A presentation by Andreas von Staden and Andreas Ullmann (University of Hamburg). This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
The international human rights regime is densely institutionalised, spawning a web of diverse compliance monitoring and dispute settlement procedures before regional and global bodies. Some of these are full-fledged judicial institutions – the three regional human rights courts – while most are commissions, councils, and committees that generate output that, while being normative in character and generating expectations of compliance, is not legally binding. Most states are subject to several supervisory procedures and many states have accepted the individual complaints jurisdiction of the regional human rights courts as well as that of the global UN human rights treaty bodies and have, as a result, been subject to both legally binding judgments as well as legally nonbinding treaty body views/decisions. This study investigates comparatively the significance of legal status by exploring similarities and differences in responses to adverse findings by the European Court of Human Rights, on the one hand, and by the UN treaty bodies, on the other. By comparing responses of the same states to judgments and views of the two types of monitoring bodies in cases involving similar types of violations, the authors control for key aspects affecting compliance and can hone in on legal status and the identity of the issuing body as the key difference between sets of observations. Using statistical survival analysis (to capture the time dimension of responses) and comprehensive data sets including the known compliance status of all judgments and treaty body views rendered to date, the article tests a number of hypotheses derived from the existing literature on state compliance with international obligations to show their different traction with regard to explaining compliance with legally binding and legally non-binding decisions. If systematic differences in compliance behaviour of the same countries with respect to court judgments and treaty body views identifying comparable human rights violations emerge—and it is already known that overall compliance rates are lower for the treaty bodies—then this strongly suggests that the difference in outcomes is linked to institutional differences.
This presentation is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium's cluster on 'Effectiveness of Human Rights'. This series of the Centre for Fundamental Rights colloquium brings together scholars across disciplines at various career stages to present important new scholarship on the effectiveness of human rights norms and institutions, examining a variety of international human rights and international criminal law norms, their public support and institutional impact across diverse sites and levels.
Andreas von Staden is Assistant Professor of Political Science, especially Global Governance, in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg. His principal research interests concern the role of institutions in international relations, the interaction of law and politics in regional and global governance (especially in relation to issues of compliance), judicial politics beyond the state and the international protection of human rights. Andreas holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and M.A. degrees from Princeton, Yale University, and Universität Hamburg.
Andreas Johannes Ullmann is a doctoral candidate at the University of Hamburg and a research associate in the DFG-funded project “On the Causal (In)Significance of Legal Status: Assessing and Explaining Compliance with the ‘Views’ of the UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies.” He is also a research associate at Universität Potsdam working in the Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe “International Rule of Law –Rise or Decline?”. His research is located at the intersection of international relations and international law with a special interest in the fields of human rights, international investment, and climate policy, and his work has appeared in journals such as the European Journal of International Law and Advances in Climate Change Research. He holds a B.A. in sociology from Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich and an M.A. in political science with a specialisation in comparative politics and area studies from the University of Hamburg.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
