On the Causal (In)Significance of Legal Status: Assessing and Explaining Compliance with the “Views” of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies

• Applicant: Dr. Andreas von Staden
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417704617

All main UN human rights treaties provide for monitoring committees to oversee compliance with their obligations. While only the state reporting mechanism is automatically accepted when ratifying the relevant treaties, all committees have by now also been given the optional competence to decide individual complaints. In terms of the number of states covered, the human rights dispute settlement system spawned by the treaty bodies’ individual complaints procedures (ICPs) is the most encompassing in existence today.Given the lack of reliable information about rates of compliance with the committees’ legally non-binding decisions (“views”) and the system’s impact on enhancing the protection of human rights, the project team has created the first systematically collected and coded data set on compliance with committee decisions comprising all treaty bodies, decisions, and years. Building on existing theories of compliance, the data is currently being analyzed using statistical survival analysis to identify the causal factors that affect the implementation of treaty body views. In addition, the project has explored the prior question of the factors that explain commitment to ICPs (which are also expected to influence compliance), highlighting the statistically significant roles of commitment to regional human rights courts and of learning effects that result from observing the costliness of treaty body output over time.The project’s central research question concerns the causal role of the legally non-binding status of treaty body views for compliance and non-compliance. For this purpose, two further sets of analyses remain to be conducted. First, the quantitative analysis of compliance with treaty body views will be replicated with data on compliance with the legally binding judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Holding country characteristics constant by analyzing behavior by the same respondent states allows to identify the extent to which correlations between compliance with non-binding views and binding judgments and the same configuration of explanatory variables are statistically different. Second, qualitative case studies of select countries and matched pairs of views and judgments will engage in process-tracing of domestic compliance processes to reveal the mechanisms that link causal factors and outcomes. Using public and archival data and interviews with key domestic stakeholders, the analysis will identify when and at which specific steps during the implementation process differences in legal status become causally meaningful and with what effects.In light of the tightly planned timeframe of the original proposal, the originally not budgeted research into the factors affecting commitment to ICPs, and the uncertainties and interruptions caused by the corona pandemic, commencement of the project’s final work package has been delayed. An extension of 18 months is requested to be able to complete all outstanding research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants