Setting the agenda: Social influence in the effects of the Human Rights Committee in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Analyzing original data from Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, this article explores the influence of the Human Rights Committee (HRC) of the United Nations (UN) in the configuration of states' normative agendas and the roles they seek to play. Focusing on the HRC's reporting procedure, the article investigates whether states adjust the substantive content of their periodic reports to mimic the human rights agenda explicitly set by the HRC through its concluding observations reports. The article finds that states take the HRC seriously and play the role of “good,” committed members of the human rights regime, following in their periodic reports the agenda of rights previously set by the HRC. The article, therefore, offers a specific theoretical argument and systematic, original evidence on the potential and the limits of the influence of the organs of the international human rights regime.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Amanda Murdie, James Ron, Carolina Garriga, Barbara Frey, and the participants in the Social Science of Human Rights Conference (University of Dayton) and the International Relations Colloquium of the University of Minnesota for their valuable comments and suggestions. We would also like to acknowledge Jose Luis Villalpando for his valuable research assistance.

Funding

This article was made possible in part to a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship and a sabbatical grant given to Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz by Mexico's National Council on Science and Tecnology (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) [CONACYT].

Notes

1. An international regime is a set of “implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures [established by states] around which actors' expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner 1983: 2).

2. This literature is abundant. See, for example, Landman (2005), Simmons (2009), Hafner-Burton (2013) Cardenas (2007), Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink (1999, 2013), Keck and Sikkink (1998), Davis and Murdie (2012), Neumayer (2005), Brysk (1993, 1994), Franklin (2007), and Ron (1997).

3. Notable exceptions are the work by Lebovic and Voeten (2006) on the UN Human Rights Commission, a recent study on the reporting procedure of the Committee against Torture (CAT) by Creamer and Simmons (2015), Krommendijk's work on the treaty bodies (2014 and 2015), and Cole's research on the effects of the decisions on individual cases by the UN Human Rights Committee (Cole 2012).

4. Online Appendix A presents the list of the UN treaty bodies.

5. Treaty bodies also have the faculty to elaborate general comments, to receive individual and state complaints regarding specific cases, and (most of them) to undertake special investigations regarding severe violations of human rights in specific countries (see Morijn 2011: 300–302; Keller and Ulfstein 2012a; UN OHCHR 2012).

6. The 2004 concluding observations report on Poland mentioned in Online Appendix B, for example, contains four brief paragraphs regarding “positive aspects” and 16 considerably longer paragraphs on “sources of concern and recommendations.” See Human Rights Committee (2004).

7. In the case of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, reports are submitted every two years.

8. Important but still partial exceptions are Krommendijk (2015), who focuses on the “effectiveness” of recommendations by different treaty bodies in three developed democracies, and Creamer and Simmons (2015), who systematically study the quality of state responses to concluding observations reports by the Committee against Torture.

9. A related question is whether human rights reputations are more important to states than reputations in other principle-based issue areas, such as the protection of the environment or the alleviation of poverty. This is, however, a question that can only be answered through focused empirical research. This endeavor exceeds the aims and scope of this article.

10. For a detailed review of this literature, see Jetschke and Liese (2013). Most likely, reputations in other issue areas, directly linked to material interests (such as trade or economic competitiveness, for example), rank higher in states' agendas than those related to principles and ideals, like human rights. We do not argue that human rights reputations are the most important. We contend that they are at least some how important and that, therefore, states do take them seriously.

11. Also see Note 17. This begs an empirical question—What do states do more often in their responses to treaty bodies? Do they tend more to acknowledge or to deny? Further research might shed more light on these questions. Again, this falls beyond the aims and scope of this article. For a qualitative approach to tracing a similar question, see Bell and O'Rourke (2010) regarding the inclusion of provisions on women in peace agreements.

12. From the perspective of socialization theory, role playing is a form of appropriate behavior— “agents behave appropriately by learning a role… [acting] in accordance with expectations” of the group to which they belong (Checkel 2005: 804). But this conceptualization of role playing implies noninstrumental behavioral adaptation. Actors, in this sense, adopt roles because they are “appropriate” under certain social settings, not because it is in their interest to do so (Checkel 2005: 810–812). In this sense, our understanding of role playing is clearly “thinner” as it does not imply a transition from the logic of consequences to the logic of appropriateness.

13. These countries are the following: Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Guatemala, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Even if the HRC started to produce its first concluding observations reports in the early 1980s, it was not until the early 1990s when its reports started to make an explicit scrutiny of the situation on the ground and thus to include sources of concern and recommendations to states (Gaer 2011: 108; Kälin 2012: 36–37).

14. Our list of human rights includes not only rights as such but also the rights of specific groups and some particular human rights issues. We used the “world examiner” included in the Atlas.ti software package. Online Appendix C shows the list of words included in these clusters.

