The Dynamic Impact of Periodic Review on Women’s Rights

Human rights treaty bodies have been frequently criticized as useless and the regime’s self-reporting procedure widely viewed as a whitewash. Yet very little research explores what, if any, influence this periodic review process has on governments’ implementation of and compliance with treaty obligations. We argue oversight committees may play an important role in improving rights on the ground by providing information for international and primarily domestic audiences. This paper examines the cumulative effects on women’s rights of self-reporting and oversight review, using original data on the history of state reporting to and review by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CmEDAW). Using a dynamic approach to study the effects of the periodic review process, we find that self-reporting has a significant positive effect on women’s rights. We explore three clusters of evidence for the domestic mobilization mechanism: information provision through domestic civil society organizations; publicity and critique through the domestic media; and parliamentary attention, debate, and implementation of recommendations. This is the first study to present positive evidence on the effects of self-reporting on rights and to describe the mechanisms that link Geneva bodies with local politics. Our findings challenge the received wisdom that the process of reporting to these treaty bodies is basically useless

Transparency at Home: How Well Do Governments Share Human Rights Information with Citizens?

Governmen

Reforming WTO Conflict Management Why and How to Improve the Use of “Specific Trade Concerns”. Bertelsmann Working Paper 24/02/2020

The World Trade Organization (WTO) needs reform to strengthen its vital role in mitigating commercial conflict, notably its procedures for discussing trade concerns. As Committees do not need permission to improve their own procedures this might be a logical starting point, but General Council guidance and a central decision on ad-ditional funding can help Officials need to keep each other informed about implementation of WTO rules, and they do in thousands of so-called notifications through the WTO every year. Knowing what is going on is the first step in managing conflict. Officials also need to be able to talk to each other about implementation, which they do in dozens of committee meetings every year. In those meetings they often raise “specific trade concerns” (STCs) on behalf of their firms. Most often those concerns about laws, regulations, or practices are addressed by their trading partners. A relative handful cannot be resolved this way and are raised as formal disputes. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) committees are a bench-mark showing the place of STCs in the great pyramid of the WTO legal order. I draw three implications from the pyramid in SPS and TBT: 1. Only a small fraction of the huge number of SPS and TBT notifications ever become a source of con-flict leading to a dispute. From 1995 until early 2019, there were 34,000 TBT notifications, 580 STCs and only 6 disputes with Appellate Body reports. 2. One reason is that discussion of STCs can mitigate some sources of friction, sometimes by modifica-tion or withdrawal of a measure. 3. Dispute settlement is at the tip of the pyramid. There are probably many more enquiry point com-ments than STCs, and there are certainly many more STCs than disputes. The committees do not settle formal disputes, but they have demonstrably served to diffuse trade conflict in their respective areas

(De)Legitimation at the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism

International courts employ a variety of legitimation strategies in order to establish and maintain a sound basis of support among their constituents. Existing studies on the legitimating efforts and legitimacy of the World Trade Organization\u27s (WTO) judicial bodies have relied largely on theoretical or normative priors about what makes them legitimate. In contrast, this Article directly connects the study of courts\u27 legitimating efforts with their effects by empirically mapping the reception of the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism\u27s (DSM) exercise of authority by the system\u27s primary constituents--WTO Members. Using an original data set of WTO Member statements within meetings of the Dispute Settlement Body from 1995-2013 and a series of interviews, this Article provides a descriptive analysis of expressed views on the DSM\u27s exercise of authority over time and across subsets of Members. Through an in-depth examination of statements on focal reports, this Article sheds new light on the sources of the DSM\u27s legitimacy by identifying practices that contribute to reducing or enhancing it in the eyes of the primary constituents of this international institution

