Contemporary international criminal law suggests that head of state immunity does not extend to atrocity crimes, but the executive’s office continues to be the safest place for suspected ...perpetrators. Moreover, indicted suspects can use the threat of international accountability to win democratically contested elections. This article asks how suspects and their surrogates translate an indictment from an international criminal tribunal into an electoral victory and suggests that the path between an indictment and electoral victory unfolds in one of two ways: (1) the consolidation of existing coalitions around the indicted suspects and their allies; or (2) the creation of new coalitions that span existing cleavages. The article evaluates these assumptions through two cases: Lebanon and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and Kenya and the International Criminal Court. These two decidedly different cases exemplify the ways in which coalitional politics shield suspects international accountability and reward them with high office.
In 2015 the Russian Constitutional Court announced that it would review all of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rulings against Russia for their constitutionality. This decision, which both ...the Duma and the Kremlin supported, underscored a fundamental disagreement between Russia and the ECHR about both the substance of human rights norms and the ways in which disagreements about human rights can and should be resolved. Russia has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1996 and agreed to accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ECHR in 1998. Russian citizens regularly seek recourse at the ECHR and Russia even complies with many of the Court's demands to pay financial reparations to victims.
International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The ...international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.
With the proliferation of the international human rights regime, states confront a dense set of institutional commitments. Our knowledge of the influence of these commitments is limited for two ...reasons. First, scholars largely focus on the effect of treaty ratification on states’ human rights behavior, but states engage with these institutions after ratification via regional human rights court rulings and UN recommendations. Second, scholars often examine these institutions in isolation. The institutions do not operate in isolation, however, nor do states necessarily consider the requests they receive from these institutions independently. In this article, we introduce the Women’s Rights Recommendations Digital Database (WR2D2), which maps the various recommendations international women’s rights institutions make on European states. We begin by discussing the importance of recommendations from international institutions and their relationship with commitment and compliance. We then describe the data collection effort, including two dimensions on which recommendations made to European states vary–precision and action. Next, we report descriptive statistics from the dataset, including regional and temporal trends. We conclude with a discussion of the multifaceted research agenda that this new dataset can facilitate.
When international human rights tribunals like the European Court of Human Rights find states responsible for human rights abuses, they ask governments to pay reparation to the victims, engage in ...symbolic measures, and enact the policy changes necessary to ensure that the violations do not recur. This article considers the conditions under which states comply with these rulings, especially when the tribunals are unable and often unwilling to provide strict enforcement. This article extends current theories about the domestic politics of compliance with international human rights law to the case of the European Court of Human Rights. This article analyzes a new, hand-coded data set on states’ compliance with over 1000 discrete obligations handed down by the European Court of Human Rights that ask states to change their human rights policies. The results of these analyses suggest that robust domestic institutions, particularly executive constraints, are the key to compliance with the European Court of Human Rights. When domestic institutions enforce the Court’s rulings, the results can be significant changes in states’ human rights policies and practices.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) was designed to try the worst war criminals for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other instances of mass human suffering. By providing a permanent, ...international mechanism to hold perpetrators of mass human rights abuse accountable, the ICC is also meant to be a deterrent-to prevent potential genocidaires from committing systematic human rights abuses in the first place. But what if the effect is actually quite the opposite? While advocates of international justice have made conjectures about the effect of the ICC on stopping human rights abuses, the existing scholarship does not empirically test assumptions about the relationship between international criminal justice and violence. This article outlines the causal mechanisms by which the ICC could affect ongoing violence and tests these assumptions using event count models of the relationship between the ICC and the level of violence against civilians in Libya during the 2011 crisis. These analyses suggest that the ICC's involvement in conflict does have a dampening effect on the level of mass atrocities committed. The results also call for a broad and sustained research agenda on the effect of international accountability efforts on ongoing violence.
In their rulings, international human rights tribunals frequently ask states to engage in costly compliance measures ranging from paying reparations to victims to changing domestic human rights laws ...and practices. The tribunals, however, have little enforcement or oversight capacity. The responsibility for compliance falls to domestic actors: executives, legislators, and judiciaries. Through nuanced case studies of the compliance process in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, this article suggests that compliance with the Inter-American human rights tribunals' rulings depends on executives' political will for compliance and their ability to build pro-compliance coalitions with judges and legislators.
Despite the International Criminal Court's increased prominence in international politics, there remains marked variation in states' cooperation with the ICC. This article asks why do states ...cooperate with the ICC following an indictment, arrest warrant or request for information, and how do these patterns of cooperation affect the Court's ability to constrain state behavior? Using comparative case studies from Kenya, Côte d'Ivoire, and Libya, we suggest that states' cooperation with the ICC is a function of domestic political calculations, tempered by states' international partners and ambitions and the ICC's own learning process.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) boasts one of the strongest oversight systems in international human rights law, but implementing the ECtHR’s rulings is an inherently domestic and ...political process. This article begins to bridge the gap between the Court in Strasbourg and the domestic process of implementing the Court’s rulings by looking at the domestic institutions and politics that surround the execution of the ECtHR’s judgments. Using case studies from the UK and Russia, this article identifies two factors that are critical for the domestic implementation of the Court’s rulings: strong domestic, democratic institutions dedicated to implementing the ECtHR’s judgments and an overarching sense of responsibility to set a good example at home and abroad for respecting human rights and the rule of law. This article concludes with a discussion of the steps necessary to facilitate better implementation of the ECtHR’s rulings.
