society on patterns of compliance, a key variable identified by prominent studies (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Neumayer 2005). In spite of government repression of their efforts in some Central Asian counties, NGOs and IGOs were still able to teach citizens who reside in these countries how to use their new rights to complain to the UN treaty bodies. This offered the international community an opportunity to hear directly from citizens about patterns of domestic abuse.

New Opportunities for Individuals in International Law Citizens from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia are part of a new and growing trend in the post–World War II period involving expanded opportunities for individuals in interstate politics. The proliferation of war crimes trials in the international system following those at Tokyo and Nuremburg, and more recently the development of the International Criminal Court, have transformed the realm of interstate relations into more than just diplomatic engagements between state representatives. War crimes trials and trials before the ICC punish individuals, highlight their crimes in a global venue, and single out their ability to cause harm.7 The right of individual petition at the UN developed simultaneously with these new opportunities to hold individuals accountable for their crimes in global courts. Individual petition at the UN flips this opportunity on its head—privileging citizens as the subjects rather than the objects of international law. The right of individual petition is thus a novel mechanism allowing citizens to initiate claims of abuse against their governments before global audiences. The right of individual complaint at the UN was first introduced in the Conven­tion on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). When the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Racial Discrimination Convention in 1965, they also created an oversight committee, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The Committee assists states and monitors their implementation of the terms of the Convention. The emergence of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination paved the way for the creation of six other similar treaty bodies: the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the ­Committee Against Torture, the Committee on Migrant Workers, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. While each of these committees has a potentially important role to play in improving human rights, this book focuses on the four more established treaty bodies; the Committee on Migrant Workers and

6    Introduction

Table I.1  UN Committees Accepting Complaints from Individual Citizens Committee

Convention

Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

Committee Against Torture

Convention Against Torture

Human Rights Committee

Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women Committee on Migrant Workersa

Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rightsa a

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

These committees have not yet received the 10 ratifications necessary to begin receiving complaints.

the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are excluded because the ten ratifications necessary to activate these committees have not yet been obtained. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is also excluded because the Optional Protocol that gives individuals the right to petition the committee was not opened for ratification until 2007, and there have not yet been any complaints received by the committee.8 The goal of this analysis is to understand both why governments ratify, and whether and how claims filed against governments before the UN contribute to improvements in human rights protections. These committees, which are collectively known as the treaty bodies, have a variety of important functions. They receive and review state reports on their progress with implementation of the treaties. In theory these committees can also receive complaints from other states about treaty violations; however, in practice no state has submitted a complaint against another. The General Assembly also empowered them all to receive complaints about government abuse from citizens and NGOs. Giving individual citizens the right to directly petition the UN opens up a new avenue, a promising new opportunity for individuals seeking recourse against their governments for human rights violations. In 2008, the General ­Assembly passed the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which will eventually give citizens the ability to petition the Committee directly. The expansion of the right to individual petition at the UN is an intriguing development for international law, as prior to this time individual citizens had

Introduction    7

very limited access to global institutions. The International Court of Justice, the world’s premiere legal institution, only receives complaints from states, not from individuals. Yet the growing popularity of individual petition at the UN is part of a broader shift that empowers individuals to seek global redress for rights violations. The newest global court, the International Criminal Court, which started hearing cases in 2002, tries individuals, not governments, for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Though obscure in academic circles, the global human rights policy community is well versed in the potential leverage that the right of individual petition to the UN treaty bodies presents. In 2010, Amnesty International devoted a global campaign to pressuring governments to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.9 Amnesty’s advocacy for ratification of the Optional Protocol indicates that a powerful NGO of global reach is persuaded that individual petitions before the UN have the potential to impact rights protections in meaningful ways. Examples abound of the power of these committees. In response to stinging losses before the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, new antidiscrimination legislation was passed in the Slovak National Council to protect the Roma. In Hungary, new domestic violence laws to protect women were explicitly created in response to Hungary’s losses before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Domestic torture legislation was introduced in Azerbaijan in the wake of losses before the UN Committee Against Torture.

Unique Contributions of This Book Much scholarly attention has been paid to understand why governments ratify human rights treaties (Simmons 2009; Vreeland 2008; Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; Cole 2005b; Wotipka and Ramirez 2003) and whether treaties improve human rights protections (Simmons 2009; Landman 2005; Hathaway 2002; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2007; Neumayer 2005). The commitment literature has made great strides in clarifying our understanding of the conditions facilitating government ratification of specific human rights treaties through statistical analysis. Domestic politics can shape commitment decisions in significant ways. Autocratic governments ratify the Convention Against Torture as a concession to competitive domestic parties (Vreeland 2008), while countries with common law legal systems will resist ratifying because the treaties may be interpreted in unanticipated ways by domestic judges (Simmons 2009). This literature has also reinforced the power of global socialization in shaping state behavior—­governments emulate the behaviors of one another, including ratifying human rights treaties (Wotipka and Ramirez 2003; Wotipka and Tsutsui 2008). Governments also consider the anticipated costs associated with adjusting their human rights policies before ratifying (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; Cole 2005b).

8    Introduction

Work on compliance with human rights treaties often tests compliance across treaties, but does not employ process tracing case studies to examine the impact of treaties on human rights practices in specific countries (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Neumayer 2005; Hathaway 2002). A separate body of work explores the conditions under which civil society actors use treaties as a standard by which to highlight human rights abuse and shame governments into complying with their human rights commitments (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Boli and Thomas 1997; Otto 1996). However, with the exception of Simmons (2009), there has been very little work linking the causes of commitment to its consequences. Insincere Commitments remedies this oversight by examining the causes and consequences of individual petition at the UN. This right is connected to, but not the same as, ratification of human rights treaties. Governments ratify the treaties and then separately ratify an Optional Protocol (or make a positive declaration about an article in the treaty) to grant their citizens the right to sue them at the UN. Exploring the timing of this commitment demonstrates that governments often grant citizens the ability to petition the UN years after they have ratified the treaty, suggesting two distinct political processes—one for treaty commitment and a second for individual petition commitment. This book is therefore a complement to the important work on ratification of human rights treaties, adding to the conversation by examining the impact of jurisprudence emanating from UN oversight committees on domestic rights protections. UN treaty bodies routinely render decisions against governments and demand that those governments institute new human rights policies. These decisions offer a unique opportunity to consider government compliance with the direct policy recommendations of UN agents. Finally, this book offers a fresh take on the relationship between commitment and compliance, arguing that even when commitment is insincere, compliance may still follow.

Questions The fall of the Soviet Union and the proliferation of civil society groups into some parts of Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, along with the newfound right to individual petition at the UN, altered the opportunities to pressure governments to protect their citizens in these regions. Insincere Commitments is devoted to addressing two core questions. First, why do governments give their citizens the ability to essentially sue them at the United Nations? These governments have the option of ratifying the associated human rights treaty while simultaneously rejecting UN oversight. Yet many governments have gone out of their way to do both. Individual petitions before the United Nations carry with them the very real possibility of a public, global investigation into domestic human rights practices, a review by UN experts, and ultimately a decision by those experts on the legitimacy

Introduction    9

of the state’s human rights practices. Why would governments, particularly those that violate their citizens’ rights, open up this avenue for a global public shaming? Second, what are the consequences of giving citizens the opportunity to petition the United Nations? Are governments more inclined to comply with their treaty obligations if their citizens initiate complaints against them at the UN? How does the right of individual petition create new political openings for NGOs and IGOs to facilitate state compliance with human rights agreements? What strategies do these actors use to successfully pressure governments to improve domestic human rights protections? Under what conditions will granting citizens the right to petition the UN fail to enhance levels of compliance?

Answers Upon their liberation from Soviet control and influence, governments in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe were met with a variety of challenges: privatizing state-owned enterprises, instituting political reforms, and attempting to complete these monumental transitions without further domestic tumult for their populations. Yet for many of these governments the costs of transition were simply too high to bear alone. Debt crises, currency crises, and intense conflicts over privatization led to poor economic performance and gridlock. It was amidst this economic turmoil directly following independence that many of these governments became willing to ratify human rights treaties and individual complaint mechanisms. Domestic economic pressures heightened these governments’ receptivity to policy recommendations from Western audiences, who coincidentally had control of major global lending institutions. In Central Asia, the US government was recommending that governments adopt civil and political rights consistent with established democracies. In Central and Eastern Europe, the EU was carefully scrutinizing potential applicant countries and evaluating their legal protections for minorities and women. New governments responded to these pressures by seeking out cheap ways to signal their commitment to Western human rights. Domestic and global pressures work simultaneously to compel governments to grant their citizens the right to petition the UN. This is an insincere commitment because it is born from a need to temporarily boost democratic credentials before a global audience rather than from a genuine desire to improve domestic rights protections. However, there is an upside to this story. While the initial impetus behind accepting UN oversight is insincere, under certain conditions NGOs and IGOs can intervene to enhance levels of state compliance with human rights agreements. NGOs, and to a lesser extent IGOs, facilitate compliance with human rights agreements by socializing domestic populations about how to take advantage of their ability to petition the UN. In some cases these actors hold training sessions to educate the public about submission of individual complaints before the UN

10    Introduction

and serve as the counsel of record for individuals submitting complaints. NGOs and IGOs are instrumental in elevating the costs of this commitment by creating an opportunity for citizens to facilitate a public shaming of rights-violating governments in a global venue. NGOs also use the right of individual petition at the UN to enhance levels of compliance by focusing public attention on omissions in domestic human rights protections. Individual stories can serve as powerful symbols of systematic, government-sponsored rights violations. NGOs focus public attention on the stories of these petitioners and thereby pressure governments to comply with human rights agreements. As the political space for NGOs to operate in Central and Eastern Europe has opened up, so too has the impact of human rights agreements. One method these groups use to enhance rights protections is individual petition at the UN. Prominent voices in international law argue that oversight mechanisms “add trivial costs at best” to patterns of state compliance, which helps to explain the pattern of high commitment despite low levels of domestic rights protections (Goldsmith and Posner 2005, 127). To a certain extent I agree with these ­scholars—I do not seek to demonstrate that the right of individual complaint through the UN has independent effects on state behavior across all of the cases explored in the following chapters. The Central Asian cases suggest that citizen petitions to the UN have not yet ushered in changes in human rights protection. However, the European cases demonstrate that individual petitions can lead to concrete legislative changes in domestic human rights protections. My aim with this work is to demonstrate the subtle and nuanced ways in which filing cases before UN treaty bodies can lead to changes in human rights outcomes, even in the absence of new human rights legislation. The Central Asian cases show that although legislative compliance does not necessarily follow losses before UN committees, these cases provide other important benefits. The cases allow NGOs to identify focal points in campaigns against rights-violating governments. Moreover, these cases frequently give citizens access to information about family members that they would not otherwise have been privy to. In Central Asia this type of information is invaluable because it might mean finally learning the fate of family members who were disappeared by state security services. Even where these cases do not lead to legislative changes in human rights protections they can lead to changes in human rights practices. Though the Tajiks remain defiant following losses before the UN Human Rights Committee, for example, they have significantly reduced their use of torture as an instrument of state control. A recurring theme in this book is that these mechanisms do not independently affect state behavior, absent the work of interested NGOs ­(Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan). Where NGOs are embedded in a domestic environment supportive of their efforts, the right of individual petition at the UN has served as a novel strategy to apply additional pressure on governments to change their human rights practices (Slovakia and Hungary).

Introduction    11

Methods of Analysis No rational leader would ever stride confidently away from signing a human rights agreement only to admit that she signed insincerely with no intention of improving human rights protections for her citizens. Even autocratic leaders with dubious human rights records take advantage of the opportunity to send a cheap signal to global audiences at signing ceremonies. Following his signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights in 2008, the Cuban foreign minister declared that the signing “formalizes and reaffirms Cuba’s commitment to the rights protected in both instruments, which my country has been systematically implementing since the time of the Cuban revolution in 1959.”10 In 1997, the Chinese Representative to the UN signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in New York, declaring that “the important action taken by the Chinese government after serious study has once again demonstrated its firm determination to promote the development of human rights undertakings in China and the world.”11 Demonstrating that commitment is part of an insincere strategy to diffuse global human rights and domestic economic pressures presents a methodological challenge because political elites in ratifying governments are obviously loath to utter such an admission. This book offers no evidence from interviews with elected officials who blithely admit that their commitment was insincere. However, a multi­ method approach provides clues through statistical analysis and process-tracing case studies that commitment was indeed part of a larger strategy to mediate the immediate pressures that governments at the helm of newly independent states experienced throughout the 1990s. Drawn from four new datasets covering all of the countries in the world between 1965 and 2007, the statistical analysis begins by teasing out global patterns of commitment to individual petition at the UN. What types of governments are most likely to permit their citizens to petition the UN? Are there systematic differences between those that ratify treaties and those that make the larger commitment to offer their citizens the ability to petition the UN? Wealth has been a consistent predictor of both ratification of human rights treaties and protection of human rights, but when we shift the analysis to individual petition mechanisms we find that economic crises of many stripes are also a consistent predictor of commitment.12 The global statistical analysis reveals high commitment rates among Eastern European and Central Asian governments, which are then explored in subsequent case studies. The statistical analysis is also used to test alternate explanations of treaty ratification from the international relations literature. There are limits, of course, to what large statistical analysis can tell us about commitment and compliance. I present the statistical results being acutely aware that I am offering the reader clues about new patterns associated with commitment, but not irrefutable evidence that domestic economic crisis compels deeper

12    Introduction

commitments to human rights in all cases. The case studies, which recreate the domestic and global pressures these governments experienced before and after commitment, shed light on the sincerity of commitment. In many cases ratifying governments allowed domestic human rights protections to deteriorate immediately following ratification. By examining the sequencing associated with commitment and compliance, we can tap into government intentions at the time of commitment. These statistical analyses are supported by case studies of individual countries in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe between 1991 and 2007. These cases document both the domestic and global factors surrounding ratification of individual complaint procedures, as well as the novel ways that NGOs and IGOs use the right of individual complaint at the UN to elevate the costs of noncompliance with human rights treaties. To better understand how and why advocates from these organizations use the UN to press governments to comply with human rights treaties, I conducted interviews individuals from relevant NGOs and IGOs located in each country. Together, the statistical analysis and the case studies make it possible to understand why governments grant their citizens the right to petition the UN and how NGOs and IGOs use this opportunity to help citizens pressure governments to improve human rights protections. The term individual petitions mechanism (IPM) is used throughout the text to describe the mechanisms in these treaties (or attached to them as Optional Protocols) allowing citizens to take their claims of abuse to the UN treaty ­bodies. These mechanisms provide an additional form of UN oversight over ratifying governments because they provide citizens with the ability to directly report treaty violations to the UN. The text, therefore, uses the terms ratification of individual petition mechanisms and granting the UN oversight interchangeably to denote the same process. The UN exercises its oversight in a variety of other ways—­ governments that have not permitted their citizens to petition the UN are still required to submit periodic reports, for example. While important, the process of filing and defending periodic reports at the UN is not the focus of this inquiry.

Organization of the Book Chapter 1 begins by developing the theoretical approach to ratification and compliance advanced throughout the book. Drawing on literature from political science, international law, and sociology, this chapter offers a new theory linking commitment to compliance, ultimately arguing that newly independent governments ratify insincerely to mediate domestic economic and global human rights pressures. Compliance is more likely where NGOs and IGOs intervene and apply pressure on ratifying governments. Chapter 1 also lays out alternative hypotheses from competing explanations of commitment and compliance.

