The role of legal status of normative pronouncements for generating compliance has been subject to debate in IR and IL scholarship. This paper probes the causal significance of the distinction between legally binding and non-binding decisions in the field of human rights by taking advantage of the fact that a sizable number of states are subject both to the jurisdiction of one of the three regional human rights courts in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as to the individual complaints procedures instituted under the nine UN human rights treaties, with the former issuing legally binding judgments and the latter formally non-binding “views” that, nonetheless, articulate normative requirements for respondent states. The results of a study of a sample of responses of European democracies to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and to the “views” of the Human Rights Committee operating under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights indicates that legal status affects compliance, but not in a determinative way. Based on these results, I develop a theory of compliance in which legal status interacts with a number of other factors (strength of domestic pro-compliance constituencies, type of violation, legal system etc.) to be tested with additional cases.
