Suchergebnisse

AbstractFragmentation and competition between global and regional institutions are not among the major issues that threaten the regime. There are three ways in which tensions nonetheless arise. First, consistent with the universalist aspirations of human rights, global conventions have played a focal role in verbally defining rights. This masks considerable cross‐regional and intra‐regional differences in how rights should be interpreted. Second, judicialization of human rights has mostly occurred at the regional level. This occasionally creates inconsistencies with the global regime. Third, rights concerns often encroach on other areas of international cooperation, including security, trade, and development. This raises similar issues of forum shopping as in the other issue areas, for example because some governments may shop for trade agreements or development loans with fewer rights conditions.

AbstractRecent scholarship finds that new democracies are more likely than established democracies to make binding commitments to international human rights institutions. Are new democracies also better at following through on these commitments? Stated differently, does their greater willingness to join international institutions reflect a genuine commitment to human rights reform or is it just "cheap talk?" We analyze this question using a new data set of more than 1,000 leading European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) cases. Since new democracies face judgments that are more difficult to implement than established democracies, we employ a genetic matching algorithm to balance the data set. After controlling for bureaucratic and judicial capacity, we find that new democracies do implement similar ECtHR judgments initially more quickly than established democracies, but this effect reverses the longer a judgment remains pending. Although new democracies have incentives to implement judgments quickly, they sometimes lack checks and balances that help ensure implementation should an executive resist.

Customary international law (CIL) is widely recognized as a fundamental source of international law. While its continued significance in the age of treaties was once contested, it is now generally accepted that CIL remains a vital element of the international legal order. Yet CIL is also plagued with conceptual and practical difficulties, which have led critics to challenge its coherence and legitimacy. In particular, critics of CIL have argued that it does not meaningfully affect state behavior. Traditional CIL scholarship is ill equipped to answer such criticism because its objectives are doctrinal or normative—namely, to identify, interpret, and apply CIL rules, or to argue for desirable changes in CIL. For the most part, that scholarship does not propose an explanatory theory in the social scientific sense, which would articulate how CIL works, why states comply, and why and how rules change.