Introduction    13

The second chapter explores summary trends associated with granting citizens the right to petition the UN. States that have undergone a significant form of regime transition (becoming either more democratic or more autocratic) are more likely to grant their citizens the ability to complain to the UN than those states that have not experienced a recent transition. While the states of Central Asia and Eastern Europe have been willing to grant their citizens this right relatively frequently, it is Western states that generally pay the highest costs for accepting UN oversight because they are brought before UN oversight committees most often. This chapter also examines the timing of these commitments, revealing that governments often ratify treaties and grant their citizens the right to petition the UN years apart. Chapter 3 employs statistical analysis to test between prominent theories of commitment in the literature. The findings in this chapter offer initial support for the role of domestic economic crises to compel deeper global commitments to human rights. Debt crises, currency crises, and banking crises are statistically significant predictors of commitment to UN treaty bodies, which provides a new variable motivating governments to grant their citizens the right to sue them at the UN. With some variations, these findings are robust across treaties in both global and regional models. The results suggest that governments have insincere motivations for making these unlikely commitments to their citizens’ human rights. The findings in chapter 3 guide the selection of cases in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Economic crises heighten new leaders’ receptivity to human rights policy recommendations from external actors, and encourage them to seek out cheap signals of their commitment to human rights. To understand the role of economic crisis on commitment decisions in Central and Eastern Europe, chapter 4 details the Slovak experiences with Article 14 in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination. The Slovaks faced poor domestic economic conditions and intense pressure from Europe to improve their treatment of Hungarian and Roma minorities. Examining the conditions surrounding commitment to Article 14 of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Slovakia demonstrates how economic weakness and sustained global pressures enhance the likelihood of commitment and, over time, the likelihood of compliance. This case also illuminates the various ways NGOs can socialize the population about their right to petition the UN Committee Against Racial Discrimination. In chapter 5, we turn to Hungarian ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which isolates the effects of debt crises on ratification. Unlike the Slovaks, who achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the black sheep of Europe in the mid-1990s, the Hungarians adopted policies more consistent with those of ­Europe. As aspiring EU members under pressure to adopt the equality acquis, the

14    Introduction

­ ungarians had good reasons to ratify the Optional Protocol. Hungarian NGOs H were especially active in teaching Hungarian women how to take advantage of their new rights at the UN, using losses at the UN to pressure the government to change its ­policies. Together, the Slovak and Hungarian cases that constitute chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate that even insincere commitments to human rights can pave the way for real change in domestic human rights protections. The sixth chapter provides a striking contrast to the optimistic conclusions contained in chapters 4 and 5. The high rates of commitment to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the right of individual petition among Central Asian governments inform the selection of cases in chapter 6. Despite offering their citizens few of the rights contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at the time of ratification, governments in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan offered their citizens the opportunity to file claims at the United Nations. Both the Tajiks and the Kyrgyz faced precisely the combination of pressures that this book predicts will lead otherwise rights-violating governments to make commitments to their citizens’ human rights—devastating domestic economic conditions coupled with global pressure to adopt specific human rights policies. The Central Asian cases provide a window into the pivotal role that NGOs play in facilitating compliance with human rights agreements. Unlike the Central and Eastern European cases, where NGOs operated with the support and often the funding of European institutions, NGOs and IGOs in Central Asia simply did not have enough political support to enhance levels of compliance. Despite losing numerous cases before the UN Human Rights Committee, NGOs have not been successful in promoting changes in human rights protections in either Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. The Central Asian cases have been carefully selected to counter the criticism that ratification of constraining articles in human rights treaties is motivated entirely by aspirations to accede to the European Union. The Central Asian countries examined in chapter 5 had no realistic aspirations of acceding to any powerful regional institutions, meaning that commitment to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its Optional Protocol cannot be dismissed entirely as a reflexive response to regional pressures. However, the regional context is important in shaping the likelihood of compliance. NGOs in Central Asia did not enjoy the support of powerful regional organizations as they did in Europe, which undermined their ability to shame governments into complying with their human rights commitments. The seventh chapter synthesizes both the statistical evidence and the conclusions from the case studies to demonstrate that mainstream work in international relations has neglected a potent explanation for deeper commitments to human rights. Democratic transitions and transitions to independence create temporary openings for the international community to lock new governments into committing to their citizens’ human rights. As new governments grapple with the

Introduction    15

economic pressures of independence and transition, they are more open to policy recommendations from global audiences. For the citizens in these countries, this moment of opportunity can create institutional avenues for giving voice to patterns of domestic rights violations on the global stage. A battle to protect human rights and challenge patterns of government impunity is taking place. Individual citizens, NGOs, IGOs, and the United Nations have emerged as key players in this battle. When the leaders of newly independent states grant their citizens the right to petition the UN, they may be hoping to simply send a cheap signal to boost their democratic credentials, but even insincere commitments can provide powerful opportunities for citizens to publicize domestic rights violations. The process is slow—sometimes maddeningly slow—but individual citizens, with the assistance of NGOs, IGOs, and new avenues at the UN, are accelerating the pressure on their governments to provoke changes in domestic rights protections. This book is an effort to suggest that even initially insincere commitments to global human rights agreements can serve as novel mechanisms for promoting compliance with human rights agreements.

Notes   1.  John Bolton, Address to the Global Structures Convocation, New York. February 3, 1994.   2.  Fourth-wave democracies include the following countries: Albania, Benin, ­Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chile, Congo, Czechoslovakia, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Hungary, Lesotho, Lithuania, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Zambia.   3.  For the Civil and Political Rights Convention (ICCPR), Economic, Social and Cultural Convention (IESCR), Women’s Convention (CEDAW), Racial Discrimination Convention (CERD), Torture Convention (CAT), and Children’s Convention (CRC), Landman (2005) finds that fourth-wave democracies have the highest mean ratification scores (89–92).   4.  There is a vast literature on reservations, understandings, and declarations (RUDs) to human rights treaties. For examples see Neumayer (2007), Baratta (2000), Goodman (2002), and Schabas (1994).   5.  Wade Cole offers one of the first attempts to examine the impact of individual petition mechanisms on human rights protections globally. See Cole (2005a).   6.  On the ability of democracies to send more credible signals see Fearon (1994).   7.  For an excellent overview of war crimes trials throughout history see Smith (2012).   8.  As of November 1, 2011.   9.  See Amnesty International’s website in the treaty bodies section: www.amnesty.org /en/appeals-for-action/call-governments-sign-defend-economic-social-and-cultural-rights. 10.  Associated Press, “Cuban Foreign Minister Meets UN Secretary General, Signs Human Rights Agreement,” New York. February 28, 2008.

16    Introduction 11.  Xinhua News Agency, “Chinese Envoy Signs International Rights Treaty, Criticizes Taiwan,” November 3, 1997. 12.  On the relationship between wealth and ratification of human rights treaties see Simmons (2009) and Landman (2005). Simmons finds that while rich countries are inclined to make reservations to their treaty commitments, poor countries are far less likely to make any reservations (100). On the link between wealth and protection of human rights see Mitchell and McCormick (1988); Poe and Tate (1994); Poe, Tate, and Keith (1999); and Keith (1999).

1 A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance

Tr a d i t i o n a l ly i n i n t e r n at i o n a l relations, we conceive of the state as the final locus of authority. Citizens take their complaints of abuse to domestic courts; whatever remedy they may receive accrues to them through domestic legal channels. Prior to the introduction of individual petition at the UN there was no opportunity available for citizens to bypass their national courts and make claims against their governments in global adjudicative bodies. Since the right of the individual petition at the UN was introduced in 1965 more than two thousand individuals have taken advantage of this opportunity. In 2002, twentyseven Roma citizens living in Dobšiná, Slovakia, petitioned the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination to protest the cancellation of low-cost housing construction. The UN Committee agreed that racial discrimination against the Roma motivated the town council to cancel their construction plans, and ordered the Slovaks to continue construction (L.R. et al. v. Slovakia). Why would a government opt to allow its citizens a new, extrastate venue for complaining about domestic human rights violations? And what are the consequences of making this commitment? Scholars have explained commitment to human rights treaties with a variety of different theories—domestic political considerations (Simmons 2009; Vreeland 2008; Moravcsik 2000), the anticipated costs associated with adjusting human rights policies to comply with treaty terms (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; Hathaway 2003; Cole 2005b) and socialization to global norms of behavior (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999. These theories generally cluster around one of two broader approaches to commitment: exogenous socialization from the global community and endogenous cost/benefit calculation. Rather than a purely global or a purely domestic explanation, pressures emanating from both of these sources best explain deeper levels of commitment to human rights among newly independent states. In examining the experiences of ­ratifying 17

18    Chapter 1

governments in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the 1990s, it is apparent that ratification allowed leaders to achieve a strategic compromise between domestic and global pressures. Like the commitment literature, the compliance literature has also split along constructivist and rationalist lines. Drawing on Checkel (2001), the approach to compliance advocated here emphasizes domestic processes and agency to argue that under certain conditions, NGOs enhance the likelihood of compliance. The rest of this chapter develops both the commitment and compliance arguments while surveying extant literatures in both fields.

Insincere Commitments: Responding to Domestic Economic Pressures A good starting point for understanding the domestic pressures that motivated newly independent governments to make public commitments to their citizens’ human rights is to consider their preferences. When Askar Akaev assumed power in Kyrgyzstan, what did he hope to achieve by granting his citizens the right to petition the UN Human Rights Committee? What did Viktor Orban, who became the prime minister of Hungary in 1998, and his FIDESZ party claim were their goals when they granted Hungarian women the right to petition the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women? Political scientists typically assume that political elites want to keep their jobs (Mayhew 1974). Beyond remaining in office, the leaders of Central Asian and Eastern ­European governments also had to address the economic challenges of transitioning from command to capitalist economies. This was no easy task in the 1990s, with domestic conflicts over distribution of previously state-owned enterprises looming large on the political scene. Conflicts over how to privatize, which actors should play the largest role in the process, and the pace of privatization dominated the domestic legislative debates during this period.1 In some countries, such as Russia, privatization occurred spontaneously, with stakeholders seizing state assets because the government lacked effective control of industry following the transition (Carlin and Mayer 1992). In Hungary and Poland, government officials intentionally delegated privatization authority to industry (Carlin and Mayer 1992). The Czech Republic opted for a voucher system, allowing citizens and private actors the opportunity to bid for shares in previously state-owned enterprises (Makhija 2003). In Poland, managers of stateowned industries employed a variation on spontaneous privatization, seeking out international partners and offering them highly favorable terms in exchange for a position in the new enterprise (Lipton, Sachs, and Summers 1990). The newly elected leaders in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in the early 1990s came to the helm of these governments during a period of massive political and

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    19

economic upheaval. While there are myriad ways in which privatization affected policy decisions, I focus here on three. First, output growth fell dramatically across these regions, reaching 40 percent of previous levels at their lowest point (Fischer and Sahay 2001, 4). By 1998 only three countries—Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia—had surpassed their pretransition output growth (Fischer and Sahay 2001, 9). Poor economic output meant less available tax revenue (Barr 2001, 171). The consequences of diminished tax revenues for politicians can be particularly problematic, especially for leaders in postsocialist states with constituents accustomed to expansive social safety nets.2 A second consequence of privatization was a wide distribution in income and earnings (Barr 2001, 171). Income disparities (traditionally measured by Gini coefficients) varied considerably by country. Higher Gini coefficients mean more income inequality. For countries like the United States, with higher income disparity, the Gini coefficient was .38 in the mid-2000s.3 During the same period, France had a Gini coefficient of .28 and hence lower income inequality. Central Asia experienced the widest income disparity between its highest- and lowestpaid workers. In both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan the Gini coefficient reached .47 between 1996 and 1999, meaning that top income earners typically earned ten times the salary of low-income earners (World Bank 2000b, 139–41). Central and Eastern European governments, like Hungary and the Czech Republic, avoided the high levels of income disparity experienced by Central Asian countries. Between 1996 and 1998 Hungary’s Gini coefficient was .25 and Poland’s Gini coefficient was .33 (World Bank 2000b, 140). Income distribution is not necessarily a poor outcome. The distribution meant that market forces were determining incomes. My point here is to suggest that new—and in some cases large—income disparities had considerable effects on social stability and enhanced levels of poverty. The transition had a devastating impact on absolute poverty levels throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia—between 1988 and 1998 poverty in these regions increased between 2 and 21 percent (World Bank 2000a). World Bank estimates suggest that prior to their transition, one out of every twenty-five people in these regions survived on less than $2.15 per day; by 1998, one out of every five lived on $2.15 per day (World Bank 2000b). A third consequence of privatization was a series of unanticipated economic crises in transitioning economies. These countries experienced banking, debt, and currency crises throughout the 1990s. Loss of consumer confidence in banks, owing to poor policies designed to counter inflation, led to speculation on banks and banking crises across these regions (EBRD 1999). By 1996, nineteen banks in Bulgaria closed because consumers lost confidence and withdrew their savings, leaving the banks with negative capital and nonperforming portfolios (Gulde 1999). In 1997 the Czech Republic, which had led the region in maintaining stability during the economic transformation, was hit by both a currency crisis

20    Chapter 1

Table 1.1  Summary of Domestic Economic Pressures on CEE and Central Asian Leaders •  Diminished output growth → fewer tax revenues •  Gap in income distribution → poverty

•  Unanticipated financial and economic crises → instability and unemployment

and a banking crisis (EBRD 1999). Tougher Central Bank regulations contributed to a loss of credibility in the Central Bank’s exchange rate policy, which led to bankruptcies, output decline, and unemployment (EBRD 1999, 76). Moreover, when subnational units (towns, municipalities, etc.) were given the opportunity to manage their finances for the first time, many, like those in Hungary, sought to borrow long term to finance short-term deficits (Liu and Waibel 2008). By late 1993, eight Hungarian banks were deemed insolvent. Prevailing weaknesses in their domestic economies shaped the policies these leaders adopted throughout the 1990s and made them more receptive to global actors with the resources to help. These leaders did not reflexively grant their citizens the right to sue them because they faced poor domestic economic conditions. Rather, these acute financial challenges heightened their receptiveness to recommendations from Western audiences, some of whom were making targeted recommendations about human rights at this time.

Insincere Commitments: Responding to Global Pressures Domestic economic pressures alone cannot explain why these governments ratified some treaties but not others—or why they granted their citizens the right to petition the UN treaty bodies for violations of some treaties but not others. Domestic economic pressures motivated new leaders to reach out to external actors. Two sets of global pressures, one explicit and one implicit, encouraged newly independent leaders to grant their citizens the right to petition the UN for violations of certain treaties. First, the global actors engaged with newly transitioning states in the 1990s— the EU in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States through USAID in Central Asia—made targeted and in some cases highly critical recommendations about which human rights policies to adopt. Throughout the 1990s the European Commission was carefully monitoring potential applicant countries to assess their compliance with the Copenhagen Criteria. The Copenhagen Criteria dictate general economic, political, and human rights policies expected of new EU members. Aspiring EU members are obliged to provide equal treatment to minority communities. This was a tall order for newly independent states. Much

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    21

Table 1.2  Summary of Global Human Rights Pressures on CEE and Central Asian Leaders • Targeted human rights recommendations from the European Commission and the US (explicit) •  New leaders associating human rights treaties with the West (implicit)

of the conflict that developed between Slovakia and the EU, for example, focused on human rights protections for Hungarian and Roma minorities. The extreme pressures that potential applicant countries faced to bring their policies in line with those of the EU help explain why Eastern European countries were particularly inclined to accept the oversight of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (55 percent of the countries in the region), but less inclined to accept the oversight of other committees. While the European Commission was providing careful annual assessments of the human rights practices of European states seeking entry into the EU, USAID was actively engaged in Central Asia, particularly in Kyrgyzstan. Demands from the United States for independent judiciaries, free and fair elections, and other hallmarks of democratic governance in the region help to explain why Central Asian states overwhelmingly accepted the oversight of the UN Human Rights Committee, which oversees implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The EU and the US were the actors empowered with the resources to help alleviate the economic struggles associated with privatization. Their recommendations would have been considerably important to newly independent leaders as a potential source of economic assistance. A second and more implicit global pressure emanated from the nature of the UN human rights treaties themselves and the early conflicts that surrounded their development. Beginning with the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the UN General Assembly in 1948, a divide between Cold War adversaries emerged. While the United States and Western European democracies voted in favor of the UDHR—which included the rights of political participation, freedom from discrimination and torture, freedom of movement, and the right to health care—the Soviets and their allies abstained. This early divide critically shaped the development of subsequent human rights treaties. The ­Soviets and the Eastern bloc states argued that economic and social rights should be established before civil and political rights, while the US and Western European states suggested that both sets of rights were essential to human rights.4 Rather than resolve the conflict between them, two separate treaties were established to address both issues in isolation. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights were both established, albeit separately, in 1966. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Communist leaders and a variety of other non-Western, developing governments began to argue forcefully that economic

22    Chapter 1

rights must precede civil and political rights. The Soviet delegate to the UN argued that “the exercise of economic and social rights was a prerequisite for the exercise of all other human rights and fundamental freedoms.”5 These early debates and political preferences essentially gave the ICCPR the Western stamp of approval. So when post-Soviet states emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had one relatively straightforward way to send a cheap signal about their commitment to human rights—to ratify the ICCPR and its Optional Protocol at long last.

