Overlapping international human rights institutions: Introducing the Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2)

Abstract

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.

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

“…Although these findings constitute important preliminary insights, they could be complemented by additional decision-level determinants of compliance, such as the underlying issue, as expressed by the specific rights that have been violated and the legal reasoning behind and/or the precision of the remedies. A stronger focus on decision-level factors would address claims about the importance of decision characteristics for state compliance that have been made in the literature on legally binding judgments by international courts (Fikfak 2018; Haglund and Hillebrecht 2020; Staton and Romero 2019; Stiansen 2019).…”

“…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).…”

Talk of shame: Conflict-related sexual violence and bilateral critique within the United Nations

“…The CRSV-shaming results – especially if voiced many times and through numerous channels – in an increasingly tangible expectation that the government in question will re-evaluate its practices and policies (Carraro, 2019; Haglund & Hillebrecht, 2020). This expectation is sustained by pressure from domestic civil-society organizations and civil rights-aware citizens, and by pressure from the foreign governments carrying out the shaming.…”