Organising Human Rights: Internal Complexity of International Organisations and its Effects on Human Rights Policies

Why do international organizations absorb and respond to international human rights norms differently? For one, international and regional human rights institutions (such as norms, regimes, and policies) have been globally converging on institutional design features while exhibiting increasing norm complexity as well as clustering institutional particularities in space, time, and across regions. Likewise, over the past decades, international and regional organizations (IOs and RIOs) have been exhibiting substantial institutional changes, specifically an increase in formal authority, openness to civil society actors, institutional overlap and interaction, and internal complexity on organization body-level. Both intersecting observations challenge prevailing state-centric and formal unitary (government-driven) models of international institutions and organizations, and institutional change in international relations literature. This paper posits that inquiring how international organizations generate norm interpretations of international human rights policies provides new perspectives on the work and internal processes of increasingly complex international organizations. It argues that internal complexities especially in informal knowledge structures shared amongst IO-body levels and exposed to varying external influences generate different understandings of international human rights policies and, thus, translate into different policies in time, space and region. To develop this argument, the paper firstly maps quantitatively increasing internal complexity of IOs and RIOs as well as norm frames of international human rights policies over the past decades which guides case selection. Secondly, a case study on the development of the Council of Europe’s (CoE) convention aiming to combating and preventing violence against women and domestic violence (‘Istanbul Convention') explains internally diverging interpretative norm frames with diverging informal knowledge structures within the CoE. Accordingly, structurally differentiated sets of actors including and cutting across intergovernmental committees, transnational parliamentarians, expert groups, and so on constructed diverging interpretative frames of violence against women due to their differently institutionalized knowledge positions and influences from external norm environments.