Insincere Commitments: How Domestic and Global Pressures Explain Commitment How did granting their citizens the right to petition the UN help newly elected leaders in CEE and Central Asian countries alleviate these domestic and global pressures? Governments in these regions possessed two crosscutting considerations that contributed to ratification. On the one hand, poor domestic economic conditions heightened their need for global partners with the resources to rescue their economies. Public dissatisfaction over income disparities, decreased social services, and unemployment threatened leaders’ ability to remain in office. To appease their constituents and remedy these economic crises, it was essential to take heed of the recommendations of Western states and institutions. However, these leaders also had a second consideration to address. While a complete democratic overhaul of their domestic institutions would have satisfied the United States and the EU, among many newly independent states this move could have reduced the leader’s ability to remain in power. Instituting policies that liberalize media restrictions, encourage citizen participation in the electoral process, or allow for significant institutional checks on executive power all serve to ensure democratic succession—something that new leaders may have hoped to avoid. Opening domestic institutions to true democratic competition and transparency could have been considered prohibitively costly for leaders of newly transitioning states. This would have been particularly true in Central Asia, where there was no experience with democracy or citizen participation in government. The ­political structures that developed in Central Asia during this period reflect this deep internal conflict. Despite the democratic constitution in Kyrgyzstan, for example, the state functions more like an autocracy.6 Leaders in these regions had to strike a bargain between competing interests—temporarily boosting their democratic credentials in the hopes of obtaining economic assistance, but avoiding extensive democratization that could threaten their ability to retain power. These pressures help to explain the puzzle of high regional commitment to human rights, despite poor domestic human rights protections. Accepting the

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    23

Figure 1.1  Pressures on Newly Independent States oversight of UN human rights committees served as one cheap way governments could resolve this dilemma.7 However, unlike treaty ratification alone, granting citizens the right to petition the UN treaty bodies with claims of rights abuses is essentially a gamble for governments—it opens up the possibility that a government will be called to the UN, but does not guarantee that a government will be called. In some cases this gamble has paid off—the Czechs have yet to be brought before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, despite granting their citizens this opportunity in 2000 and passing highly questionable policies toward the Roma. The Uzbeks have lost out in this gamble—they have been called to the UN Human Rights Committee eighty-three times for claims arising out of violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.8 The decision to accept UN oversight, then, has very little to do with respecting human rights, internalizing global norms, or even rationally calculating domestic interests. Instead, accepting UN oversight is a strategy designed to offset global human rights pressures without paying the electoral costs associated with true democratic reform. I refer to this as an insincere commitment precisely because ratification of individual complaint mechanisms is a cheap signal used by governments to delay true reforms. Commitment to UN oversight among countries whose domestic rights practices diverge significantly from the requirements of the human rights treaties they ratify appears irrational when viewed as an isolated decision. Yet when accepting UN oversight is situated as one of many strategies

24    Chapter 1

that new leaders in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe employed to offset new pressures, the decision is less irrational and perhaps better described as strategically insincere.

Alternative Explanations of Commitment Existing theories of commitment offer substantial insights into the reasons behind ratification of human rights treaties, though none focus exclusively on ratification of individual petition mechanisms. These theories come from international relations, political science, and sociology, and focus alternately on rational cost benefit/calculations (Simmons 2009; Vreeland 2008; Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; ­Hathaway 2002; Moravcsik 2000) and socialization (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Wotipka and Ramirez 2003).

Rationalism One of the most well-accepted explanations for why governments ratify human rights treaties is that they calculate the costs and benefits of ratification before signing on the dotted line and submitting the treaty through the domestic ratification process. There are a host of benefits that governments might anticipate following commitment—ratification can be used as a concession to domestic opposition (Vreeland 2008) or to limit the policy options of future governments, thus protecting democratic institutions (Moravcsik 2000). Or, governments may ratify a treaty because they simply intend to comply with its terms or hope to remain in-step with regional peers (Simmons 2009). These same theories also emphasize the domestic costs of ratification. The institutional structure of the domestic legal system can enhance the costs of commitment in states with common law legal systems, where judges possess broad powers of interpretation and may be threatened by the impact of an externally negotiated agreement (Simmons 2009, 109). Newly elected democrats in post–WWII Europe supported the creation of the European Court of Human Rights, which limited their ability to violate the human rights of their citizens in exchange for the knowledge that future leaders would be similarly constrained. The costs of limited policy autonomy for the current government are offset by the benefits, locking in democracy and buffering new, fragile democracies against domestic, nondemocratic threats (Moravcsik 2000). Although the costs associated with a lack of policy autonomy remain the central feature of rationalist accounts of treaty ratification, others point to the potential costs associated with compliance after ratification to explain the initial ratification decision (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; Hathaway 2003). When deciding whether or not to commit, governments consider how costly it will be to bring state practices into compliance with the terms of the treaty. If their current hu-

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    25

man rights laws diverge considerably from the treaty, compliance will be difficult and a government will be less likely to make the initial commitment (Hathaway 2003, 1833). These costs are negligible if governments only ratify treaties with which they are already compliant (von Stein 2005; Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom 1996), if they have no intention of complying with the terms of the treaty following ratification (Vreeland 2008; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005), or if the enforcement mechanisms are weak or nonexistent (Cole 2005b; Hathaway 2003; Donnelly 1986, 1989). Efforts to disaggregate and test the potential costs associated with ratification of the Convention Against Torture (CAT) have largely supported the role of costs in conditioning commitment (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; Cole 2005b). Beyond the anticipated costs of policy change following ratification, Goodliffe and Hawkins (2006) propose two additional costs that are relevant to ratification decisions—unintended consequences and the costs of foreclosing options. States with few resources or very different legal philosophies from those underlying the treaty may lack the ability to anticipate the costs of commitment to the Convention Against Torture, and therefore face unintended consequences (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006, 363). Foreclosing options refers to the governments’ loss of policy flexibility in the wake of ratification. Goodliffe and Hawkins capture a loss of policy flexibility by including GDP and the extent to which a state is embroiled in an intrastate dispute. A low GDP and high engagement in domestic conflict limit the governments’ ability to flexibly adjust to a treaty’s terms after ratification; therefore, states with these characteristics should be less likely to commit. Rationalist accounts of treaty ratification possess an inherent theoretical appeal. They posit a straightforward cost-benefit calculation to explain state behavior. However, rationalist theory has two weaknesses, one theoretical and one empirical. In theory, rational governments should be able to calculate the costs of bringing their practices into compliance with a treaty. While recognizing that ratifying governments can determine if their current practices comply with the terms of a given treaty, civil society can impose costs following ratification that governments are not always able to anticipate. IGOs and NGOs are uniquely positioned to draw attention to human rights abuses perpetuated by the state (Boli and Thomas 1997; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999). These groups use their resources to draw attention to gaps between state rhetoric and state practice. Absent attention from NGOs and IGOs, the decision to ratify without complying may be relatively low-cost— the state ratifies but faces no pressure to alter domestic practices. However, when engaged NGOs and IGOs take an interest in a state’s practices, ratification can be extraordinarily costly. It is under these conditions that interested NGOs can severely elevate the cost of ratification. I demonstrate through the case studies in the following chapters that NGOs are responsible for both educating the public about their ability to directly petition the UN and for publicly shaming ­governments

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for failure to comply. Rationalist accounts of ratification focus squarely on the costs associated with compliance following ratification to explain the initial decision to commit. These accounts of commitment neglect the limitations of newly independent governments to foresee just how aggressively they would be lobbied by interested NGOs. Second, rationalist accounts imply that states already complying with human rights treaties, by protecting their citizens’ human rights and respecting the rule of law, should be more willing to commit to human rights treaties. Protecting human rights and respecting the rule of law is a hallmark of democratic governance. This means that the costs of commitment for democracies, specifically, should be low, thereby making those states, at least theoretically, more inclined to ratify human rights treaties. The empirical data in chapter 3 bear out this expectation. However, when the analysis is shifted slightly, from ratification of human rights treaties to acceptance of UN oversight, rationalist expectations break down. The autocratic states of Central Asia have accepted the oversight of the UN Human Rights Committee at very high rates. Moreover, quantitative analysis of ratification largely undercuts rationalist models, finding much stronger support for the role of socialization models (Cole 2005b; Simmons 2002).

Constructivism Constructivists diverge from rationalists in their attention to the power of norms and ideas. Rather than evaluate the costs and benefits associated with ratification, constructivists draw heavily from sociology to suggest that states are embedded in an exogenous global society, develop their preferences and identity in relation to their external environment, and ratify treaties as an expression of their current or aspirational values. Constructivist theory helps us to understand how states construct their identities and the cultural context within which they define their interests (Katzenstein 1996, 19–32). State identities, policies, and preferences are developed in response to other actors. Put simply, states do not possess a core identity apart from their peers; rather, their identities are constructed in response to their environment (Meyer et al. 1997). This is a departure from rationalist explanations, which identify endogenous, cost-benefit calculations as the origin of state preferences. For constructivists, the norms and culture of global society form the foundation within which states develop their identities and interests.9 Katzenstein (1996) suggests a series of processes through which norms develop by “spontaneously evolving, as social practice; consciously promoted, as political strategies to further specific interests; deliberately negotiated, as a mechanism for conflict management; or as a combination mixing these types” (21). Norms such as democracy, capitalism, and human rights are not static—they emerge and evolve as states interact with each other and with other international actors (Wendt 1992). These global norms are

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    27

not unlike fashion trends. In some years respect for women’s rights is fashionable, while in other years respect for the rights of racial minorities is more popular. The relationship between norms, state identity, and state behavior does not flow in one direction, with norms determining state identity and behavior. States may initially develop their preferences in response to external stimuli, but state practice then shapes the content and character of global norms. The norms in turn influence state preferences and policies. The result is a feedback effect—state preferences are both created by and influential in the creation of international norms. Human rights norms not only protect citizens from state intervention, but also (and increasingly) define a “‘civilized state’ in the modern world” (Risse 2000, 5). States define their identities—as advocates of human rights, for example—in relation to their environment, and in so doing shape the range of legitimate social identities available to others. Constructivists assign great weight to influential rather than coercive forces to explain state behavior in international politics, though there is variation in the methods through which scholars suggest that norms develop and shape state behavior (Goodman and Jinks 2004; Ramirez et al. 2002; Finnemore 2001; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). Pioneering work in this field posits a norm life cycle consisting of the emergence, cascade, and eventual internalization of a given norm (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). There is general agreement that socialization is the process through which norms become so entrenched in state practice that they develop a takenfor-granted nature.10 However, recent efforts have been made to both identify the micro-processes associated with socialization ( Johnston 2001) and to identify other processes through which norms influence state behavior, including acculturation (Goodman and Jinks 2004) and diffusion (Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2008). Prevailing standards of behavior are not equally likely to emerge from all international actors. The international society responsible for socialization does not consist of every state in the international system. Instead, only those like-minded states have the ability to socialize others (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999, 11). RisseKappen (1996) argues that members of the community of liberal democracies are not only less likely to fight each other, but are also more likely to create institutions to serve their common interests and ideals (37). Thus, norms of behavior in the international system should be promoted and institutions created by established democracies (Risse-Kappen 1996; Reus-Smit 1997; Wendt 1992). Other scholars have pointed to the increasingly important role of transnational advocacy networks and nongovernmental organizations to explain the origin of norms (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Kaufmann and Pape 1999; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Boli and Thomas 1997).11 These complex processes through which states develop their preferences and identities contribute to their behavior with respect to human rights treaties. Through their interaction with other states and international actors, states are socialized to acceptable standards of behavior. Treaty ratification then may be the

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result of persuasion by these actors, or it may be that states aspire to internalize prevailing norms and use treaty ratification to achieve this goal. Constructivist scholars argue that treaty ratification can be used to solidify the acceptance of global human rights norms domestically (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Lutz and Sikkink 2000). These global forces of socialization push states to adopt similar human rights standards, ratify the same global treaties, and eventually to become more similar in their approaches to human rights. Wotipka and Ramirez (2003) argue that states are increasingly “constructed from and influenced by world models of progress and justice set forth by universalistic scripts for authentic nationstatehood” (10). These standards should, over time, result in greater nation-state isomorphism (Ramirez et al. 2002). Normative models fill an important gap in international relations literature by explaining the origin and substance of state preferences, yet both empirical and anecdotal evidence challenge central constructivist predictions. Constructivists point to liberal democracies as the source of cosmopolitan norms, and indeed democratic states are statistically more likely to ratify the four United Nations Human Rights treaties and their associated individual petition mechanisms. But an investigation of the timing of ratification of IPMs between democracies and nondemocracies suggests that nondemocracies often act like democratic states— ratifying at a similar pace and with similar levels of commitment. Moreover, actual domestic practices appear unlikely to predict patterns of ratification. Hathaway (2002) demonstrates that among all nondemocracies, those with worse human rights records are more likely to commit to the Genocide Convention, the Torture Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and to a lesser degree the Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1853). This is a particularly problematic observation for constructivists because democracies are supposed to serve as norm entrepreneurs, encouraging nondemocratic states to adopt prevailing human rights norms. If nondemocratic states are running astride with democratic states, then there cannot be time for these norms to be promoted and internalized through the processes that constructivists predict. In the next chapter I examine more closely which types of governments grant their citizens the right to petition the United Nations. That discussion will make clear that some high-profile democracies—the United States, for example—have been stubbornly resistant to new human rights institutions with oversight capabilities (e.g., the International Criminal Court), and many remain utterly unwilling to accept United Nations oversight. Established democracies are shunning global oversight of their domestic human rights policies while notorious rights-violating regimes are assuming key positions in global human rights bodies—Cuba, Sudan, and Zimbabwe held important positions on the United Nations Human Rights Commission, while Libya held the panel’s chairmanship before its dissolution in 2006. These facts call into question the strength of explanations that privilege norms and established democracies as the global force of socialization culminating in the ratification of UN human rights treaties.

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Table 1.3  Implications for Two Alternate Explanations of Commitment Rationalism

1. Ratification is a rational policy devised as a concession to domestic opposition.

2. Leaders ratify to lock in democracy in the face of nondemocratic threats to their authority. 3. If the anticipated costs associated with compliance are perceived to be low, leaders will commit. 4. Governments with few material resources or legal philosophies that are distinct from those underlying the treaty will be subject to a higher potential for unintended consequences and will be less likely to ratify.

5. The possibility of a loss of policy autonomy will inhibit ratification among governments engaged in intrastate conflicts or that possess low GDPs (foreclosing policy options). 6.  Governments with common law legal systems will be less likely to ratify. Constructivism

1. Governments ratify human rights treaties in response to socialization by established democracies (IR constructivist approach).

2. Governments ratify human rights treaties in response to socialization by world society (sociological approach).

3. Governments that ratify because they aspire to internalize the rights contained in a given treaty should make clear attempts to comply in the short term (1–2 years immediately following commitment).

