Complying with human rights1

Simon Hug2 and Simone Wegmann3
Département de science politique et relations internationales
Université de Genève
 
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the
Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 12 - 15, 2012

First version: October 2011, this version: Nov 3, 2011

Abstract

The empirical assessment of how signatories of human rights conventions comply with their agreed to obligations has yielded so far conflicting results, especially regarding the compliance mechanisms that are the most promising to ensure improving human rights records. We argue in this paper that this has to do with the fact that different compliance mechanisms have been assessed in isolation, without considering possible interactions. To assess this argument, we propose a novel way to assess the effect of these mechanisms by relying on a Markov-transition model and find that strong management capacities and enforcement mechanisms allow countries to improve their human rights record.

Footnotes:

1This paper draws on Simone Wegmann's (2010) master thesis.

2  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@unige.ch

3  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; email: simone.wegmann@unige.ch

File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.12.
On 3 Nov 2011, 08:08.