Dilemmas of Delegation: The Politics of Authority in International Courts

One of the most enduring questions for the study of politics relates to what, if any, inde- pendent power international institutions have to affect the behavior of sovereign states. This dissertation addresses this question by examining the politics underlying one supranational judicial body’s exercise of authority—the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Set- tlement Mechanism (DSM). International courts are strategic legal actors that operate in a highly political context. Politics matter for judicial outcomes—the rulings of courts—but legal constraints moderate the impact of politics in fairly systematic ways. The dissertation specifies the conditions under which one dynamic prevails and demonstrates that power pol- itics do not dominate international judicial interactions. Rather, courts are sensitive to the degree of institutional support they enjoy among the collective membership and a broader set of relevant stakeholders. Collective support for or challenges to a court’s institutional legitimacy—what I call a court’s political capital—affect judicial outcomes more than the preferences of dominant stakeholders. The second chapter develops the dissertation’s theoretical argument, while the third chapter describes the political context within which the WTO’s judicial bodies operate. It applies methods of automated text analysis to an original dataset of all member statements made within the WTO Dispute Settlement Body from 1995-2013 in order to construct measures of the DSM’s political capital. I supplement this evidence with a series of interviews with member representatives and WTO Secretariat officials. The fourth chapter employs original measures of dispute outcomes to identify how WTO panels respond to shifts in the DSM’s political capital. It finds that dispute panels are po- litically savvy, as they tend to signal less deference to national regulatory choices only when the DSM enjoys relatively greater support among the membership as a whole. However, the legal constraints of appellate case law moderate the influence of these political pressures on dispute outcomes. Through their rulings, panels seek to maximize support among their legal and political audiences simultaneously. The fifth chapter turns to the relationship between the Appellate Body (AB) and dis- pute panels. How panels review domestic laws and policy choices can be—and has been increasingly—challenged on appeal by parties. This chapter describes how the AB initially directed panels to engage in searching review of domestic policy choices, but that it has encouraged greater deference to national authorities in recent years. It identifies when the AB reverses panel findings on these grounds, with a focus on when it takes into account views expressed by governments. The final chapter turns to the impact of the WTO’s judicial authority on state behavior, specifically compliance with its judgments. Employing original measures of dispute judg- ments and compliance outcomes, this chapter demonstrates that the WTO’s judicial bodies use the content of their rulings to ease the domestic political costs of trade policy changes, thereby acting as ‘partners in compliance’ with a government’s executive branch. Yet the extent to which these strategies successfully facilitate swifter implementation is conditional on the domestic politics of compliance. The political cover provided within adverse rul- ings has no observable impact on the fact or timing of compliance for disputes that can be implemented through executive action alone. However, relatively greater validation of a trade measure does increase the probability of compliance and swifter implementation when legislative action is required. This suggests that the WTO’s judicial bodies successfully fa- cilitate compliance through the content of their rulings, thereby improving the effectiveness of the dispute settlement system.Governmen

Do Self-Reporting Regimes Matter? Evidence From the Convention Against Torture

International regulatory agreements depend largely on self-reporting for implementation, yet we know almost nothing about whether or how such mechanisms work. We theorize that self-reporting processes provide information for domestic constituencies, with the potential to create pressure for better compliance. Using original data on state reports submitted to the Committee Against Torture, we demonstrate the influence of this process on the pervasiveness of torture and inhumane treatment. We illustrate the power of self-reporting regimes to mobilize domestic politics through evidence of civil society participation in shadow reporting, media attention, and legislative activity around anti-torture law and practice. This is the first study to evaluate systematically the effects of self-reporting in the context of a treaty regime on human rights outcomes. Since many international agreements rely predominantly on self-reporting, the results have broad significance for compliance with international regulatory regimes globally

The Proof is in the Process: Self-Reporting Under International Human Rights Treaties

Recent research has shown that state reporting to human rights monitoring bodies is associated with improvements in rights practices, calling into question earlier claims that self-reporting is inconsequential. Yet little work has been done to explore the theoretical mechanisms that plausibly account for this association. This Article systematically documents—across treaties, countries, and years—four mechanisms through which reporting can contribute to human rights improvements: elite socialization, learning and capacity building, domestic mobilization, and law development. These mechanisms have implications for the future of human rights treaty monitoring