Explaining Compliance The disciplines of international relations and international law have contributed greatly to our collective understanding of the conditions under which governments comply with treaty commitments. I use insights from both of these literatures to develop my claim—that NGOs can, under certain circumstances, enhance levels of compliance with the decisions of UN treaty bodies by using individual cases at the UN as focal points for domestic rights claims and revealing incidences of noncompliance. NGOs often initiate the processes that contribute to compliance by socializing domestic populations about how to use their new rights at the UN. There exists significant disagreement across these disciplines about the conditions under which treaties promote compliance. For realists, there is little reason to believe that treaties alter state behavior (Mearsheimer 1994/1995; Goldsmith and Posner 2005; Morgenthau 1985; Aron 1981). If we witness compliance with a treaty, such compliance is assumed to be a coincidence of interests aligning with treaty language or reflective of underlying power structures in the international system (Morgenthau 1985). This means that while treaties are capable of screening those governments willing to offer lip service to their terms, treaties do not actually constrain state behavior in meaningful ways (von Stein 2005). The dominance of

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neo-realism in international relations has relegated the study of international law and institutions by denying the influence of legalized agreements on state behavior (Morgenthau 1985; Bull 1977). Within international law the question shifted from whether international law affects state behavior to how international law affects state behavior. Management theorists argue that states comply with international treaties because they view compliance as “the right thing to do” (Chayes and Chayes 1995; Young 1992). Such noninstrumental calculations of compliance lead these scholars to an optimistic view of the effects of international law on state practice—as Henkin (1979) famously observed, “almost all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.” Management theorists emphasize a general pattern of rule consistent behavior conditioned by efficiency, interests, and norms (Chayes and Chayes 1995, 4). A characteristic feature of this approach is careful attention to the iterative discourse associated with the process of treaty making (Chayes and Chayes 1995, 25). Through the process of treaty making, “states not only weigh the benefits and burdens of commitment but also explore, redefine, and sometimes discover their interests” (Chayes and Chayes 1995, 4). Noncompliance, from this perspective, is often not a willful decision, but rather a consequence of limited capacity. Management theory explicitly cautions against including coercive sanctioning and enforcement mechanisms in international agreements, even referring to these coercive mechanisms as a waste of time (Chayes and Chayes 1995, 2). Much like the constructivist approach to treaty commitment, the management approach to compliance stresses the process and environment through which states develop their preferences. In general, management theorists are optimistic about compliance, suggesting that if states possess the capacity to comply, that they will generally be observed to be doing so. The wide variation in observed patterns of compliance with human rights treaties highlights the weakness of the management approach. Focusing on a lack of capacity as the core impediment to compliance makes intuitive sense, but is too optimistic to explain compliance with human rights agreements. This approach implies that compliance occurs because governments have altered their preferences and policies in relation to their social environment, and that, other things being equal, we ought to observe state compliance with international agreements. To be sure, a domestic uprising may prevent a government that would otherwise have complied with their commitment to respect the civil and political rights of their citizens from doing so. However, in general we see wide variation in compliance with human rights agreements, particularly among new democracies, which cuts against the optimistic expectations management theorists advance.12 An alternative explanation of compliance, the enforcement approach, draws on the social choice tradition in political science (Young 1992; Yarbrough and Yarbrough 1992; Axelrod 1984; Keohane 1984). States are considered to be rational actors who seek to maximize the benefits while minimizing the costs of

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    31

cooperation. States are expected to willfully defect from their international treaty commitments because they possess incentives to cheat, but it is possible to structure a states’ calculation of its interests in favor of compliance by monitoring and punishing instances of defection. The propensity to defect can be mitigated by careful institutional design. Oversight and sanctioning mechanisms can elevate the costs of noncompliance, thereby enhancing the attractiveness of rule compliant behavior because states fear reprisals from others (Axelrod and Keohane 1986; Underdal 1998). One mechanism of commitment is thus the fear of direct reprisal for failure to comply with treaty terms. This mechanism is straightforward—if State A fails to abide by the terms of a bilateral trade treaty with State B, State B may punish A by cutting off A’s access to B’s domestic market. A second mechanism of compliance consistent with this approach is reputation. States may make a rational, strategic decision to comply with their treaty commitments in order to develop a reputation among others as a rule abiding state. Unlike the threat of a direct punishment for noncompliance, reputational costs for noncompliance are paid in the loss of future cooperative agreements. In the previous example, State A’s failure to comply would not elicit a direct retaliation from State B. Rather, State A’s defection would reveal a reputation for cheating and thus inhibit State B from entering into cooperative endeavors with A again in the future. Snidal (1985) has reinforced the theoretical insights of this school, introducing the element of time to suggest that states can be expected to comply with their international commitments when it serves their “short or long term self-interest to do so” (Koh 1996/1997, 2632). Reputation and retaliation, both central features of the enforcement approach to compliance, sit uncomfortably in the field of human rights. It is unclear what a reputation for faithfully complying with human rights agreements yields in the international system (Keohane 1997). States can simultaneously possess multiple reputations across different areas—a good reputation for complying with human rights treaties and a bad reputation for complying with trade treaties, for example (Goldsmith and Posner 2005, 102). There is little reason to believe that reputation in one issue area will carry over into reputation in another (Downs and Jones 2002). Even where states have reputations for complying with their human rights commitments, political events may intervene to inhibit their capacity to comply. In some of the cases explored in subsequent chapters, revolutions and leadership changes intervene to affect levels of compliance. Thus, even if governments sought to sincerely comply with their commitments, a claim I view skeptically, major political events impeded their ability to do so (Mercer 1996). Regarding retaliation, we have few examples of governments directing their foreign policy against other states purely in retaliation for lack of compliance with human rights agreements. Again, a comparison to trade agreements is instructive. If State A fails to live up to its obligations under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, causing harm to State B’s economy, then State B is likely to retaliate against State A at the World Trade Organization dispute resolution panel. In this

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case the likelihood of retaliation will inhibit State A from cheating. With respect to human rights treaties—if State A tortures its citizens in direct violation of the Convention Against Torture, it is unclear what interest would prompt State B to retaliate. An additional challenge with existing theories of compliance is that most hinge on the expectation that there is indeed some collective benefit associated with cooperating. As Simmons (2009) has noted, “in the human rights area, of course, a country can generally realize its desired level of rights without the cooperation of any other state” (123). Unlike trade or security agreements, both of which produce collective benefits unavailable absent cooperation, human rights agreements produce no clear collective benefits. Governments that aspire to eradicate torture or discrimination would better achieve these ends by passing domestic legislation than ratifying a global treaty. The reputation and retaliation mechanisms that promote compliance with trade or security agreements do not easily apply to government practices regarding domestic human rights protections. Important new literature in international relations seeks to overcome this limitation by carefully identifying the conditions under which human rights treaties can affect compliance through domestic political processes (Simmons 2009). By setting agendas, mobilizing domestic protest, and leveraging litigation, domestic groups use international human rights treaties to press their governments to comply (Simmons 2009, 125–55). Even this attention to the domestic processes through which domestic actors use treaties to elicit government compliance does not go far enough in emphasizing how the design of treaties and their unique oversight mechanisms might promote or inhibit compliance. Building from this new tradition, this book explores the utility of individual petition at the UN as a source of leverage over rights violating governments in the domestic setting, arguing that the right of individual complaint at the UN complements these domestic forces in promoting compliance with human rights treaties. Empirical analysis of the relationship between treaty ratification and human rights practices has arrived at divergent conclusions. Two pioneering pieces demonstrate that when controlling for other factors contributing to human rights practices, ratifying governments typically offer worse levels of respect for civil, political, and women’s rights and higher levels of torture and genocide than nonratifying governments (Keith 1999; Hathaway 2002, 1992–93). Despite this early skepticism regarding the impact of human rights treaties on human rights practices, recent work challenges these conclusions, revealing that the more democratic states become the more likely they will be to comply with human rights agreements (Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, and Meyer 2008), and wealth and participation in IGOs enhances human rights protections (Landman 2005, 116). Why does democratic development coincide with a higher incidence of compliance with human rights agreements? These recent empirical analyses point us toward a deeper consideration of oversight mechanisms in human rights agree-

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    33

Table 1.4  Implications from Alternative Conceptions of Compliance 1. The more sanctioning and monitoring mechanisms a treaty possesses, the greater the likelihood that states will comply. 2.  Governments will comply if they fear retribution for noncompliance. 3.  Governments will comply for fear of reputational consequences. 4.  A lack of capacity will inhibit state compliance with treaties.

ments as one potential source of compliance with human rights agreements in transitioning democracies. Extant theories of compliance leave very little room for individual citizens or NGOs to get involved in the process of promoting compliance with international human rights treaties. Social forces and civil society actors are given too little credit for the subtle ways they prompt governments to comply with their human rights commitments, particularly among states transitioning to democracy.

The Effects of Insincere Commitments on Compliance Existing empirical data challenges the assertion that treaties enhance human rights protections at all (Hathaway 2002). However, if we shift the analysis from ratification of human rights treaties to ratification of individual petition mechanisms, there is a stronger link between ratification and improved respect for human rights. Indeed, Hathaway (2003) identifies only one anomaly in her data, which otherwise indicate that ratification of human rights treaties does not elicit compliance, by saying that “I do make what I believe to be the relatively uncontroversial claim . . . that stronger monitoring and enforcement procedures have the power to improve compliance with human rights treaties. Specifically, I observe that noncompliance appears less common and less pronounced among countries that have ratified the Optional Protocol to the CCPR and Article 21 of the Torture Convention, and countries that have ratified these provisions generally have substantially better human rights ratings that those that have not” (2003, 188). Oversight mechanisms may therefore be useful in increasing levels of compliance—the question is, how do they elicit this compliance? I begin with the assumption that the types of governments that this book takes as its analytic focus, newly independent postsocialist states, have some strategic interest in publically associating themselves with Western human rights treaties. The domestic and global pressures that inspire this decision are laid out in previous sections. Given that these governments have committed to human rights treaties and offered their citizens the opportunity to petition the UN, why do some comply and others defect?

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Recent work in international relations (Landman 2005; Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Neumayer 2005) demonstrates that where nongovernmental organizations are active, human rights treaties can alter state behavior. During the era of Soviet dominance, civil society was stamped out of existence in Central Asia and in some countries in Eastern Europe. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have witnessed wide variance in the emergence and impact of NGOs in post-Soviet states. In countries where registration requirements are minimal and NGOs flourish, there is a higher probability that they will positively effect compliance with human rights treaties. Where NGOs and other civil society actors were stifled in their work, there are fewer opportunities to affect domestic rights practices. In bridging rationalist and constructivist accounts of compliance, Checkel (2001) suggests that “argumentative persuasion is more likely to be effective when the persuadee is in a novel and uncertain environment—generated by the newness of the issue, a crisis, or serious policy failure—and thus cognitively motivated to analyze new information” (562). The leaders of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia were precisely the types of actors that would have been receptive to persuasion, and NGOs used the right of individual complaint at the UN to pressure governments in novel ways. We know that NGOs enhance levels of compliance by naming and shaming governments for failure to comply, mobilizing citizens to pressure their governments, or teaming up with more powerful states to leverage changes in human rights protections (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Lutz and Sikkink 2000). To this growing body of literature exploring how NGOs facilitate compliance, I add two mechanisms. First, following ratification of individual petition mechanisms, NGOs can socialize domestic populations about their new rights. By training the public at large—as well as lawyers and judges—about the right of individual petition at the UN, NGOs increase the probability that defections from a treaty’s terms will be made public. In this way, NGOs empower individual citizens in ratifying states to promote treaty compliance. A second method through which NGOs can facilitate compliance with human rights treaties is to publicize losses before UN human rights committees and pressure governments to comply with the recommendations of UN committees. Using symbolic politics, or a single event to symbolize the plight of a group, can be an effective strategy for increasing awareness (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 22–23). NGOs used the murder of Natalya Estemirova in Chechnya to draw attention to the plight of human rights advocates in Chechnya and Russia. The right of individual complaint before the UN presents an unparalleled opportunity for NGOs to identify individual citizens whose rights have been violated by their governments, and promote their cause both as it moves through the UN and once a decision at the UN has been rendered. In this way NGOs can use the right of individual complaint at the UN as a focal point to draw attention to very narrow and targeted omissions in human rights policies—the absence of restraining orders in Hungary

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    35

Table 1.5  How NGOs Use IPMs to Enhance Compliance with Human Rights Treaties •  Teaching domestic populations how to take advantage of their right to petition the UN • Using individual petitions at the UN to focus public attention on specific omissions in human rights protections

or the lack of antidiscrimination legislation in public dining establishments in Slovakia. Holding press conferences to shame governments into complying with the recommendations of these UN oversight committees also increases the costs of noncompliance for governments domestically. There is thus an intervening variable that explains why some newly independent states comply with their commitments and others do not—the strength of NGOs. Both quantitative and qualitative research has demonstrated that where a high number of citizens are linked up with international nongovernmental organizations, pressure on the government to comply with international commitments increases (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Neumayer 2005; Landman 2005; Lutz and Sikkink 2000). Granting one’s citizens the opportunity to petition the UN does not directly and inexorably lead to compliance. Where NGOs train the public about the use of these mechanisms, focus their attention on targeted rights violations, and then pressure governments to comply, we should expect a higher likelihood of compliance.

The Timing of Compliance A few notes are in order regarding the expected timing of compliance. There are two reasons to expect compliance with human rights treaties, when it is observed at all, to come years after commitment. First, the theory of commitment developed here emphasizes that human rights commitments among newly independent governments are strategically insincere—designed to temporarily alleviate domestic economic and global human rights pressures. Governments responsible for commitment are therefore using commitment as a strategy to delay true democratic reforms in the face of domestic economic pressure. There is no reason to expect governments that commit to proceed immediately with compliance—because in most cases commitment has little to do with a genuine desire to improve rights protections, compliance should not immediately follow commitment. Second, when NGOs teach local populations to use this new right at the UN, draw attention to specific weaknesses in domestic rights protections, and pressure governments to alter policies in response to losses before these committees, we should expect a higher likelihood of compliance. However, these activities take time, as does the process though which petitions make their way through

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UN ­committees. On average there is a two-to-three-year delay between initial submission at the UN and final decisions. If citizens taking advantage of their opportunity to petition the UN affects levels of compliance, then we should not expect compliance to immediately follow commitment. Instead, there ought to be a lag time between the submission of complaints to the UN and changes in domestic human rights protections. The right of individual petition at the UN presents an unparalleled opportunity to gauge the impact of international law and international organizations on national human rights protections, because the UN treaty bodies offer clear and targeted recommendations to governments that lose cases. However, the theoretical insights offered here, focusing on the effects of individual petition at the UN and the initially insincere government commitment that makes this right possible, imply that at minimum between two and three years will pass before we observe compliance. There is a good argument to be made that even if these leaders were initially caught off-guard by the work of NGOs in promoting compliance, over time similarly situated peers ought to have learned that commitment was prohibitively costly and commitment should have dropped off. Social learning models in international relations offer much insight into why and how actors develop their preferences in relation to their external environment (Checkel 2001; Soysal 1994; Risse-Kappen 1995; Finnemore 2001; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). However, the lag time between commitment and the pressures to comply have served to undercut the effects of learning for many governments. The vast majority of newly independent governments granted their citizens the opportunity to petition UN committees relatively swiftly within the first ten years of becoming independent, and none have withdrawn this right.13 However, for the few governments that held off and committed later, reservations contained in UN records suggest that they did indeed learn from their peers. Romania, for example, was a laggard in terms of granting citizens the right to petition the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, not granting citizens this right until 2003. Having no doubt witnessed the challenges that the Slovaks encountered following the submission of complaints from their Roma community, the Romanian declaration regarding Article 14 is fascinating. The Romanians accepted the authority of the Racial Discrimination Committee to receive complaints from their citizens arising out of violations of the Convention; however, they also declared the following: “Without prejudice to the article 14 paragraphs 1 and 2 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Romania considers that the mentioned provisions do not confer to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination the competence of examining communications of persons invoking the existence and infringement of collective rights. The body, which is competent in Romania . . . is the National Council for Combating Discrimination” (Romanian Government 2003). In short, while Romanians have the individual right to petition the UN—in

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    37

Figure 1.2  How NGOs Enhance Compliance cases where there is a collective invocation of the Convention, unquestionably the most serious type because it suggests a systematic government violation of group rights, those individuals lack the ability to petition the UN. This creative declaration, granting individuals but denying groups the ability to take claims of racial discrimination to the UN, suggests that governments learned from the experiences of others. The vast majority of newly independent governments were not as lucky as Romania, as they ratified early and learned slowly how this commitment could impose modest costs.

