Implementing Decisions of International Human Rights Institutions – Evidence from the United Nations Human Rights Committee

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of research about the implementation of international law. However, there has been almost no empirical research about implementing decisions of international human rights institutions. The decisions of those institutions are usually regarded as soft law, and states do not have a clear legal obligation to implement them. In this article, I bring original empirical data about how and when states implement decisions of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (HRC) in individual communications. I hypothesize that the following factors influence the readiness of states to implement the views of the HRC: (i) the level of democracy and human rights protection in the state; (ii) internal capacity; (iii) strength of civil society; (iv) type of remedy; (v) representation on the HRC; (6) subject matter of the communication. I find that the most important factor for implementing remedies granted by the Committee is the high human rights score of the state. The internal capacity of the state is also significant but to a lesser extent than found in previous studies. Also, I find a certain connection between the state being represented on the HRC and its willingness to implement the remedies.

The 2020 United Nations human rights treaty body review process: prioritising resources, independence and the domestic state reporting process over rationalising and streamlining treaty bodies

“…30 It has also been argued that the human rights scorecard of a state gives a good indication of the extent to which that state will comply with the recommendations made to it. 31 Significantly, there are challenges to the TB processes achieving the desired impact. States' compliance levels with these processes 32 and with implementing the recommendations made to them by TBs are in general low.…”

A Room Full of ‘Views’: Introducing a New Dataset to Explore Compliance with the Decisions of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies’ Individual Complaints Procedures

“…While scholars have investigated compliance with the UNTBs' self-reporting requirements (Creamer and Simmons 2019), a quantitative assessment of compliance with the output of their individual communications procedures (ICPs) remains outstanding. Although several contributions have examined specifically states' engagement with ICPs (Fox Principi 2017; Gadda et al 2019;Murray 2020;Shikhelman 2019;von Staden 2022b), they are either qualitative in character or employ only limited datasets on treaty body decisions (in most cases formally known as 'views') 2 and state reactions thereto. While several datasets on second-order compliance exist with respect to the Inter-American (IACtHR) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (Grewal and Voeten 2015;Hillebrecht 2014b;von Staden 2018), similarly comprehensive data for the globally most encompassing human rights monitoring system, the one spawned by the nine core UN human rights treaties, remains a desideratum.…”

“…The dataset is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive one available despite certain gaps due to unavailability of follow-up information. Other existing datasets are limited either by treaty body, years covered, or both: Shikhelman (2019) samples only a few years of ICP data for the Human Rights Committee (HRC); Haglund and Hillebrecht (2020) include in their Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database only the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) between 2007 and 2016 and only for European countries; and von Staden (2022b), while comprehensive in coverage, addresses compliance only with the decisions of the Committee against Torture (CAT).…”