Expertise and decision-making of independent experts in International Organizations. Evidence from the International Human Rights system.

Most international human rights bodies rely on individual experts to inform, substantiate, and legitimize their decisions. However, little is known about how these experts use the authority assigned to them. The paper studies this question in the context of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s special procedures individual complaint procedure—a central avenue through which victims of human rights abuses can make their cases heard. Specifically, the paper sets out to examine how different types of expertise can shape the inclination of individual mandate holders to call out states for their human rights violations in individual cases. We differentiate between two types of expertise that independent experts can hold: substantive and political expertise. The first reflects knowledge of professional theories, concepts, and tools, and the second reflects skills in navigating professional work's political, social, and economic contexts. We argue that individuals with more substantive human rights expertise have been socialized into norms of individual redress and possess the skills to facilitate such redress. Therefore, we expect that these experts will raise more human rights concerns with countries, particularly regarding sensitive issues. Experts with political expertise, on the other hand, will have been socialized into a more state-centered understanding of human rights policy and will consequently be more reluctant to raise individual concerns, especially in human rights areas that are particularly sensitive to member states. We test these expectations by combining novel biographical data on independent experts with data on more than 21,000 communications lodged by all UN Special Procedures with thematic mandates towards 180 countries between 2010 and 2020. We use multilevel regression techniques and expert interviews to examine the role of varying expertise in mandate-holders’ individual communications procedure activities. Our findings show that the expertise of individuals plays an important role in shaping their decisions. We find that individuals with more substantive expertise exhibit a greater emphasis on individual complaints overall and especially in more sensitive issue areas. At the same time, we find that political expertise in national governments appears to lead to a shift away from politically sensitive issues. More generally, our results suggest that the individual background of experts employed in the international human rights regime matters for substantive policy outcomes.