Insincere Commitments and Compliance: Predictions In summary, the domestic pressures associated with privatizing state-run economies throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia contributed to very poor economic performance while heavily influencing the policies of many of these governments throughout the 1990s. Poor domestic economic conditions did not automatically lead these governments to commit to human rights. Instead, domestic economic pressures created a moment of opportunity, giving Western governments an advantage in demanding that governments in transition adopt Western human rights policies. Western audiences, the United States and the EU, were making targeted recommendations to governments across these regions about which human rights policies to promote—minority rights in the case of new

38    Chapter 1

European democracies, and civil and political rights in Central Asia. Leaders of transitional governments sought out cheap strategies for mediating these tensions. Individual petition at the UN potentially engendered costs, but the commitment was essentially a gamble because there was also a distinct possibility that citizens would not take advantage of their new right to petition the UN for treaty violations. Where governments provided the political space needed for the embryonic development of civil society, NGOs and IGOs stepped in to socialize the domestic public about their new rights at the UN. In some instances, civil society actors successfully imposed modest shaming costs on governments that ultimately enhanced levels of government compliance with human rights treaties. If the initial ratification decision is insincere, motivated by a need to mediate global and domestic pressures, then ratification will be more likely under conditions of acute economic need (see implication 1, table 1.6). Systemic banking crises, currency crises, debt crises, and debt restructuring, all drawn from International Monetary Fund data, are used in the statistical analysis in chapter 3 to link poor economic conditions with commitment. Governments with weaker economies will have a greater propensity to seek our cheep signals of commitment to human rights. A second prediction flows from this theory: ratification should be one of many modest strategies leaders of newly independent states use to attract assistance from external actors. It is likely that governments sought out many ways to keep their jobs, alleviate domestic economic pressures, and respond to the concerns of ­Western audiences. Making an insincere commitment to human rights would be one such option for addressing these concerns, but this was certainly not the only way. We might also expect these governments to engage Western actors with official state visits and public relations campaigns designed specifically for consumption by Western audiences. The case studies are particularly useful in contextualizing commitment to individual petition at the UN as one of many strategies newly independent governments adopted to mitigate the pressures they faced (see implication 2, table 1.6). Implication 3 in table 1.6 identifies global pressures as the source of change in human rights policies. Newly independent governments in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia were responsive to the demands of institutions such as the EU and USAID. As criticism of their human rights practices grows, newly independent governments are more inclined to commit to treaties that address these concerns. For European governments who were routinely criticized for their lack of protections for minority populations, granting citizens the right to petition the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination could help respond to critics. Ratification of individual petition mechanisms enhances opportunities for individual citizens and NGOs to pressure governments to comply with their global human rights commitments. The activity and engagement of NGOs is the key variable separating governments that comply with human rights treaties from those

A New Approach to Commitment and Compliance    39

Table 1.6  Six Implications for Commitment and Compliance 1. Governments ratify in response to human rights policy recommendations from Western actors during periods of acute economic weakness. 2. Ratification is one of many modest strategies leaders employ to attract the assistance of external actors.

3. Ratification follows when Western states and institutions pressure newly independent governments to change specific human rights policies. 4. NGOs enhance the costs of noncompliance by teaching domestic populations how to complain to the UN. 5. NGOs enhance levels of compliance by using individual petitions before the UN as focal points, drawing attention to the omission of specific human rights policies in domestic law. 6. Governments that accept UN oversight will not comply with their commitment to respect the human rights of their citizens in the short term.

that do not. These mechanisms can enhance compliance in two ways. First, when NGOs socialize the public about their right to complain at the UN, a new avenue for revealing domestic human rights violations before global audiences becomes available (see implication 4, table 1.6). Second, NGOs enhance levels of compliance with human rights treaties by using individual cases before UN committees as focal points to draw attention to specific human rights violations. If ratification is an insincere commitment by governments seeking to alleviate domestic economic pressures and respond to critics, then there is little reason to expect these governments to actually alter their domestic rights practices immediately following ratification. Unlike alternative theories of commitment—which imply that ratifying governments should be observed complying with their commitments either because they have been socialized to internalize global norms or because they correctly anticipated the adjustment costs of commitment—my theory makes a distinct prediction about the behavior of ratifying governments immediately following ratification. Because leaders commit insincerely and individual petitions before the UN take years to be resolved, over longer periods of time compliance should be observed, but in the short term (between one and two years after ratification) ratifying governments are unlikely to comply (see implication 6, table 1.6). This chapter argues for a reorientation of our approach to commitment and compliance with global human rights agreements. Even where governments make insincere commitments, individual citizens, with the assistance of NGOs, can use mechanism of justice available at the UN in novel ways to push and prod resistant governments to expand domestic rights protections. In the next chapter I explore which citizens have been most inclined to seize on this opportunity and sue their governments for violations of human rights treaties.

40    Chapter 1

Notes   1.  Discussions of the intense domestic conflicts in Central Asia and Eastern Europe abound. For examples see Spolar (1996); Polish News Bulletin (1995); and The Economist (1994).   2.  For a discussion of the generous benefits newly independent states attempted to provide for their populations post-transition see World Bank (2000b, 287–94).   3.  This estimation comes from the OECD’s Stats extract online, available at http:// stats.oecd.org/index.aspx. The estimation for the US is calculated after taxes and transfers.   4.  See Forsythe (2006, 40–42; 1982). See also Hannum (1992) and Donnelly (1981, 638). Both Forsythe and Donnelly suggest that Western states were supportive of both civil and political rights and economic and social rights   5.  Quoted in Donnelly (1981, 644).   6.  Dukenbaev and Hansen (2003) provide two flowcharts to explain the Kyrgyz governing structure. The first, provided for in the constitution, consists of co-equal branches. The second flowchart is drawn with a president superior to the other branches of government, which they contend closer approximates reality. For the flowcharts see Appendix 1 (p. 50) and Appendix 3 (p. 52). See also Kovalskii (2001).   7.  This is distinct from but related to Hafner-Burton, Tsutsui, and Meyer (2008), who argue that rights violating regimes are apt to ratify human rights treaties because they are less constrained by domestic forces to comply. The right of individual petition among rights-violating regimes carries with it the potential of shaming at the UN.   8.  As of August 16, 2010.   9.  For a discussion of the distinction between rationalism and social constructivism see Risse (2000). 10.  Johnston (2001) and Ikenberry and Kupchan (1990). 11.  There is an important divide between international relations scholars and sociologists on the identity of norm entrepreneurs. For international relations scholars, norms emerge from established democracies (Risse-Kappen 1996; Reus-Smit 1997). For sociologists, world society leads all states to adopt similar policies (Meyer et al. 1997). I test for both versions of this argument in the statistical analysis and the case studies. I am grateful to Feryal Cherif for drawing my attention to this split. 12.  For more on this variation see Landman (2005) and Simmons (2009). 13.  A detailed examination of the timing of commitment is offered in chapter 2.

2 Patterns of Commitment Which co unt r ie s g rant their citizens the right to file complaints before the UN treaty bodies? Which countries merely ratify human rights treaties to avoid UN intrusion into their domestic affairs? In chapter 1 we considered theories explaining commitment and compliance. Each of those theories makes predictions about which types of governments should be most inclined to ratify treaties. Social learning models imply that established democratic governments should lead by example and make bold commitments to human rights. Cost/benefit models also imply that those with the best practices and least to lose will be the most likely to ratify treaties. Still other models of commitment point to newly democratizing governments as those most inclined to commit. This chapter explores trends in treaty ratification and patterns associated with ratification of individual petition mechanisms. The chapter also provides an overview of the frequency of use of the individual complaint procedures attached to the following treaties: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention Against Torture. The findings call into question some basic assumptions about which types of governments grant their citizens the ability to file claims before the UN treaty bodies, under what conditions they will do so, and which types of governments are most likely to be called to defend their human rights practices at the UN by their own citizens.

Data Sources The data used in this chapter come from a variety of sources. The United ­Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) possesses ratification records for every state covering all 41

42    Chapter 2

t­ reaties and Individual Petition Mechanisms (IPMs).1 The Polity IV project provides detailed data on regime characteristics and transitions.2 Polity IV data are used here to capture regime type (democracy, moderate democracy, and autocracy) and regime persistence (established and transitioning). Geographic regions are generated using World Bank regional classifications.3

Treaties and Individual Petition Mechanisms Governments have a few options when it comes to United Nations human rights treaties—ignore them and hope that the global human rights community will not notice, have the chief executive sign the treaty to signify support without bringing the treaty to a vote in the national legislature, ratify the treaty with a vote in the national legislature, or ratify the treaty and accept UN oversight for domestic treaty implementation. In short, the options are: ignore, sign, ratify, or ratify and grant citizens the ability to file individual petitions before the UN (table 2.1). Absent the vocal opposition of domestic or global advocacy groups, the first of these options is costless for most governments. The government ignores the existence of a treaty and pursues domestic human rights policies that reflect its preferences. From an international law perspective, signing a treaty does not suggest that it will be implemented domestically. Rather, signature merely means that a government agrees in principle with the essence of a treaty (Slomanson 2007, 362). In fact, signing a human rights treaty amid the fanfare of a national press conference may elevate domestic support for the government, while requiring absolutely no policy changes. Ratification, which requires approval by the national legislature in most countries, means that the treaty has force of law domestically and citizens should expect their government to alter their domestic human rights practices in compliance with the treaty. Ratification should, at least in theory, be a costlier commitment than signature because it implies that the government will endeavor to comply with the terms of the treaty (Shaw 2003, 818). The final option, ratifying the treaty and accepting UN oversight by ratifying an optional protocol, or making a positive declaration about an article, which grants citizens the right to petition the UN, is the most potentially intrusive to states’ human rights practices. After ratifying the Table 2.1  Government Options with Respect to UN Human Rights Treaties •  Ignore •  Sign

•  Ratify

•  Ratify and grant citizens the ability to file petitions before the UN

Patterns of Commitment    43

treaty and accepting the oversight of the relevant UN human rights committee, there is an expectation that the terms of the treaty will be passed into law, and where violations of the treaty’s terms occur, citizens will have the opportunity to appeal directly to the UN. While the first two options (ignore or sign) do not oblige states to alter their domestic human rights policies, the following inquiry focuses on the second options (ratify or ratify and grant citizens the ability to file petitions before the UN treaty bodies). These last two imply that states will either endeavor to change their domestic human rights legislation or will commit to doing so and allow the UN to receive complaints from citizens arising out of treaty violations. That governments would ever choose one of the last two options is puzzling. Unlike trade treaties, where states walk away from the negotiating table with the expectation of lower tariffs in foreign markets, there are no material benefits that governments derive from ratifying UN human rights treaties. Governments might accept the oversight of the World Trade Organization dispute resolution panel, but they do so because the benefits of reduced trade barriers outweigh any potential costs associated with WTO oversight. In the area of human rights, there are no clear material or collective benefits associated with ratification or accepting UN oversight. If a government really wanted to improve its domestic human rights protections it need not engage the international community to do so—simply introducing new domestic legislation would achieve the same outcome. Despite these inherent limitations, the data in the next section bear out one clear trend: states overwhelmingly ratify human rights treaties.

Ratification Patterns Figure 2.1 displays the cumulative percentage of countries that have ratified the four human rights treaties of interest. These data suggest that the majority of countries that ultimately ratify the treaties do so within the first ten years that they are open for ratification. Thirty-one countries (out of 190 possible at the time) ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) by 1981, the second year the treaty was open for ratification. Similarly, thirty-six countries ratified the Convention on the Elimination of ­Racial Discrimination (CERD) by 1965, the fourth year that the treaty was open for ratification. The majority of ratifications for the Convention Against Torture (CAT) cluster within the third and seventh years that the treaty was available for ratification, between 1987 and 1991. Those countries that intend to ratify human rights treaties do so approximately within the first ten years that the treaty is open for ratification. In terms of absolute numbers, countries tend to be joiners when it comes to human rights treaties—a high percentage of countries in the world ratify UN human rights

Figure 2.1: Cumulative Percentage of Treaty Ratifications per Year 44    Chapter 2

Figure 2.1  Cumulative Percentage of Treaty Ratifi cations per Year treaties. Table 2.2 provides treaty ratification rates for all of the countries in the world. The numbers range from a low of 59 percent of states in the world that have ratified the Convention Against Torture to a high of 79 percent for both the Racial Discrimination and Women’s Discrimination Conventions. Though relatively high ratification rates seem to provide evidence that the international community is converging toward adopting a common global human rights regime, there remain good reasons to be skeptical about high treaty ratification rates. Governments often ratify human rights treaties and intensify the violations of those rights immediately following ratification (Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui 2005; Hathaway 2002). High levels of ratification of these treaties largely conform to scholarly expectations in international relations—though governments are expected to comply with the terms of treaties (pacta sunt servanda), they often simply ignore these obligations and enjoy the temporary boost to their credibility associated with ratifying. The speed with which governments ratify these treaties also suggests that there is little strategy involved. When the treaties become available for ratification, governments ratify them because the costs of ratification are perceived to be so low. The rates of commitment to individual petition at the UN are considerably lower than the rates of ratification of the treaties themselves. Recall that ratifying

Patterns of Commitment    45

Table 2.2  Global Ratification Rates of UN Human Rights Treaties a

Total no. of ratifying states/total number of states % of states that have ratified

Civil and Political Rights Convention

Women’s Discrimination Convention

Racial Discrimination Convention

Convention Against Torture

128/191

151/191

150/191

112/191

67

79

79

59

As of 2007.

a

the individual petition mechanism associated with each treaty empowers citizens with the opportunity to directly petition the UN if their government violates their rights guaranteed by the treaty. Table 2.3 illustrates the global rates of ratification of IPMs. At 50 percent, a relatively high number of countries in the world have accepted the oversight of the Human Rights Committee by ratifying the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Fewer governments, 23 percent, have declared their acceptance of Article 14 in the Racial Discrimination Convention, thus empowering the Committee Against Racial Discrimination to receive citizen complaints. Similarly, 29 percent have ratified Article 22 in the Convention Against Torture, allowing the Committee Against Torture to receive individual complaints. The rate of ratification of the Optional Protocol associated with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women is 40.3 percent. A comparison of figures 2.1 and 2.2 suggests something interesting about the timing of ratification of both the treaties and the IPMs. If governments intend to ratify human rights treaties they do so quickly, generally within the first ten years the treaty is available for ratification. The same is not true for IPMs. Governments take their time ratifying IPMs. Like the treaty, the IPM for the International Table 2.3  Individual Petition Ratification Rates a

Total no. of ratifying states/total number of states

% of states that have ratified aAs

of 2007.

Human Rights

Women’s Discrimination

Racial Discrimination

Committee Against Torture

95/191

77/191

44/191

55/191

50

40.3

23

29

2.2: Cumulative Percentage of IPM Ratifications per Year Figure 46    Chapter 2

Figure 2.2  Cumulative Percentage of IPM Ratifi cations per Year Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) was available for ratification for thirty-six years in the time period under analysis (1968–2004). In the first seventeen years that the IPM was available for ratification forty countries ratified, but in the second seventeen years that the IPM was available for ratification fifty-nine countries ratified: 19 percent more countries ratified in the later period. Figure 2.2 suggests that countries are not as quick to ratify IPMs as they are to ratify human rights treaties.4 What accounts for this lag time and why are governments so much slower in ratifying individual petition mechanisms than treaties?

Who Ratifies? The case studies in the following chapters focus on IPM ratification in newly transitioning regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The descriptive statistics in this section demonstrate that newly transitioning regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia accept UN oversight at high rates. These charts and graphs illustrate ratification trends for IPMs, rather than ratification trends for treaties. Extensive work on the patterns surrounding ratification of human rights treaties demonstrates that certain treaties, like the Convention on the Rights of

Patterns of Commitment    47

Child, have reached nearly universal rates ratification (Simmons 2009, 63). Probing ratification patterns associated with IPMs yields unexpected results. These results guide the selection of case studies in the chapters that follow.

