The Ill‐Treatment and Torture (ITT) Data Collection Project uses content analysis to measure allegations of government ill‐treatment and torture made by Amnesty International (AI) from 1995 to 2005. ITT's country‐year (CY) data quantify AI allegations of ill‐treatment and torture at the country‐year unit of observation and further across different responsible government agents and across different econo‐socio‐political groups of alleged victims. This paper introduces the Ill‐Treatment and Torture country‐year data, describes quantitative patterns likely to be of interest to researchers focused on the study of international non‐governmental organizations (INGOs) and human rights, and suggests a number of theoretically motivated questions that can be explored using the ITT country‐year data.

The climate of impunity in many post-civil conflict societies results in unprecedented levels of violence against women, making legal implementation and law enforcement particularly difficult. We argue that the presence of strong legal provisions mediates the negative influence of the post-civil conflict environment on violence against women. Specifically, we examine the role of strong legal protections on the enforcement of sexual violence legislation in post-civil conflict countries. To examine our hypothesis, we utilize an original dataset measuring the strength and enforcement of domestic legal statutes addressing violence against women for the years 2007–2010 in post-civil conflict countries. We find elements of civil conflict as well as domestic and international legal regimes to be reliably associated with the enforcement of violence against women laws and rape prevalence in post-civil conflict states.

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With the proliferation of the international human rights regime, states confront a dense set of institutional commitments. Our knowledge of the influence of these commitments is limited for two reasons. First, scholars largely focus on the effect of treaty ratification on states’ human rights behavior, but states engage with these institutions after ratification via regional human rights court rulings and UN recommendations. Second, scholars often examine these institutions in isolation. The institutions do not operate in isolation, however, nor do states necessarily consider the requests they receive from these institutions independently. In this article, we introduce the Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2), which maps the various recommendations international women’s rights institutions make on European states. We begin by discussing the importance of recommendations from international institutions and their relationship with commitment and compliance. We then describe the data collection effort, including two dimensions on which recommendations made to European states vary – precision and action. Next, we report descriptive statistics from the dataset, including regional and temporal trends. We conclude with a discussion of the multifaceted research agenda that this new dataset can facilitate.