Understanding Adoption of International Human Rights Treaties: Political Regimes and Modification of Compliance Control

Although the research on human rights commitments has considerably evolved over the last decade, too many uncertainties make the research in human rights commitments difficult and the whole field of scholarship remains unsettled, with competing explanations of several phenomena of interest. Our paper steps into this debate with an innovative approach, presenting a new model on commitment decision-making, which is both more precise and better grounded in the legal and political reality. We present the most complex research up to now, introducing the largest database of international HR treaties yet. We argue that patterns in which different political regimes commit to international HR treaties depend on the strength of the compliance control (combination of the control established by the treaty and domestic courts applying the treaty). Nevertheless, this effect is modified by states entering procedural reservations which limit the jurisdiction of treaty control mechanisms. For transitional democracies, the modifying effect is minimal, TD are good committers, behaving as system desires, international HR commitments have the most benefits for them. While democracies mostly fully commit, some of them do modify their commitments towards compliance control with procedural reservations, not because they do not want to comply, but because they do not trust international control mechanisms. We suppose this is caused by differences in HR cultural understanding among democracies. Finally, autocracies modify their commitments through procedural reservations most often and we do not expect any differences across the geographic regions.