15. Our measure of salience cannot capture the orientation given to the words we count. The HRC can, for example, praise the adoption of measures on torture or it can criticize the state for failing to implement them (although as argued in the text, concluding observations reports are critical, for the most part). On the other hand, states can either concede the shortcomings raised by the HRC or resort to denial (Cohen 1996). Elucidating the orientation of the words, however, is not necessary to test our first hypothesis. We explore whether states talk more/less about the rights the HRC emphasized/deemphasized. The orientation of the words is not relevant to observe changes in the relative importance given to the discussion on a specific human right. For example, if in responding to a growing concern by the HRC regarding torture the state responds with considerable denial, it would in any case still be following the agenda set forth by the HRC. Our measure of saliency, in this way, fully captures these trends.

16. A cycle constitutes the unit of analysis as it represents a single exchange of information between the HRC and a state. Then, an observation in our dataset corresponds to a cycle applied to the saliency of only one right and one country. An example of cycles for Poland is as follows: The first time the HRC published a concluding observations report on the respect for human rights in Poland was in 1993. Then, Poland issued an ensuing periodic report in 1997. This constituted the first cycle in our study for Poland. After two years, the HRC provided a second concluding observations report in 1999, which in turn was followed by a new periodic report by Poland in 2004. This constitutes the second cycle for this country.

17. Data comes from the 1990/1991 to the 2014/2015 editions of the Yearbook of International Organizations, edited by the Union of International Associations and currently published by Brill. For more information visit: https://www.uia.org/yearbook.

18. Table D1 in the Online Appendix D displays the summary statistics of the variables used.

19. We employ 32 “human rights dummies,” which coincide with those listed in the Online Appendix C.

20. We display the results of these tests in the final three lines of Table 1.

21. We decompose the Freedom House score into its components to assess which specific political rights might be enhancing the effects of the HRC's reports on the adoption of normative discourses by the states. We find that those political rights regarding the electoral process, political pluralism, and participation do enhance these effects. Table E2 in Online Appendix E reports these results through the estimation of marginal effects. In addition, we decompose the Polity score to see whether we could also find analogous results. Similar to the analysis based on the Freedom House indicators, the political rights included the components Institutionalized Democracy and Competitiveness of the Executive Recruitment in the Polity Index also increase the effectiveness of the HRC's reports. Table E3 in Online Appendix E reports these findings. Therefore, several political rights, which are measured under these components in both Freedom House and Polity, coincide and contribute to strengthen the effects of the HRC's concluding observations reports.

22. We employ a battery of diverse robustness checks to assess the validity of our results and the explanatory relevance of other determinants. For space limitations, we do not explain them in detail as part of the main text. Overall, we make modifications to the sample size taking into account the quality of democracy (excluding those cases with relatively low scores) and introduce several control variables into the analysis such as the following: (1(1) ) an interaction term between the change in the relative saliency of rights in the HRC's concluding observations reports and the number of elapsed reporting cycles to assess whether the response of states intensifies over time; (2(2) ) the Government Effectiveness Index elaborated by the World Bank as a measure of institutional capacity; (3) the number of years between the HRC's report and its respective response from the state; (4) naming and shaming activities by human rights NGOs; (5) the total population, the gross domestic product, and the Composite Index of National Capability (from the Correlates of War Project) as additional predictors taken from the realist approach; (6) an interaction between the change in the relative saliency of rights by the HRC and the developmental assistance commitments states have received; (7) an interaction between the change in the relative saliency of rights by the HRC and the degree of economic openness to control for the impact of economic interdependence; (8) an interaction between the number of international NGOs present in each country and the change in relative saliency of rights in the HRC's concluding observations reports; (9) a variable that measures changes in the relative saliency of rights made by the HRC in the reports to other countries; (10) an interaction between a regional dummy and the change in the relative saliency made by the HRC; (11) an interaction between a regional dummy and the political rights score (the political rights score remains as statistically significant); and (12) an interaction between a regional dummy, the change in the relative saliency by the HRC, and the political rights score (the political rights score remains statistically significant). These modifications do not change our support for our hypotheses and we find that the explanatory power of the added variables tends to be null or weak. Table E1 in Online Appendix E displays these results of the alternative specifications. Moreover, Online Appendix E explains in detail the justifications of these robustness checks.

23. Our saliency measures and analysis are not suggestive of the “quality” of state reports. Similarly, we do not explore the scope conditions that are likely to lead to “higher quality” state responses to the HRC. Creamer and Simmons (2015) find that the quality of state reports to the Committee against Torture is associated with state capacities (measured by the existence of a National Human Rights Institution) and by the level of democracy of states.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz

Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz is a professor-researcher at the International Studies Division of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City. He is the author of three books and several articles, published in journals such as the Journal of Human Rights and the Human Rights Quarterly.

Hector M. Nuñez

Hector M. Nuñez is a professor-researcher at the Department of Economics of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), in Aguascalientes, Mexico. His research has been published in journals such as Energy Economics, The Energy Journal, and Agricultural Economics, among others.

Aldo F. Ponce

Aldo F. Ponce is a professor-researcher at the Department of Political Studies of the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), in Aguascalientes, Mexico. He has published in journals such as Studies in Comparative International Development, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Research Review, and Party Politics, among others.