International human rights recommendations at home: Introducing the Women’s Rights Compliance Database (WRCD)

Abstract

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.

La legalización de los derechos humanos internacionales ha provocado una explosión en el número de recomendaciones que los Estados reciben cada año en lo que se refiere a sus prácticas nacionales en materia de derechos humanos. ¿Cómo responden los Estados a estas recomendaciones, algunas de las cuales pueden pedirles que lleven a cabo importantes reformas internas en materia de derechos humanos? En este artículo, presentamos la Base de Datos sobre el Cumplimiento de los Derechos de la Mujer (WRCD, por sus siglas en inglés), que permite a los investigadores contestar no solo esta pregunta, sino también una serie de preguntas relacionadas. La WRCD proporciona datos sobre el cumplimiento de 2558 recomendaciones en tres instituciones: La Convención sobre la Eliminación de Todas las Formas de Discriminación contra la Mujer (CETFDCM), el Examen Periódico Universal (EPU) y el Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos (TEDH). Este artículo presenta los fundamentos conceptuales y empíricos de la WRCD y ofrece estadísticas descriptivas de los datos. A continuación, posicionamos la WRCD dentro del conjunto más amplio de datos sobre el cumplimiento de los derechos humanos e ilustramos cómo no solo cubre un vacío crítico en el panorama de los datos sobre el cumplimiento de los derechos humanos, sino que también facilita una sólida base para la investigación futura.

L’apparition d’une législation internationale en matière de droits humains a entraîné une explosion du nombre de recommandations émises chaque année aux différents États en ce qui concerne leurs pratiques nationales dans ce domaine. Comment les États répondent-ils à ces recommandations, certaines les invitant à mettre en place d’importantes réformes dans le domaine des droits humains ? Dans cet article, nous présentons la WRCD, la Women’s Rights Compliance Database (base de données sur la conformité en matière de droits des femmes), qui permet aux chercheurs de trouver la réponse à cette question et à un certain nombre d’autres sur le sujet. La WRCD propose des données de conformité relatives à 2558 recommandations, englobant trois institutions : le CEDAW (Comité pour l'élimination de la discrimination à l'égard des femmes), l’EPU (Examen périodique universel) et la Cour européenne des droits de l’homme. Cet article présente les bases conceptuelles et empiriques de la WRCD et fournit des statistiques descriptives pour les données utilisées. Nous situons ensuite la WRCD au sein d’un corpus élargi de données de conformité, et démontrons que non seulement elle vient combler une lacune dans le paysage des données relatives aux droits humains, mais également qu’elle favorise l’élaboration d’un futur solide programme de recherche.

Keywords:

• Cooperation
• data
• Europe
• human rights
• international organizations
• justice

Notes

1 Throughout this article, we refer to compliance as compliance with recommendations. We do not mean that states have fully implemented the ideals of the institutions providing recommendations, but rather that states have complied with particular recommendations made by these bodies. For example, if a state receives a recommendation to reduce gender inequality by taking X action, we code the state’s compliance with X action.

2 We suggest that the often used, semi-synonymous terms of implementation (of recommendations) and execution (of judgments) also need to be understood as processes, not dichotomous outcomes.

3 Supplementary Appendix Table AIV provides information about the total number of recommendations issued each year by each body.

4 For a more detailed discussion of the recommendation characteristics, see Haglund and Hillebrecht (2020).

5 We also include categories of partial codes under certain circumstances. Details are available in section IV of the Supplementary Appendix.

6 Users can also include the partial compliance and partial delegation categories if desired (coded 333 in the data). See section IV of the Supplementary Appendix.

7 For a discussion of why compliance data are not available for all recommendations in the WR2D2, see the Supplementary Appendix (section II).

8 The certification checks and additional information about intercoder reliability, are available in the Supplementary Appendix (section VIII).

9 For more descriptive spatial trends, including the proportion of recommendations coded as “inaction” and as “execution,” “delegation,” and “consideration” for each state in the sample see Supplementary Appendix section IX.

10 We omit missing data, so the proportion of recommendations coded as compliance for each state is based on the number of recommendations coded for each state.

11 While recent literature has used NHRIs as indicators of state capacity (e.g. Creamer and Simmons 2019), we suggest that there is such variation in the mandates of NHRIs, including within the region, that they are not adequate indicators of capacity for mobilization. Moreover, some states with very strong capacity do not have NHRIs.

12 Examining the overall correlation between consideration and electoral democracy produces values where consideration = 2, 1, or 0 and the state engaged in full compliance (2). By examining a subset of the data and only looking at the correlation between consideration and electoral democracy when compliance = 0, execution = 0, and delegation = 0, we are able to examine the correlation between the action of consideration (none, partial, full) and democracy, for example, for only recommendations where no higher level of compliance was also achieved on the same recommendation.

13 See the Supplementary Appendix for more information about conceptualizing and coding recommendation precision (section VII).

14 See Hill and Watson (2019) for more on the lack of relationship between democracy and compliance with international women’s rights law.