Suchergebnisse

The regulator-intermediary-target (RIT) framework exposes the potential for intermediaries to provide alternative channels for capture. In this article, I argue that the risk of capture can be mitigated through what I call regulatory stewardship—a novel conception of regulatory management that involves the intermediaries themselves monitoring the performance of one another. I explore regulatory stewardship by examining a new generation of human rights treaty innovation: the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). These instruments differentially formalize relations between intermediaries. I use their contrasting experiences to identify three factors central to effective regulatory stewardship: (1) the nature of the task environment, (2) the quality of rule frameworks, and (3) the approaches adopted by potential stewards in practice. This study argues for the importance of regulatory stewardship within RIT arrangements, particularly where targets are strongly motivated to resist implementation.

The global human rights regime has undergone extraordinary expansion in the last thirty years. It is particularly notable for its profusion of state and non-state actors and levels of formal articulation. This article seeks to make legible the human rights governance architecture from the global to the local level, within an issue-specific domain. Orchestration theory is employed as a general mode of governance, with application across political units and political levels. Orchestration applies when a focal actor enlists and supports third-party actors to address the target indirectly in pursuit of shared governance objectives. Using the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) as an example, the article explores the authority relationship across two central political units (the orchestrator and intermediary), with a focus on how this new global human rights architecture may offer a way of bridging the steps separating international instruments from practices on the ground.

The United Nations remains the principal international governmental organisation for promoting human rights. However, serious concerns focus on persistent compliance gaps between human rights standards and domestic practice. In response and against a backdrop of growing regime complexity, United Nations human rights agencies have increasingly sought to bypass states by coordinating new forms of non-state and private authority. International Relations scholarship has captured this governance arrangement using the concept of orchestration, defined as when an international organisation enlists and supports intermediary actors to address target actors in pursuit of international governmental organisation governance goals. This article explores the implications of an orchestration topology for human rights governance by analysing national human rights institutions in the context of an established global human rights regime and its dedicated orchestrator: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. I use the experience of national human rights institutions to further refine the concepts of managing versus bypassing states to capture how networked intermediaries are affected by, and respond to, new opportunities within international governmental organisation structures. The article identifies the conditions under which orchestration may be particularly well-suited to a human rights governance function. It further examines the analytical limitations of this mode of influence for addressing a multi-level compliance gap, as well as what the analysis means for international organisations and understanding orchestration more generally.