Interplay Between Formal and Informal Mechanisms in Implementing Human Rights Treaties: The Case of OSCE Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly

Human Rights treaties that are designed and adopted by nation-states constitute an important part of global governance, they shape up regulatory regimes and formal norms that are monitored by specially created international intergovernmental institutions, but they also create an arena of interaction of state and non-state actors. One of the mechanisms that are combining tools of formal and informal governance is known as soft law regulatory mechanisms (Mörth (ed.), 2004; Senden 2004; Snyder 2010, Trubek 2005). The advantages of soft law regulation is that it is based on voluntary agreements and interests of the parties in implementing those norms that are usually based on consensus; they do not use coercive power and repressive mechanisms, which is quite costly and seldom effective. Instead soft law uses attractiveness of the norms itself because they create “desirable order” that is also known as regulatory power. Many of international institutions implementing human rights are using exclusively soft law regulations. Case of human rights policy domain is fruitful to study informal mechanisms of global governance because it creates a very dynamic interplay between quite rigid governmental institutions and inter-governmental organizations like UN, EU, OSCE, etc. and informal mechanisms they use to reach their goals in implementing human rights norms and regulations. One of those cases is OSCE activities in monitoring human rights treaties implementation. This paper focuses on the case of formulation and implementation of the soft law mechanisms of the Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly (Belyaeva, Bull, and others, 2010) that provides the combination of tools for NGOs and assembly organizers as well as for local governments, regulatory bodies, and internal security organizations, like police, to interact with each other in the implementing of the international human tights treaties such as securing the freedom of peaceful assembly.