Signaling Sincere Commitment Through Overlap and Redundancy: Explaining the Acceptance of Individual Communications Procedures Across Regional and Global Human Rights Regimes

The universe of international institutions for the protection of human rights has become densely populated. In addition to national institutions and mechanisms, a wide array of treaties and monitoring mechanisms exists at the regional and global levels. In addition to the regional human rights regimes in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, there are today nine ‘core’ UN human rights treaties, each of them establishing a committee with the competence to monitor treaty implementation through review of state reports and to engage in various other (mostly optional) monitoring mechanisms. Many states have accepted several, if not most, of the regional and global monitoring mechanisms. At the same time, complaints have increasingly been voiced that the human rights system has become too complex and too resource-intensive, resulting, among other things, in General Assembly Resolution 68/268 (2014) which initiated a review process with a view to generating proposals, by 2020, for reforming the treaty body system. Many rights are also included in several of the regional and global treaties while being monitored by different courts and committees, creating jurisdictional overlap and the possibility of normative friction and fragmentation triggered by different interpretations. While states may complain about an excessively intricate international human rights system, they can freely decide which treaties to ratify and which monitoring mechanisms to accept. In our paper we investigate the factors that explain why states accept optional human rights monitoring mechanisms. Focusing on the active individual complaints procedures (ICPs) under eight of the UN human rights treaties, we argue that accepting multiple, at least partly overlapping oversight mechanisms is neither haphazard nor results in institutional chaos, but is an intentional strategy by some actors to avoid failure and reduce uncertainty in the overall system of human rights protection. Specifically, we expect states interested in the creation of a robust and reliable legal system of human rights protection to actively seek redundancy and overlap. This implies that states that already have similar judicial control mechanisms in place nationally and regionally are also more likely to accept additional oversight mechanisms at the global level. We focus on individual complaints procedures because these “fire alarm” mechanisms relinquish control over the initiation of proceedings to non-state actors and are thus the strongest signal of sincere commitment. In order to test these claims we use a multi-method research design, combing quantitative survival analysis to reveal general patterns in the data with qualitative case studies to show that our hypothesized mechanisms are indeed at work with respect to concrete commitment decisions. We study the ratification behavior of states concerning all eight global ICPs over a period of fifty-three years using semi-parametric survival analysis technique. We then investigate the plausibility of our argument further in the context of four case studies, using in-depth analysis of governmental declarations, parliamentary debates, and parliamentary committee reports concerning the acceptance of ICPs to show how relevant actors problematize overlap and redundancy between different human rights treaties and monitoring mechanisms and in what ways this affects ratification behavior.