Reinforcement, politicization, signaling, or inertia: Overlap in UN treaty bodies’ monitoring of foreigners’ rights violations

Migrant workers’ and refugees’ rights are enshrined in respective treaties. Yet the treaty bodies of the CAT, the CRC, the CEDAW, the CERD and the ICESCR all regularly monitor the protection of foreigners’ rights in ratifying countries. This is peculiar because it is wasteful of scarce treaty bodies’ resources and because it could exacerbate monitoring fatigue among member countries. The research outlined in this paper aims to measure and explain this overlap between treaty bodies’ monitoring practices. Utilizing previous research on foreigners’ rights in human rights shaming schemes, it formulates four explanations for foreigners’ rights monitoring overlap. The Reinforcement explanation argues that in reiterating the importance of foreigners’ rights treaty bodies are responding to an increased need for foreigners’ rights protection around the world, due to migration crises and deterioration in the treatment of migrants. The Politicization theory stipulates that by mentioning abuse of foreigners, the treaty bodies are trying to mobilize home countries and powerful allies of home countries to help enforce the treaty. The Signaling concept builds on the literature that identifies foreigners’ rights as a relatively sensitive human rights issue. This literature argues that states are relatively sensitive to shaming on foreigners’ rights issues. Accordingly, treaty bodies might be focusing on foreigners’ rights in order to either balance an otherwise positive report, or signal exceptional discontent with the country’s compliance level. Finally, the treaty bodies’ repeated attention to foreigners’ rights may be resulting from institutional inertia. The paper will review the literature from which each theory originates and formulate research hypotheses for empirical analysis. Subsequently, I will describe my empirical strategy for testing the hypotheses. This strategy includes non-parametric analysis, regression analysis and qualitative analysis of interview data. The results indicate that overlaps in the monitoring of foreigners’ rights violations by the UN’s treaty bodies, are associated with migration spikes in the monitored country. Such spikes strengthen the need for protection of the migrants and increase the number of people benefiting or suffering from protection or violation of their rights respectively. This confirms the reinforcement hypothesis. This finding means that in monitoring compliance with the UN HR treaties, TB are responding to changing circumstances and needs on the ground. The paper draws theoretical and policy implications from this finding.