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This article argues that international regime complexity has shaped Europe's politics of human rights trade conditionality by creating opportunities for various types of "forum shopping," and, consequently, that some of the most significant politics of human rights enforcement have occurred in an entirely separate issue area—trade—which are being worked out partly during lawmaking and partly during implementation. The presence of nested and overlapping institutions creates incentives for rival political actors—whether states, institutions, or policymakers—to (1) forum shop for more power, (2) advantage themselves in the context of a parallel or overlapping regime, and (3) invoke institutions á la carte to govern a specific issue but not others. Each tactic creates competition between institutions and actors for authority over the rules, setting hurdles for IO performance. Even so, (4) regime complexity can make enforcement of rules that are impossible to implement in one area possible in another area.

"Naming and shaming" is a popular strategy to enforce international human rights norms and laws. Nongovernmental organizations, news media, and international organizations publicize countries' violations and urge reform. Evidence that these spotlights are followed by improvements is anecdotal. This article analyzes the relationship between global naming and shaming efforts and governments' human rights practices for 145 countries from 1975 to 2000. The statistics show that governments put in the spotlight for abuses continue or even ramp up some violations afterward, while reducing others. One reason is that governments' capacities for human rights improvements vary across types of violations. Another is that governments are strategically using some violations to offset other improvements they make in response to international pressure to stop violations.

Präferentielle Handelsabkommen spielen eine immer wichtigere Rolle bei der internationalen Durchsetzung von Menschenrechten. Beinhalten solche Abkommen nämlich entsprechende Klauseln, die den Vertragspartner zur Einhaltung von Menschenrechten verpflichten, so scheint dies effektiver als der Abschluss von reinen Menschenrechtsabkommen, da letztere an den repressiven Politiken der Unterzeichnerstaaten zumeist nichts ändern. Als ähnlich negativ in der Wirkung sind jedoch auch präferentielle Handelsabkommen zu beurteilen, die nur eine schwache Bindung zwischen Menschenrechten und präferentiellen Marktzugang herstellen. Dies ist z. B. der Fall, wenn die Einhaltung von Menschenrechten nicht anhand konkreter Vertragsbestimmungen geregelt ist, sondern wenn die Bedeutung dieser Rechte nur in der Präambel des Vertrages hergehoben wird. (rll-swp)

A growing number of studies provide quantitative evidence that economic globalization encourages government protection of human rights: trade and investment advance civil and political rights and encourage governments to refrain from violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. Other studies provide evidence that globalization promotes government repression of human rights: the arbitrary arrest, torture, forced disappearance, or extra-judicial killing of citizens, activists, or dissidents by state security forces under the control of ruling state elites. This article employs a variant of Extreme Bounds Analysis in order to analyze the robustness of this growing body of important but contradictory inferences. It argues that (1) we can make robust empirical claims about the relationship between certain trade and investment indicators and government repression, but shows that (2) cumulative knowledge across studies nevertheless remains limited by the sensitivity of many indicators to conditioning sets of information. This problem stems from vaguely specified theoretical mechanisms linking economic processes to government repression and is of potentially great consequence for scholarship seeking to explain the causes of human rights violations, in particular, and the effects of economic globalization, in general.