Established and Newly Transitioning Regimes A government is considered established if it has not experienced a significant shift in regime type within five years; a government is considered transitional if it has experienced a regime change within five years of IPM ratification.5 This section aims to gauge the effect of regime instability on the likelihood of ratification. Instability has a potentially negative normative connotation, but it need not. Here, a transitional regime may have shifted toward autocracy or toward democracy. I am agnostic regarding the direction of change and aim only to determine if those governments that have experienced recent and significant regime change are more or less likely to accept UN oversight. Using event history techniques borrowed from biostatisticians, I estimate the risk of ratification for democracies, moderate democracies, and autocracies. This is essentially the same as introducing variation in regime type into the frequency charts (figures 2.2 and 2.3), but with one important advantage. The survivor function in event history analysis allows for the estimation of ratification without biasing the estimate. This problem is called right-censoring and occurs when some of the observations in the data set are still alive at the end of the observation period.6 Without the assistance of event history techniques, these living cases (those states that have still not ratified the treaty at the end of the observation period) are treated as though they ratified in the final year of observation. This has the obvious effect of biasing the estimators of ratification upward. The survivor function fixes this bias by removing those cases that are still alive from the denominator of the survivor function only at the time that they are right-censored.7 Figure 2.3 estimates the survivor function for established and transitional regimes for the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. By ratifying the ICCPR, governments allow their citizens to submit complaints about treaty violations directly to the UN Human Rights Committee. The curved lines in the figures below represent the percentage of established and transitioning governments that are still at risk of ratifying after the amount of time on the x-axis. Curves that plunge deeply suggest that a high number of states have ratified and hence the number of states still at risk at time t is small. Shallow curves suggest that there are still a high number of states at risk of ratification at time t. After thirty years of analysis time, 65 percent of transitional regimes (represented by the dashed line in figure 2.3) accepted the oversight of the UN ­Human Rights Committee. Comparatively, established regimes (represented by the solid line in figure 2.3) were slower and less likely to accept UN oversight

Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Established Figure 48    2.3: Chapter 2

and Transitional Regimes

Figure 2.3  Ratifi cation of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Established and Transitional Regimes

than transitional regimes. After thirty years of analysis time, only 50 percent of established regimes had accepted UN oversight. Why are newly transitioning regimes accepting the oversight of the UNHRC at such high rates? Perhaps even more puzzling is the relatively slower and lower rate at which established regimes (regardless of regime type) have accepted UN oversight. This trend of transitional regimes exhibiting a higher rate and more brisk pace of IPM ratification than established regimes is consistent across all four UN oversight committees. Figure 2.4 represents the percent of established and transitional regimes that have accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture (by separately ratifying Article 22 of the Convention Against Torture). Like the pattern for the Human Rights Committee, transitional regimes have accepted the oversight of this committee more readily—though it should be noted that the overall rate of Article 22 declarations is low for all states. After more than thirty years of analysis time, approximately 45 percent of transitioning regimes had accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture. The solid line at the top of figure 2.4 indicates that it took twenty years for established regimes to begin ratifying Article 22, and after thirty years only 25 percent of all established regimes had ratified.

Figure 2.4: Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Torture:

Established and Transitional Regimes

Patterns of Commitment    49

Figure 2.4  Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Torture: Established and Transitional Regimes

Regime Type How does regime type affect the likelihood that a government will accept UN oversight? Conventional wisdom and prominent international relations scholars suggest that democracies should lead by example—making stronger commitments to human rights than either moderate democracies or autocracies (Risse-Kappen 1996).8 The implication is straightforward: Democracies should be observed ratifying treaties and IPMs more frequently than moderate democracies and autocracies. To a limited degree, the data bear out this expectation. Relying on the same event history techniques used above, figure 2.5 estimates the risk of accepting UN oversight for democracies, moderate democracies, and autocracies for the Committee Against Torture. The shallow line at the top of the chart implies that many moderate democracies are still at risk of ratifying—in other words, few moderate democracies have accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture. Conversely, democracies have accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture at high rates, represented by the deeply plunging line. Autocratic states fall somewhere between democracies and moderate democracies in their likelihood of accepting UN oversight. The timing of ratification is

2.5: Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Torture: Figure 50    Chapter 2 Regime Type

Figure 2.5  Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Torture: Regime Type

also intriguing. It took democracies twenty years (from the time that Article 22 of the CAT could be ratified) to begin accepting UN oversight. Compared to the rapid pace at which all states, regardless of regime type, ratify the treaties, it is surprising that most states exhibit a significant lag between treaty ratification and IPM ratification. The slow pace and surprisingly high rate at which autocracies accept Torture Committee oversight is also reflected in their acceptance of Human Rights Committee oversight. The UNHRC is connected to the ICCPR. States accepting the oversight of this committee allow their citizens to submit complaints should they fail to provide for open political participation, freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention, or protections against legalized discrimination. Figure 2.6 suggests that democracies are accepting UN oversight at rates exceeding other types of states, consistent with the findings above for the Committee Against Torture. However, moderate democracies and autocracies exhibit deeply plunging lines, indicating that few of these governments are still at risk of ratifying. Whereas democracies accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture at higher rates and more rapidly than other types of states, the lines in figure 2.6 suggest little distinction in the likelihood or timing of state acceptance of UN oversight.

Figure 2.6: Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Regime Type

Patterns of Commitment    51

Figure 2.6  Ratifi cation of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Regime Type

The Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights became available for ratification in 1976. In the first twenty years, democracies and autocracies were at a similar risk of accepting the oversight of the UNHRC. These lines are nearly indistinguishable—suggesting, for example, that 45 percent of both democracies and autocracies accepted the oversight of the UNHRC twenty years after the Optional Protocol became available to ratify. Given the types of political freedoms and prohibitions on extrajudicial detentions contained in the ICCPR, it is striking that autocracies have accepted the oversight of the UNHRC at such high rates, particularly when some notable democracies (the United States, for example) have refused to grant the UNHRC such oversight. For both democracies and autocracies, there is a considerable lag time between ratification of the treaty and acceptance of UN oversight. Governments take their time accepting UN oversight. A note on the data is in order—many of the moderate democracies did not begin accepting UN oversight until twenty years into the analysis, because this group of states is composed largely of those newly independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, these moderate democracies exhibit a pattern similar to democracies and autocracies. While they

52    Chapter 2

accept the oversight of the UNHRC at high rates (nearly 60 percent had ratified after thirty years of analysis time), they do so slowly, allowing for a considerable period of years to pass between treaty ratification and IPM ratification.

Region Countries situated in different geographic regions have traditionally placed different levels of priority on human rights. Simmons (2009) demonstrates that these regional differences are meaningful in explaining patterns of commitment to human rights treaties. Countries in some regions have made strong commitments to liberal, largely Western rights—creating regional human rights courts, ratifying UN human rights treaties, and accepting UN oversight at high rates. Using these standards of measurement, Western European governments are among the strongest advocates of human rights. They ratify UN human rights treaties at uniquely high rates, displayed graphically in figure 2.7, and they have created a regional court for the protection and promotion of human rights.9 The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has gone far beyond simply endorsing existing human rights policies in Europe. The ECHR renders decisions against governments and compels them to enhance their domestic human rights legislation.10 These governments are not simply joiners of global treaties; their commitment to human rights is reflected in both their ratification patterns and their domestic practices. Respect for the rule of law, protections for women and minorities, and prohibitions on torture and extrajudicial detentions are all standard practice in Western Europe.11 There are

Figure 2.7  Percentage of States Ratifying Human Rights Treaties in Western Europe

Patterns of Commitment    53

certainly exceptions, but generally Western European governments, more so than governments in other regions, exhibit a profound commitment to human rights. In Latin America, the thirty-four countries that comprise the Organization of American States (OAS) have created a regional commission for the protection of human rights, and yet their ratification rates of global treaties are mixed. For example, 67 percent of OAS member states have ratified the UN Convention Against Torture, 25 percent have accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture, and 62 percent have accepted the jurisdiction of the regional OAS Human Rights Commission. The regional Human Rights Commission in Latin America, unlike its European counterpart, has been less aggressive in ruling against states and influencing the contours of domestic human rights practices.12 However, by most accounts domestic rights practices in these countries have improved since the region was dominated by military regimes during the 1960s and early 1970s (Brewer-Carias 2008; Cleary 2007; Lutz and Sikkink 2000). Countries situated in other geographic regions have a more mixed record of ­support for global and regional human rights instruments. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights was established in 1986 as a “quasi-judicial supervisory body” (Viljoen and Louw 2007, 2). Unlike the ECHR, which has the ability to order governments to change their domestic policies, the African ­Commission can only make recommendations. A recent study on the effects of the African Commission suggests that it has done little to alter the status of human rights in Africa (Viljoen and Louw 2007). Rates of ratification of global human rights treaties are also mixed in Africa. Of the thirty-eight countries in SubSaharan Africa, 62 percent have ratified the UN Convention Against Torture, but only 11 percent have accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Torture. Cultural conflicts over the meaning of human rights have traditionally undermined greater levels of support for these UN treaties outside of the West (Donnelly 2003). Particularly, rights for women and the focus on the political rather than economic and social rights have dominated objections (Cole 2005b, 473). While 89 percent of the states in the Middle East and North Africa have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, none have accepted the oversight of the Committee on the Prohibition of Discrimination Against Women. Similarly, South Asia states have become notorious for their rejection of any form of external oversight of their domestic practices (Kahler 2001).13 I focus here on states in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe precisely because their approach to human rights instruments falls between the extraordinary advocacy in Western Europe and aggressive avoidance in South Asia. Figure 2.8 situates geographic regions on a continuum based exclusively on three measures: regional ratification rates of UN human rights treaties, regional rates of acceptance of UN oversight, and the existence and activity level of a regional human rights court. While neither Eastern Europe nor Central Asia have created a regional human rights court of their own, states in these regions have ratified UN treaties and

54    Chapter 2

Strong   

Weak

Western  Latin  N.  America  Eastern  Europe  Central  Asia  Sub-Saharan  Middle  East  &  South  Asia Europe   America    Africa  North Africa

Figure 2.8  Regional Support for Human Rights Instruments

accepted UN oversight at rates exceeding those in Latin America.14 To reiterate, figure 2.8 is not suggesting that Central Asian governments do a better job of protecting the human rights of their citizens than governments that fall further to the right on the continuum. The chart suggests that when comparing regions based solely on treaty ratification rates, IPM ratification rates, and the existence and caseload of regional human rights courts, Central Asian governments are supportive of these instruments. It should perhaps come as some surprise that Central Asia governments (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) exhibit such strong support for instruments designed to promote human rights. Since becoming independent states, these governments have generally resisted the wave of democratization that swept through Central and Eastern Europe. Powerful presidents stifle the role of legislatures and judiciaries in Central Asia, often ruling by decree (Kubicek 1998). Upon obtaining independence, Turkmenistan, for example, became one of the most isolated and repressive autocracies in the world (Human Rights Watch 2007). Central and Eastern European governments presumably had a stronger motivation to sign onto these treaties—given the exceptionally high rate of commitment among Western European governments, who were making important decisions about expanding EU membership to CEE countries during this period. Yet the relatively poor state of human rights domestically, particularly the protection of minority rights in Eastern Europe, calls into question the high rate at which these governments grant their citizens the right to file petitions before the UN.15 Why have these governments, more than those with better domestic rights protections and practices, been so willing to allow their citizens to petition the UN? The survival estimates plot state acceptance of Human Rights Committee oversight in three regions: Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Latin America is included to help illustrate the high rate and quick pace at which governments in Eastern Europe and Central Asia grant their citizens the right to petition UN committees. Central Asia, represented by the solid line, exhibits near total acceptance of Human Rights Committee oversight. After ten years, there is only one state left in the region that has not ratified the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: Kazakhstan. Since becoming independent in 1991,

Figure 2.9: Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Regional

Comparisons

Patterns of Commitment    55

Figure 2.9  Ratifi cation of the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR: Regional Comparisons Kazakhstan has been ruled by one man, President Nazarbayev. Observers have referred to Kazakhstan as a presidential dictatorship because the legal institutions on paper appear democratic, but Nazarbayev has suppressed opposition, consolidated power, and placed tight controls on the media (Kubicek 1998, 34).16 The ICCPR obliges governments to protect freedom of expression (Article 19) and allow free and open participation in public affairs (Article 25). Given the requirements of the ICCPR, it is not difficult to understand why Nazarbayev may be apprehensive about accepting UNHRC oversight. The level of support for the ICCPR and its Optional Protocol among the remaining governments in this region is surprising. These countries have not simply ratified the treaty and accepted UN oversight at high rates. They have also done so relatively quickly compared to those in other regions. The countries of Central Asia obtained their independence in 1991, offering only thirteen possible years in which they could have accepted UN oversight in the current dataset. Yet, by year ten they exhibit nearly total acceptance of UN oversight. Compared to the speed of acceptance among Latin American countries (none had ratified after ten years), the pace and rate of ratification in Central Asia is noteworthy. While many governments in other regions have accepted the oversight of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, associated with the

Figure 2.10: Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Racial

56    Chapter 2 Regional Comparisons Discrimination:

Figure 2.10  Accepting the Oversight of the Committee Against Racial Discrimination: Regional Comparisons Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, those in Central Asia have generally opted to avoid ratifying Article 14, which would permit their citizens to petition the Committee directly.17 Figure 2.10 estimates the survivor function for ratification of Article 14 in the Racial Discrimination Convention in Eastern Europe and Latin America. After Article 14 had been available for ratification for approximately twenty-five years, 60 percent of the states in Eastern Europe had ratified while only 20 percent of the states in Latin America had accepted the oversight of the Committee Against Racial Discrimination in the same period of time. What explains the vastly different rates at which states—particularly newly transitioning states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia—accept UN oversight? It may be that the governments responsible for ratification have little concern that their citizens will petition the UN against them. If citizens refrain from petitioning these UN committees—the Committee on the Elimination Against Racial Discrimination, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Committee Against Torture and the Human Rights Committee— then accepting their oversight would be a relatively costless act. Alternatively, ratifying governments may draw a distinction between regional human rights courts, the ECHR for example, and UN oversight committees, arguing that the decisions of UN committees are not binding because the committees are quasi-judicial bodies.18

Patterns of Commitment    57

Exploring Patterns of Use of Individual Petition Mechanisms One of my central arguments is that empowering citizens with the ability to directly petition the United Nations treaty bodies can impose very modest shaming costs by revealing incidences of noncompliance to the global community. Ratification imposes these costs because it empowers citizens with the ability to initiate a United Nations investigation of their government. To the extent that governments care about their reputation, there is a very modest potential cost associated with commitment. There is no question that individual petition mechanisms are used by citizens, particularly the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, accepting the oversight of the four UN treaty bodies explored here does not carry an identical likelihood of public shaming for governments. Some of these committees are far more active than others. Table 2.4 lists the number of submissions filed before each committee. Since its creation in 1965, the Committee Against Racial Discrimination has only received fifty-four submissions, while the Women’s Discrimination Committee has received twenty-seven cases since 1999. The oversight committees associated with the ­ICCPR and the Torture Convention, the Human Rights Committee (UNHRC), and the Committee Against Torture respectively have been very active. The UNHRC has received 1,964 submissions since its creation in 1976. The ­Committee Against Torture has received 462 submissions since it was established in 1984. UN oversight committees do not control which countries are investigated and which are spared, because citizens (often with the assistance of nongovernmental organizations) initiate committee investigations by submitting complaints. UN Table 2.4  Total Number of Petitions Submitted to Each UN Treaty Body Year the Committee Was Empowered to Hear Cases

Number of Cases*

Year of Last Case (for which data are available)

CAT

1976

1988

1,964

2010

Racial Discrimination Com

1982

  54

Committee UNHRC

Women’s Discrimination Com

2000

  462

  27

2011 (as of June 1) 2010

2010

*These numbers represent the total number of submissions, not the number of concluded cases. These committees routinely determine that submitted petitions are not admissible. Source: Information on the total number of cases submitted to these committees can be found on the UNHCR’s website for each oversight committee: www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/petitions /index.htm

Uruguay Uzbekistan France Belarus Czech Republ Russia 58    Chapter 2 Trinadad & To

