Search results

"The international human rights regime has grown substantially over the past several decades. Yet, international human rights law faces significant enforcement challenges coupled with threats to its legitimacy in many parts of the world. As part of the international human rights regime, the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights allow individuals to file formal complaints with an international legal body, making them uniquely designed to ensure rights-related changes. This book focuses on regional human rights court deterrence, or the extent to which adverse judgments discourage the commission of future human rights abuses by instilling fear of the consequences of continued abuse. The central argument of the book is that regional court deterrence is more likely when the chief executive has the capacity and willingness to respond to adverse judgments from regional courts. Jillienne Haglund argues that the executive has greater capacity to respond to adverse judgments when human rights policy changes are relatively feasible and the state is fiscally flexible. Moreover, the executive has incentives to respond to adverse judgments with human rights policy change when the executive faces pressure from the mass public, economic elites, or political elites. This book draws comparisons across regional courts in Europe and the Americas using quantitative data analysis, supplemented with qualitative evidence from many adverse judgments rendered by the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, to explain the conditions under which adverse regional court judgments deter future human rights abuses"

Despite substantial growth in past decades, international human rights law faces significant enforcement challenges and threats to legitimacy in many parts of the world. Regional human rights courts, like the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, represent unique institutions that allow individuals to file formal complaints with an international legal body and render judgments against states. In this book, Jillienne Haglund focuses on regional human rights court deterrence, or the extent to which adverse judgments discourage the commission of future human rights abuses. She argues that regional court deterrence is more likely when the chief executive has the capacity and willingness to respond to adverse regional court judgments. Drawing comparisons across Europe and the Americas, this book uses quantitative data analyses, supplemented with qualitative evidence from many adverse judgments, to explain the conditions under which regional courts deter future rights abuses.

Under what conditions are regional human rights courts effective? I argue that in order for regional human rights courts to be effective, they should deter future human rights abuses and this is more likely when the executive adopts and implements rights-respecting policy in response to adverse regional court decisions. When the executive expects the domestic judiciary to implement regional human rights court orders, the executive also expects to face domestic pressure for failing to make policy changes despite domestic judicial implementation of regional court orders. However, the domestic judiciary does not implement regional court orders with equal probability. Domestic judicial power (independence and effectiveness) increases the ability and willingness of the domestic judiciary to implement regional court orders, and subsequently increases the likelihood that the executive adopts and implements comprehensive human rights policy. Using data on adverse judgments from the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, I find that regional human rights courts are more likely to be effective in the presence of a strong domestic judiciary.

Most studies examining the effectiveness of international human rights law treat international human rights institutions as equally (un)influential on state behavior. I argue that institutional design explains variation in state response to international human rights law. Using the institutions in the Inter-American Human Rights System (Court and Commission), I argue that judgments from the highly legalized body (Court) are associated with human rights improvements, while decisions from the less legalized body (Commission) are associated with a greater likelihood of formal complaints. Using the Ill-Treatment and Torture data and original data on Commission decisions, I find support for these expectations.

With the proliferation of the international human rights regime, states confront a dense set of institutional commitments. Our knowledge of the influence of these commitments is limited for two reasons. First, scholars largely focus on the effect of treaty ratification on states' human rights behavior, but states engage with these institutions after ratification via regional human rights court rulings and UN recommendations. Second, scholars often examine these institutions in isolation. The institutions do not operate in isolation, however, nor do states necessarily consider the requests they receive from these institutions independently. In this article, we introduce the Women's Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2), which maps the various recommendations international women's rights institutions make on European states. We begin by discussing the importance of recommendations from international institutions and their relationship with commitment and compliance. We then describe the data collection effort, including two dimensions on which recommendations made to European states vary – precision and action. Next, we report descriptive statistics from the dataset, including regional and temporal trends. We conclude with a discussion of the multifaceted research agenda that this new dataset can facilitate.

Abstract
Do regional human rights courts influence respect for rights? Beyond providing remedy for individual human rights abuse, case outcomes help frame potential social mobilization by setting standards and raising the rights consciousness of civil society actors. The expectation of mobilization can increase the government's costs of flouting the court's rulings. We argue that an enabling domestic environment characterized by two features increases government expectation of mobilization following regional court litigation. First, a robust civil society creates strong horizontal ties between potential mobilizing groups. Second, a national human rights institution (NHRI) creates vertical ties that both transfer information down from the court to civil society; and transfer demands up from civil society to political elites in position to make stronger human rights policy. Using data for all Council of Europe countries from 1980 to 2012, we find European Court of Human Rights litigation associated with higher respect for rights in an enabling domestic environment characterized by strong civil society and the presence of a NHRI.

The climate of impunity in many post-civil conflict societies results in unprecedented levels of violence against women, making legal implementation and law enforcement particularly difficult. We argue that the presence of strong legal provisions mediates the negative influence of the post-civil conflict environment on violence against women. Specifically, we examine the role of strong legal protections on the enforcement of sexual violence legislation in post-civil conflict countries. To examine our hypothesis, we utilize an original dataset measuring the strength and enforcement of domestic legal statutes addressing violence against women for the years 2007–2010 in post-civil conflict countries. We find elements of civil conflict as well as domestic and international legal regimes to be reliably associated with the enforcement of violence against women laws and rape prevalence in post-civil conflict states.

The legalization of international human rights has led to an explosion in the number of recommendations states receive each year regarding their domestic human rights practices. How do states respond to these recommendations, some of which may ask them to engage in significant domestic human rights reform? In this article, we introduce the Women's Rights Compliance Database (WRCD), which allows scholars to answer this and a number of related questions. The WRCD provides compliance data on 2,558 recommendations across three institutions: CEDAW, the UPR, and the European Court of Human Rights. This article introduces the conceptual and empirical foundations of the WRCD and provides descriptive statistics of the data. Then, we situate the WRCD within the larger body of compliance data and illustrate how it not only fills a critical gap in the human rights compliance data landscape but also facilitates a robust future research agenda.

The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure a number of variables on more than 15,000 public allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. The ITT specific allegation (SA) event data use the torture allegation as the unit of observation, thus permitting users to manipulate them for a wide variety of purposes. In this article, we introduce the ITT SA data. We first describe the key variables in the SA data and report a number of bivariate descriptive statistics to illustrate some of the research questions that might be usefully investigated with the data. We then discuss how we believe the ITT SA data can be used to study not only AI's naming and shaming behavior, but also states' (lack of) compliance with the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). We conclude with an empirical analysis using the SA data that investigates the effect of domestic political institutions on formal complaints, investigations, and adjudication of torture allegations. We show that legislative checks are positively associated with complaints, investigations, and trials; elections and freedom of speech are positively associated with investigations and trials; and powerful judiciaries are associated only with investigations.

The Ill-Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure allegations of government ill-treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. ITT's country-year (CY) data quantify AI allegations of ill-treatment and torture at the country-year unit of observation and further across different responsible government agents and across different econo-socio-political groups of alleged victims. This paper introduces the Ill-Treatment and Torture country-year data, describes quantitative patterns likely to be of interest to researchers focused on the study of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and human rights, and suggests a number of theoretically motivated questions that can be explored using the ITT country-year data. Adapted from the source document.