Who commits to regional human rights treaties? Reputational benefits, sovereignty costs, and regional dynamics

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, regional international organizations have adopted several treaties on human rights. By ratifying them, member states can signal their commitment to the norms codified in the respective documents. Yet ratification patterns vary greatly across both states and treaties. Extant studies of commitment to human rights focus on the impacts of reputational benefits and sovereignty costs. These arguments, however, are largely based on studies of ratification behavior in Europe and the UN system. We extend this logic to treaties created in the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (OAU/AU). Between them, the two organizations have adopted 15 human rights agreements, giving their member states ample choices about (non)ratification. We apply event-history analysis to newly collected data on treaty commitment. This reveals variation in line with regional differences in how treaties are elaborated. Benefits from commitment expected by democratic and democratizing states play an important role in the member-state driven process in the OAS, but this is not the case in the OAU/AU. In the expert-driven context of the OAU/AU, in contrast, concerns about sovereignty costs related to treaty design and the relative power of member states are more pronounced.

Acknowledgments

We presented an earlier version of this article at the German Political Science Association’s IB Sektionstagung 2020. We are grateful for the comments and support from Levke Aduda, Margit Bussmann, Michael Giesen, Sassan Gholiagha, Felix Haass, Franziska Hohlstein, Chris Höhne, Nathalia Iost, Anja Jetschke, Max Lesch, Katharina Meissner, Anja Menzel, Nadine O’Shea, Diana Panke, Gurur Polat, and Nina Reiners. Lara Hoffmann assisted in data collection and Emma Hardy supported us in copy editing the article. We express our gratitude to the reviewers and editors for their thoughtful comments and contributions during the publication process.

Notes

1 RIOs are institutionalized forms of cooperation that takes place on the basis of geographical proximity between three or more states (Goltermann et al., 2012, p. 4; Panke et al., 2020, p. 1).

2 This is not to deny that the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights have been important proponents of further legalization. Nonetheless, scholars of the OAS point to member states as primary actors.

3 At the same time, some scholars acknowledge that autocratic regimes equally ratify to signal their (insincere) commitment to human rights (Hathaway, 2007).

4 To measure the burden IOs put on member-state sovereignty, Hafner-Burton and colleagues (2015, 2019) mapped whether treaties include certain provisions deemed to entail high costs, following the legalization framework (Abbott et al., 2000). Studying investment treaties, Thompson and colleagues (2019) assessed how documents affect the “state regulatory space” by counting how many out of a predefined list of clauses they include. Most recently, Mulesky and colleagues (2020) have constructed a multidimensional measure that captures both the scope (number of issues) and the degree of legalization (precision and obligation) for several UN human rights documents. However, it is not obvious how to deal with trade-offs between scope and legalization, and the assumption that all substantial clauses should be weighted equally also raises questions (e.g., see Thompson et al., 2019, pp. 9–10).

5 Although the imputed democracy score covers all countries, it lacks data on some country-years in Africa, especially in the period between 1969 and 1971. To make sure this does not distort our results, we have also run models with V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index (see discussion and Table A6 in the Online Appendix).

6 Northern Africa (seven countries), Western Africa (16), Central Africa (nine), Eastern Africa (17), Southern Africa (five), North America (two), Central America (eight), Caribbean (12), and South America (12).

7 Moreover, several regional documents were adopted prior to or roughly contemporaneously with their UN counterparts (forced disappearance, children’s rights). The complex relationship between UN and regional treaties could be examined in further research.

8 Because the imputed Freedom House and Polity IV variable has missing data for several African states, we used the Electoral Democracy Index from the V-Dem project as an alternative measure of democracy and episodes of democratization. Using this alternative indicator does not lead to different conclusions (see Online Appendix, Table A6).

9 As an additional test, we fit a negative binomial regression with OAS and OAU/AU treaties in the same model. The interaction between OAU/AU membership and high sovereignty costs is positive and statistically significant (see Online Appendix, Table A7). We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

10 Arguably, the Judicial Committee of the UK Privy Council “provides a more effective institutional structure for human rights review than the Inter-American System could fairly claim” (Shaver, 2010, p. 675). Yet, by the end of the 1990s, Caribbean governments were at odds with the Privy Council’s take on the death penalty (Helfer, 2002). Members of the Caribbean Community even established the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2005, which is slowly establishing its authority on regional integration law, including the protection of individual rights in a few cases (Caserta & Madsen, 2016).

11 Also note that our models do not fully explain the large differences in ratification rates between individual treaties within the same organization. To answer our research questions, treaties were pooled. Explaining the choices (not) to ratify individual documents may require a different modeling strategy and/or additional data on which states were leading the respective negotiations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mathis Lohaus

Mathis Lohaus is a research associate at the Otto-Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin. His research is focused on international organizations, the diffusion of norms and international law, and a sociological perspective on “global IR.” His book, Toward a Global Consensus Against Corruption, was published by Routledge in 2019.

Sören Stapel

Sören Stapel is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His research interests include global and regional governance, norm and policy diffusion, and overlapping regionalism. He published Regional Organizations and Democracy, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.