84 83 80 78 62 56 48

200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Figure 2.11  States Receiving the Highest Number of Individual Complaints in the UNHRC: 1976–2010 committees merely respond to each complaint. One might expect that because Source: Website the UN High Commissioner for Humanabysmal Rights. human rights citizens initiate the of proceedings, countries with particularly http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/procedure.htm. Open records would be more likely to be brought before the committees tothe defend their statistical Survey of Individual Complaints Considered. policies, and those countries that traditionally protect their citizens’ rights would be less likely to be brought before them. With the exception of the Human Rights Committee, the opposite is true—Western European and established democracies, such as Australia and Canada, have been brought before these committees far more often than countries with weaker human rights records. Those countries facing the highest number of investigations before the Human Rights Committee are an interesting group.19 They encompass some expected countries that maintain poor human rights protections by Western standards— Uzbekistan and Russia, for instance. The UNHRC has found Uzbekistan to be in violation of the ICCPR in 31 percent of the submissions filed.20 Others in the group are more surprising. As of 2010 one hundred and sixteen submissions were filed against Spain in the UNHRC. These complaints stem largely from violations of Article 14 of the ICCPR regarding weak legal protections for accused criminals.21 The frequency with which Canadian and French citizens have submitted complaints against their governments before the UNHRC might, at least initially, seem unexpected given the vast human rights protections that these governments have instituted domestically. Though the high numbers of submissions filed against both Canada and France give the appearance that the UNHRC has been actively challenging Canadian and French human rights protections, these numbers are deceiving. As of August 2010

France Australia Denmark Netherlands Spain Serbia Norway 120

32 30 16 14 11 8 6

Patterns of Commitment    59

100 80 60 40 20 0

Figure 2.12   States Receiving the Highest Number of Individual Complaints before the CAT: 1984–6/2011

Source: Website of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: Canadian citizens filed 156 petitions against their government; Open yet thethe committee http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cat/procedure.htm. deemed eighty discontinued, and the committee statistical surveyinadmissible, of Iindividualthirty-three complaintswere considered. only found that the Canadian government violated their citizens’ rights in fifteen cases. Similarly, of the eighty total submissions filed against France, as of August 2010 the committee deemed forty-four inadmissible, ten were discontinued, and the committee identified a violation of the ICCPR in just six of the submissions. While the countries that have defended themselves before the UNHRC include countries with both poor and weak human rights records, those that have been brought before the Committee Against Torture are almost exclusively Western European democracies; Serbia is the only exception in the list of the top ten countries. Figure 2.12 identifies the countries that have received the highest number of complaints against them in the Committee Against Torture. Switzerland, Sweden, and Canada top the list with 118, 108, and 73 individual complaints from their citizens respectively. Complaints from Swedish citizens arise out of weak legal protections for accused criminals.22 Petitions against Switzerland and Canada before the CAT concern the potential for torture by foreign governments in the event that the petitioner is expelled from the country.23 Like the submissions filed against France and Canada before the UNHRC, the high number of submissions against Switzerland, Sweden, and Canada before the CAT does not reflect systematic noncompliance with the Convention by these countries. For example, of the 118 submissions filed against Switzerland as

60    Chapter 2

of June 2011, thirty-nine submissions were still in process, one was suspended, the committee deemed eight inadmissible, twenty-five were discontinued by the petitioners, thirty-seven were deemed to have no violation of the Convention, and in just eight the committee found that Switzerland violated the Convention. 24 Serbia is unique in that of the eight submissions filed, the committee has found the government to be in violation of the Convention in seven, and the other case is currently in process. Far fewer submissions have been filed before the Committee Against Racial Discrimination (fifty-four cases) or the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (twenty-seven cases).25 As of October 2010 citizens from sixteen countries have filed submissions against their governments before the Women’s Discrimination Committee. These petitions have been filed against Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Peru, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Though (and perhaps because) the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has been the least active of each of the UN treaty bodies, more states have accepted this Committees’ oversight than any of the other UN treaty bodies. A total of ninety-nine countries have ratified the Optional Protocol of the CEDAW as of October 2010. Of the fifty-four countries that have accepted the oversight of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, only ten have been called to account for their domestic discrimination policies: Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden.26 States that are both established regimes and democratic are more likely than other types of states to be brought before UN oversight committees by their citizens. This might help to explain why established regimes are relatively disinclined and transitional regimes are more inclined to accept UN oversight—citizens in established regimes make use of the individual petitions procedures at the UN. The UNHRC, which oversees implementation of the ICCPR, remains an exception. The complaints submitted to the HRC come from both established democracies and autocracies. This chapter has uncovered some unexpected trends in state acceptance of UN oversight. First, governments ratify human rights treaties quickly, generally within the first ten years that they are available for ratification. However, they are slower in accepting UN oversight, generally declaring their acceptance of the relevant articles (twenty-two in the CAT and fourteen in the CERD) or ratifying the Optional Protocols (for the ICCPR and the CEDAW) years after they have ratified the treaty. Second, transitional regimes, those governments that have experienced a significant transition within five years, accept UN oversight far more readily than established regimes. This makes sense in light of the third finding in this chapter. Established regimes are avoiding UN oversight because of the high likelihood that their citizens will file submissions against them with the relevant treaty body.

Patterns of Commitment    61

Established democracies such as Canada, France, Switzerland, Australia, and Spain have faced particularly large numbers of submissions, though the treaty bodies dismissed many as inadmissible. Fear of high numbers of submissions against them might help to explain why other established regimes, like the United States, have been unwilling to accept UN oversight. In absolute terms, democracies ratify UN human rights treaties and individual petition mechanisms more often than other types of states (moderate democracies and autocracies). For both Human Rights Committee and Committee Against Torture oversight, autocracies act more like democracies than do moderately democratic states. Moderate democracies in both instances were slower and less likely to accept UN oversight. It is particularly intriguing that autocracies would offer their citizens the opportunity to file complaints before the UN regarding violations of these two treaties (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture). Collectively, these treaties prohibit torture, require political freedom, and spell out rights for the criminally accused. These treaties expressly prohibit some of the standard methods that autocrats use to keep themselves in power: suppressing and disappearing domestic opposition, clamping down on the free media, and tinkering with election results. Observers might expect autocrats to sign and perhaps even ratify the Convention Against Torture, because there is no way to hold the government accountable for treaty violations. Yet when autocrats separately declare their acceptance of Article 22, they allow their citizens to alert the international community about domestic treaty violations. Finally, regional patterns are difficult to ignore when examining state acceptance of UN oversight. Western European governments exhibit strong support for human rights in a variety of ways, including accepting UN oversight. Some of the more interesting trends concern countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. The regional system for the protection of human rights, connected to the Organization of American States, is slowly accumulating cases, but governments in this region have a mixed history of accepting UN oversight. The very existence of a regional human rights court and the well-documented work of nongovernmental organizations in Latin America suggest a region that is moving toward greater protections for human rights, despite relatively low ratification rates of individual petition mechanisms throughout the region. Comparatively, four of the five autocratic states in Central Asia have consented to oversight by the ­Human Rights Committee. This is puzzling, as none of these states have instituted Western civil and political rights in practice.27 Eastern European states have also accepted UN oversight at high rates, particularly the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This chapter demonstrates that treaty ratification largely conforms to expectations in the international relations literature, while ratification patterns of IPMs stray from those expectations. Autocracies act like democracies, governments in transition accept oversight more readily than established governments, and

62    Chapter 2

c­ ountries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia ratify IPMs more often than countries in Latin America. In the next chapter I use statistical analysis to test the significance of these patterns.

Notes   1.  The United Nations Treaty Collection Service is available online at http://treaties .un.org. Last accessed November 20, 2011.   2.  The Polity IV data can be accessed online at www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4 .htm. Last accessed November 20, 2011.   3.  Asia is separated into three distinct regions: Southeast, Central, and East. A ­separate classification for Central Asian states is added to the World Bank classifications. For a careful discussion of the challenges in using statistical analysis to capture human rights, see Landman and Carvalho (2010).   4.  The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women has been left off of this chart because the IPM was only open for one year during the period under investigation.   5.  A significant shift equates to a 3-point shift in Polity score. These values are generated from the Durable variable in the Polity IV data.   6.  For more on the problem of right censoring in event history analysis see BoxSteffensmeier and Jones (1997). See also Kousser (2005) and Cleves et al. (2008).   7.  Kousser (2005) discusses the ways in which survivor functions limit the biases associated with right censoring in his book on terms limits in the United States Congress. See pages 73–75.   8.  As per convention in the literature, I consider a democracy any state that scores between a 6 and 10 on the Polity scale, a moderate democracy any state that scores between a 1 and 5 on the Polity scale, and an autocracy any state that scores between a 0 and –10 on the Polity scale.   9.  For more on the European Court of Human Rights see Christou and Raymond (2005). 10.  The ECHR has decided more than 10,000 cases since it began hearing cases in 1960. The court considers issues that are highly sensitive to states including: state-sponsored disappearances (Aydin and Others v. Turkey), police abuse (R. L. and M.-J. D. v. France), and deprivation of liberty (Mayeka and Mitunga v. Belgium). 11.  For example, on a composite index measure of physical integrity rights granted by states annually, with 0 meaning no government respect for these rights and 8 meaning full government respect, the average score in Western Europe between 1981 and 2007 is 7.48. This measure comes from the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset. These data are available online at www.humanrightsdata.org. Last accessed November 20, 2011. 12.  For a fascinating overview of the Inter-American system on human rights, including the relative inactivity of the Inter-American Court, see Farer (1997). 13.  On the conflict between Western rights and Confucian values see De Bary (1998). 14.  Of course many of the states in Eastern Europe have acceded to the EU and now fall under the jurisdiction of the ECHR. My point here is that these governments did not

Patterns of Commitment    63 create a regional court for the protection and promotion of human rights exclusively in Eastern Europe. 15.  The European Roma Rights Centre produces reports on the treatment of Roma populations by Eastern Europe governments. Their reports are available online at www .errc.org/. The Minorities at Risk Data Project maintains both quantitative and qualitative data on minority communities all over the world at www.cidcm.umd.edu/mar/. Both sites last accessed November 20, 2011. 16.  On media restrictions see Human Rights Watch (2008). 17.  While the Kazakhs remain the only state unwilling to accept Human Rights Committee oversight in Central Asia, they are the only country in the region that has accepted the oversight of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. 18.  The Hungarian government made this argument in response to a decision by the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. See Hungarian Government (2007) para. 31. 19.  These numbers come from the UNHRC’s statistical survey of individual complaints considered as of August 16, 2010. These numbers include each submission filed before the committee but it is important to note that cases are frequently deemed inadmissible by the committee or discontinued, thus these numbers do not represent the total number of decisions against the country by the UNHRC. 20.  Of the eighty-three submissions filed against Uzbekistan the committee deemed three inadmissible, the petitioners discontinued twenty-three of the cases, and the committee found against the state in twenty-six. The remainder of the cases are still ongoing as of August 10, 2010. 21.  Each of the following cases against Spain before the UNHRC stem from ­alleged violations of Article 14: CCPR/C/94/1490/2006; CCPR/C/94/D/1489/2006; CCPR/C/93/D/1456/2006; CCPR/C/94/D/1122/2002; CCPR/C/93/D/1456/2006; CCPR/C/95/D/1473/2006; CCPR/C/92/D/1528/2006; CCPR/C/92/D/1413/2005; CCPR/C/92/D/1375/2005; CCPR/C/92/D/1527/2006. 22.  Swedish Government (2009). 23.  This is an Article 3 violation. An example of this type of case against Switzerland is El Rgeig v. Switzerland. An example of this type of case against Canada is J.A.M.O v. Canada. 24.  These numbers come from the statistical survey of individual complaints considered from the Committee Against Torture as of June 6, 2011. 25.  For the Racial Discrimination Committee these numbers cover the period through July 22, 2010. For the Women’s Discrimination Committee these numbers cover the period through October 1, 2010. 26.  Many of these countries have had multiple petitions submitted against them. ­Detailed information is available on the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination’s website at www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/procedure.htm. Last accessed May 1, 2011. These numbers come from the committee’s report dated July 22, 2010. 27.  The constitutions of these states appear democratic. However, there is near consensus among area-studies scholars that while the states appear democratic on paper, in practice they are autocratic.

3 Causes of Commitment In some instance s governments ratify treaties sincerely, in the hopes that domestic policy will follow their global commitment. In other instances they may feel pressured to demonstrate a commitment to policies similar to those of regional peers. In still other circumstances they may ratify merely to diffuse pressure from domestic or global audiences. Governments possess myriad reasons for committing themselves to human rights treaties, but do their reasons for committing to the treaties differ from their motivations for empowering their citizens with the right to file complaints before the UN treaty bodies? This chapter employs statistical analysis to test between competing explanations to this question. Chapter 1 argued for a reorientation of our understanding of commitment to individual petition among newly transitioning states. Governments at the helm of newly independent states have powerful economic motivations to respond to European or American policy recommendations. The desperate state of many transitional economies compelled leaders of these governments to look outward, seeking friends and alliances with powerful external actors. These actors recommended that new governments adopt democratic institutions and human rights policies consistent with those offered in the EU and the United States—altering the judicial system to eliminate executive influence, legalizing opposition party candidates in legislative elections, or resisting the urge to silence critical voices in the media. Ratifying human rights treaties without entering reservations, understandings, or declarations (RUDs) served as a cheap signal for new governments to temporarily appease the demands of these external actors. A compelling economic need—defined here as debt crises, currency crises, and banking crises—served as one of many factors prompting these governments to ratify treaties and embolden their citizens with the ability to file claims at the UN, and as a cheap way to embrace the policy recommendations of American or European actors. 64

Causes of Commitment    65

This chapter tests the factors contributing to commitment to the individual petition mechanisms attached to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Does an unstable political environment, rather than economic need, encourage governments to commit to UN oversight (Moravcsik 2000)? Are governments that already offer human rights protections the most likely to commit (Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006; Hathaway 2002; Downs, Rocke, and Barsoom 1996)? Do new governments learn the value of committing to global human rights norms and ratifying treaties from established democracies and other global actors (Wotipka and Ramirez 2003; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Reus-Smit 1997; Risse-Kappen 1996)? There is no question that governments commit to human rights treaties and individual petition mechanisms (IPMs) for a vast array of reasons. This chapter aims is to introduce one new possibility: that among newly transitioning governments, poor domestic economic conditions spur them to seek out cheap signals of their commitment to human rights. The statistical analyses that follow are derived from two populations of states. The first consists of all the countries in the world between 1967 and 2007, allowing us to tease out global patterns of state commitment of IPMs over time. The second explores regional models of commitment in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia between 1991 and 2007. Control variables are drawn from theoretical predictions in the scholarly literature.

Data and Methods Briefly introduced in chapter 2, survival analysis is used to test the impact of economic crisis on commitment to UN oversight. Biostatisticians developed survival analysis to capture the likelihood that individuals survive the outbreak of a disease. These models allow us to compare the amount of time it takes countries to ratify (given that they have not yet ratified). Survival models have been used in the commitment literature precisely because they help to model the fact that not all countries have ratified in any given year, but may potentially ratify in the next.1 Employing a parametric log-logistic regression model is particularly useful because there are frequently years in which just one country accepts UN oversight. In nonparametric and semiparametric models, such as the Cox Proportional Hazard Model, a single ratification for an entire year makes it difficult to compare subjects.2 The log-logistic regression allows us to compare the factors contributing to commitment, even in those rare years where there is only a single ratifying country. The regressions estimate the following equation: λ( t | x ) =

λe t α+ x ′β 1 + e t α+ x ′β

66    Chapter 3

The coefficients on this model report the likelihood of ratification for a one-unit change in the independent variables. I include the maximum likelihood coefficient estimates for each of the four models in table 3.3. However, because the model is nonlinear, the coefficients cannot be directly interpreted. Meaningful interpretations of these coefficients are offered throughout the text. Four datasets in time-series cross-section format were developed to perform these tests. Separate data sets are necessary because governments have been able to accept UN oversight for these treaties for different periods of time. The Optional Protocol to the Women’s Discrimination Convention has only been available to ratify since 1999. The Women’s Discrimination data set, therefore, covers the period between 1999 and 2007. The Optional Protocol to the ICCPR has been open for ratification since 1976, so the data set covers the years 1976–2007. Article 22 of the Torture Convention was opened for ratification in 1984 (1984–2007 in the dataset) and Article 14 of the Racial Discrimination Convention was opened in 1965 (1965–2007 in the data set). With a few exceptions, the data sets include all of the countries in the world.3 The data in each set are arranged in country-year format, meaning the set contains observations for each country in each year—the United States in 1967 is one observation and the United States in 1968 is a second. This yields 2,191 country year observations for the Convention Against Torture, 2,034 observations for the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights data, 803 for the Women’s Discrimination Convention, and 4,551 observations for the Racial Discrimination Convention.

