The Price of Petition: Tracing the Effects of Increasing Jurisprudence on Future Acceptance of Human Rights Treaty Bodies’ Individual Complaints Procedures

Abstract

As of today, most human rights treaties under the United Nations umbrella comprise an active individual complaints procedure (ICP) allowing individuals to file complaints if they deem their guaranteed rights violated by state entities. Once a UN committee establishes a human rights violation, it is able to demand costly remedial action by the violating state in their so called ‘views’. While they are not formally binding in the legal sense, treaty body decisions resulting from ICPs can nonetheless result in a normative obligation for states to implement the required remedies. Particularly the recent two decades saw activity under the ICPs rising to a total of 1400 treaty body views today. So far, most IR scholarship on UN treaty bodies has revolved either around questions concerning states’ initial commitment to the treaties and their petition mechanisms or the states’ willingness to comply with treaty provisions. This article follows a slightly different approach and asks about the effects of the now considerable number of treaty body views on states’ support for the ICPs in general. It puts forth the argument that states as boundedly rational actors are deterred from further ICP acceptance the more they are exposed to the cost implications of adverse views. Based on theories of bounded rational learning and Bayesian learning, I conjecture that early on state actors underestimate potential future costs of ICP acceptance but later update their cost assessments based on the new information provided by a growing number of adverse views both against their own and other states. Since national decision makers are assumed to be (boundedly) rational actors and since withdrawing from already accepted ICPs is most of the time not an option, this updated cost assessment will express itself through a higher reluctance to accept additional ICPs. This study tests above assertion using survival analysis techniques on an original dataset containing data on 169 countries from the years 1965 to 2018. The results indicate a robust negative effect of a higher number of those adverse views that are directly addressed at the state under observation on that state’s acceptance of three out of five examined ICPs. Findings further suggest an expectedly faint but significant negative effect of the overall number of adverse views issued by treaty bodies on the acceptance of four out of six examined ICPs. The deterrent effects of adverse views indicate how the output of soft law instruments is able to find its way into domestic decision making processes, albeit not necessarily in the way intended by the treaty bodies.