Dependent Variables The dependent variable in each model captures whether or not a government has ratified an individual petition mechanism. There are slight differences in the way that governments declare their acceptance of IPMs. For the Torture and Racial Discrimination Conventions, governments must separately declare their acceptance of a given article. For the Civil and Political Rights and Women’s Discrimination Conventions, accepting UN oversight requires ratifying an Optional Protocol. For each dataset the dependent variable captures the following: Table 3.1  Dependent Variables •  Ratification of Article 22 in the Torture Convention

•  Ratification of Article 14 in the Racial Discrimination Convention

• Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

•  Ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Women’s Discrimination Convention

Causes of Commitment    67

Employing standard event-history techniques, in the year following ­ratification countries drop out of the data set, as they are no longer considered at risk of accepting UN oversight. Ratification dates through 2004 are derived from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. These dates have been updated to cover the period between 2005 and 2007 with information obtained from the United Nations Treaty Service.

Economic Need Variables One of my central arguments here is that governments seek out cheap signals of commitment to human rights when they face poor economic conditions at home. The measures of economic need, which spur governments to ratify IPMs as a cheap signal of commitment to given sets of human rights, are discussed below. Three primary measures of economic need are employed: debt crisis, currency crisis, and systemic banking crisis. Debt restructuring is also included as a secondary measure of economic need. Laeven and Valencia (2008) developed these measures from International Monetary Fund data. A debt crisis means that the country in question has experienced a sovereign default that led to subsequent restructuring. A sovereign default, much like individual default, simply means that the country lacked the financial resources to make payments on a loan. A sovereign default, therefore, provides a powerful signal about scarcity in the domestic economy and therefore a greater need for assistance. This variable is labeled debt crisis in the statistical tables.4 A systemic banking crisis can similarly provide clues to underlying weaknesses in the domestic economy that may compel a government to seek assistance. Here, a systemic banking crisis means that financial and corporate institutions are defaulting on their loan payments and face severe challenges in paying their debts on time.5 The theory advanced here predicts a positive relationship between systemic banking crisis and commitment to IPMs. This variable is labeled systemic banking crisis in the results tables. Another signal of poor domestic economic conditions is a currency crisis. Governments experiencing currency crises experience a sharp decline in the value of their currency, which temporarily undermines its utility as a medium of exchange. The currency crisis variable measures both a nominal depreciation of a state’s currency by 30 percent in a year and a simultaneous 10 percent increase in the rate of currency depreciation from the previous year.6 A currency crisis indicates trouble in the domestic economy and should contribute to a greater likelihood that a country will accept UN oversight. This variable is labeled currency crisis in the regressions. Debt restructuring appears as a secondary measure of economic need because if debt restructuring is under way, then the country in question is negotiating a bailout with the IMF. Governments restructuring their debt with the IMF lack the economic capacity to repay creditors, but they have, at the very least, managed to get the IMF to negotiate the restructuring of their debt. Unlike the three primary

68    Chapter 3

Table 3.2  Indicators of Economic Need •  Debt crisis

•  Systemic banking crisis •  Currency crisis

•  Debt restructuring

measures of economic need, debt restructuring essentially means that a government has successfully attracted a global partner to help them out of their financial difficulties. This variable is listed as debt restructuring in the results.

Control Variables The following pages offer an abbreviated review of alternate theories of commitment, because the control variables in the statistical tests are developed from these theories. I test the three primary approaches to commitment described in chapter 1. These approaches emphasize the costs and benefits of ratification, ratification as a response to domestic instability, and ratification resulting from social learning. Goodliffe and Hawkins (2006) and Hathaway (2002) identify a series of costs (aside from economic need emphasized here) that make governments less inclined to ratify human rights treaties. They argue that when governments make ratification decisions they fear unintended consequences following ratification. Goodliffe and Hawkins develop an innovative method of establishing the degree to which a treaty may create unintended consequences for ratifying governments. Common law legal systems, unlike civil law or Islamic law systems, allow judges to interpret rules and generate law. This principle—stare decisis—means that once a point of law is settled, judges will be bound by the ruling. It may perhaps be costlier for a country with a common law legal system, which permits judicial interpretation of law, to commit to a UN treaty and UN oversight. If the UNHRC hands down a decision, judges will possess a more diverse array of sources from which to interpret a given point of law, which interjects uncertainty into the process for the government. Countries with common law legal systems should therefore be less inclined to commit to UN oversight.7 To capture a state’s ability to address the unintended consequences arising out of ratification, Goodliffe and Hawkins also predict that poor countries will be relatively less inclined to commit than richer countries. Ratification is more costly for those who cannot draw on considerable economic resources to extricate themselves from difficult positions. Thus, a low gross domestic product (GDP) should be correlated with a lower propensity to accept UN oversight.8 Hathaway (2002) argues that commitment decisions are conditioned by rule compliant behavior prior to ratification. Governments that are already protecting

Causes of Commitment    69

the rights of their citizens should ratify at higher rates because they need not adjust their policies following ratification. Testing rights protections prior to accepting UN oversight provides a particularly strong test of Hathaway’s theory. Accepting UN oversight by ratifying individual petition mechanisms allows citizens the opportunity to petition the United Nations directly. If a government is violating the rights of female citizens, the government should be disinclined to grant citizens the right to petition the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. Poor protections for human rights should undermine the likelihood of commitment. Hathaway’s prediction about human rights protections conditioning the commitment decision is tested with the inclusion of a number of human rights measures that relate specifically to each type of treaty. Because the issue areas of each treaty are distinct, different measures of human rights are used for each data set. Human rights scores are drawn from the Cingranelli-Richards data set (CIRI) (2008).9 An alternative approach to commitment predicts that new and unstable democracies will ratify treaties in the face of domestic threats (Moravcsik 2000). New democrats use ratification of global treaties as a mechanism to limit the policy options of future (presumably less democratic) governments. Three variables are used in the statistical analysis to test this theory. The first, labeled democratic transition, is an interaction variable that measures how democratic a given country is at the time of ratification, and how long that regime has been in place. The second variable taps into the prediction that new democrats should be the most inclined to commit. The durable variable captures the number of years that the current political system has been in place. The expectation in the literature is that countries that have recently experienced a transition from autocracy to democracy should be the most likely to commit to global treaties.10 A third variable indicates whether a state has undergone a transition in the previous two years. Labeled transitional in the results table, this variable was constructed using the durable variable listed above.11 Social learning models privilege emulation as a key mechanism of commitment. The more widespread a given practice (granting the UN oversight, prohibiting torture, providing rights to women), the greater the pressure each government faces to adopt the same practice. Countries are not motivated to adopt these practices through mechanisms of coercive pressure such as economic sanctions. Rather, governments learn to refrain from torturing their citizens or extend rights to minority communities because they are socialized by the behavior of others. Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) refer to this as normative bandwagoning—the greater the number of countries that engage in a given practice, the more appropriate it becomes for each individual country. The next and perhaps obvious question is to ask from whom do countries learn about appropriate standards of behavior. Social learning models highlight the role of established democracies in promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values (Reus-Smit 1997; Risse-Kappen 1996). There is an important split in the literature regarding the identity of norm entrepreneurs.

70    Chapter 3

The international relations literature focuses on established democracies as the propagators of norms and liberal values. The sociology literature counsels against this—demonstrating that deeper integration in intergovernmental networks and the influence of international nongovernmental organizations facilitates the convergence of global human rights policies among countries (Wotipka and Tsutsui 2008, 748). Governments do not simply follow the lead of established democracies; rather, exposure to the forces of world society (IGOs and international NGOs) leads governments to adopt similar policies. Based on the international relations constructivist variant of this argument, established democracies should accept UN oversight at rates exceeding new democracies or autocracies. Three variables are included in the statistical analysis to capture level of democracy. The polity2 variable measures the level of democracy or autocracy in a given country in a given year. Higher values indicate a higher level of democracy. Social learning models and the cost-benefit approach to commitment make similar predictions about the relationship between democracy and ratification. A world society approach implies that the more a country has been socialized by norms in the global community, the more we should expect them to make liberal, democratic commitments. The cost-benefit approach makes a similar prediction about the relationship, but the underlying logic is distinct. Higher levels of democracy are generally correlated with better domestic human rights protections, and therefore the costs of commitment for democracies should be lower, making them more likely to ratify. An implication of the constructivist variant of this argument is that it is not simply autocratic or democratic tendencies that contribute to the likelihood of commitment. Rather, the length of time that a country has been a stable democracy or a stable autocracy should also shape commitment decisions. A longer lifespan as a democracy (the United States as opposed to Slovakia, for example) will make those entrenched democracies more likely to accept UN oversight. These countries have experienced greater exposure to liberal, Western values and should therefore exhibit higher rates of ratification. In the opposite vein, entrenched autocracies have been insulated from these global pressures and should be less inclined to commit. In the statistical analysis, established democracy>5 years measures whether a country has been an established democracy for greater than five years. Established autocracy >5yrs measures whether a country has been an autocracy for greater than five years. Greater exposure to cosmopolitan values may teach countries to appreciate these standards, leading them to commit. Countries may imitate policies adopted by others. More global commitment to a given treaty suggests a higher level of global support for its terms. If, for example, 75 percent of the countries in the world have ratified the Convention Against Torture (a high global ratification rate), then any individual country might be more inclined to accept Torture Committee oversight. Comparatively, treaties with low global ratification rates may do little to compel a deeper commitment to UN oversight. This variable is labeled treaty ratification rate

Causes of Commitment    71

Table 3.3  Control Variables from the Literature •  Common law legal system •  Civil law legal system •  Mixed law legal system •  Gross domestic product •  Physical integrity •  Disappearances •  State killings •  Political prisoners •  Torture •  Women’s economic rights •  Women’s political rights •  Women’s social rights •  Freedom of association •  Democratic transition •  Durable •  Transitional •  Polity2 •  Established democracy > 5 years •  Established autocracy > 5 years •  Treaty ratification rate •  Socialization •  1993 •  1995

in the regressions.12 If a positive relationship between treaty ratification rate and commitment to UN oversight is identified in the statistical results, it will suggest that countries are persuaded by normative bandwagoning to grant their citizens the right to directly petition the UN. Evidence of social learning motivating acceptance of UN oversight should also be apparent in the level at which countries ratify other UN human rights treaties. If countries have learned the value of human rights from the global community, then they should ratify most of the core UN human rights agreements.13 To test for this possibility, a measure of ratification rates of the three other human rights treaties of interest in this project is included. This is labeled socialization in the results table and scores range from a possible 0 (meaning that the state had not ratified any of the other three core UN human rights treaties) through 3 (meaning that the state had ratified all of the core UN human rights treaties). A social learning model of commitment predicts a positive relationship between ratification of other UN human rights treaties and acceptance of UN oversight.

Table 3.4  Why Do Countries Accept UN Oversight? Statistical Results of Global Commitment Models

Global Model Debt Crisis

Banking Crisis

72

Currency Crisis

Debt Restructuring

Common Law Legal System

Civil Law Legal System

Mixed Law Legal System

LN(GDP per Capita)

Freedom of Association Disappearances State Killings

Political Prisoners Physical Integrity Torture

Women’s Economic Rights

Racial Discrimination Convention

Civil and Political Rights Convention

.1557* (p=.094)

.0762*** (p=.000)

.1962 (p=.268)

–.0351 (p=.587) .1848 (p=.136)

.0279 (p=.395)

–.0048 (p=.710)

–.0089 (p=.632)

–.0070 (p=.254)

.00004 (p=.968)

–.0013 (p=.113)

–.0034 (p=.362)

–.0014 (p=.249)

–.0024 (p=.069)

–.001 (p=.489)

—

—

—

.0004 (p=.674)

.0005 (p=.730)

–.0013 (p=.325)

.000005 (p=.996)

–.003 (p=.787)

—

–.0012 (p=.143)

–.0008 (p=.221)

.0003 (p=.497) —

—

.0149*** (p=.000)

.0165*** (p=.000)

–.0002 (p=.888)

–.0004 (p=.592)

—

Women’s Discrimination Convention

–.0019*** (p=.005)

–.0007*** (p=.002)

–.0008* (p=.099)

—

.0190** (p=.000)

–.0007 (p=.489)

.0002 (p=.209)

—

—

Convention Against Torture

—

—

—

–.0000 (p=.734)

.0002 (p=.716) —

.0156*** (p=.000)

–.0004 (p=.692)

–.0003 (p=.835)

–.0002 (p=.469) —

—

—

—

— —

–.0004 (p=.262)

Women’s Political Rights Women’s Social Rights Democratic Transition

Durable

Transitional

Polity2

Established Democracy > 5 years

Established Autocracy > 5 years

Treaty Ratification Rate (lagged) Socialization

1993

73

1995

Number of Countries

Number of Observations Chi-Squared Value

Log Psuedo-likelihood

—

—

.0114 (p=.764)

.0000 (p=.935)

.0083 (p=.534)

—

—

–.0008 (p=.609) .0000 (p=.251)

.0009 (p=.277)

.0001 (p=.899)

–.0001 (p=.120)

.0040 (p=.737)

.0003 (p=.737).

–.0013 (p=.909)

.0203* (p=.099)

–.0322 (p=.478) .0052 (p=.854)

.0234 (p=.646) 147

4551

139.20*** 132.151

.0023** (p=.073)

.0294*** (p=.000)

–.002*** (p=.008)

–.0017* (p=.032)

–.0026** (p=.046) 125

2034

369.98***

254.91072

—

—

–.0005 (p=605)

.0000 (p=.699)

–.0003 (p=.648)

–.00001 (p=.822)

–.0003 (p=.491) .0006 (p=.568)

.0141*** (p=.000)

–.0015*** (p=.000)

–.0019*** (p=.000) –.0004 (p=.637) 146

2191

1020.62***

198.50739

.0000 (p=.365)

.0000 (p=.712)

.0161*** (p=.000)

.0000 (p=.394)

–.0003 (p=.760)

–.0002** (p=.017)

–.0002 (p=.861)

–.0012 (p=.207) —

–.0006** (p=.030) — —

147 803

98.06***

308.042

Note: Maximum likelihood estimates are drawn from a log-logistic regression using the streg command in STATA. Coefficients and probabilities are based on robust standard errors. Fixed effects are included but not reported. P-values are reported in parentheses. ***p 5 years

–.1140* (p=.059)

Polity2

Established Autocracy > 5 years Treaty Ratification Rate Socialization

Number of Countries

85

Number of Observations Chi-Squared Value

Log Psuedo-likelihood

.0020 (p=.193)

–.0001 (p=.885)

.0000 (p=.309)

.0074*** (p=.001)

–.0000 (p=.568) .0002 (p=.855) .0000 (p=.920) .0012 (p=.337)

–.0530*** (p=.008)

–.0010 (p=.549)

–.0950 (p=.043)

–.0004 (p=.155)

.1180 (p=.123) 26

481

475.83*** 56.690

—

26

126

69.61***

103.340

—

—

–.0208*** (p=.001)

.0180 (p=.126)

—

.0012*** (p=.002) .0597*** (p=.000)

—

.0001 (p=.540) .0005 (p=.429)

.0044*** (p=.000)

–.0001 (p=.530)

.0380*** (p=.000)

.0017 (p=.496)

–.0977*** (p=.000) .1879*** (p=.000)

–.0786*** (p=.000) 25

273

—

75.277

.0058 (p=.255) .0099 (p=.189)

–.0005 (p=.572) 24

200

—

114.579

Note: Maximum likelihood estimates are drawn from a log-logistic regression using the streg command in STATA. Coefficients and probabilities are based on robust standard errors. Fixed are included but not reported. P-values are reported in parentheses. ***p