Chapter 11 Human Rights

Rittberger, Volker, Bernhard Zangl e Andreas Kruck. International Organization 2nd Edition. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Human rights pose a different dilemma from security, welfare and economic relations or the
environment. The human rights dilemma is not based on material interdependencies between states;
human rights infringements in one state usually do not have any material effects on other states. The
human rights dilemma derives ‘only’ from moral interdependencies across state borders: human rights
violations in one, often authoritarian, state can give rise to moral outrage in other, usually democratic,
states; giving rise to an active international human rights policy. The existence of such international
moral interdependencies crucially depends on the activities of transnational networks of human rights
organizations which construct local human rights violations as global problems which require
governance beyond the nation-state. Even more than in other issue areas, global human rights problems
are socially constructed rather than naturally given issues of international governance. Despite a
growing global concern for human rights and an almost universal (at least rhetorical) acceptance of basic
human rights, there remains for each individual state the temptation to keep the costs of its human
rights policy as low as possible, or even to pass them on to others. Should all states follow this
temptation then the individually and collectively desirable result of an active international human rights
policy is likely to fail. The years of discussion about an economic embargo against South Africa because
of apartheid clearly exemplified this problem. Thus international cooperation is needed in order to bring
about active human rights policies aimed at those states that violate such rights.

But, whereas cooperation is comparatively easy to organize among democratic states that have a good
human rights record, it is particularly difficult to achieve with authoritarian states that regularly violate
human rights. Nonetheless, international organizations working jointly with civil- society actors
(including well- known international non- governmental organizations (INGOs) such as Amnesty
International or Human Rights Watch) can contribute to achieving international cooperation and
governance in the issue area of human rights. Through generating reliable information about human
rights violations and mobilizing civil society, transnational networks of human rights organizations can
exert pressure on governments to act against offending states, and international organizations can
support these efforts through their policy-programming, operational and information activities. In order
to get a feel for the contributions of international organizations to international cooperation and
governance in the human rights field we shall concentrate on the activities of the United Nations (UN) at
the global level and the Council of Europe at the regional level.

Global human rights protection: the UN

The necessity of securing human rights internationally became apparent in the light of the crimes
against humanity, particularly those committed by Germany during the Second World War. Previous
attempts had been limited to more specific issues, such as the ban on the international slave trade or
the establishment of minimum standards in working conditions. More recently, the human rights

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violations by General Pinochet in Chile, Idi Amin in Uganda, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Charles Taylor in
Liberia and Sierra Leone, the politics of apartheid in South Africa, the massacre in Tiananmen Square in
Beijing, the Rwandan genocide and the atrocities committed in the civil war in the Darfur region of
Sudan – to name but a few – have kept human rights issues on the international political agenda. In all
these cases, it was apparent that pressure by international civil- society actors was the trigger for an
active human rights policy. Nevertheless, it was only with the support of powerful states that a policy of
international human rights protection became possible.

Policy programme of the UN

The first steps towards a policy programme for the international protection of human rights can be seen
primarily as a reaction to the atrocities committed under Nazi rule in Germany and the territories
conquered and occupied by Germany during the Second World War. The Preamble to the UN Charter
reaffirms ‘faith in fundamental human rights, the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal
rights of men and women and of nations large and small’. However, the Charter does not mention the
specific human rights which states have to guarantee and respect beyond Article 55, which urges the
promotion of ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all
without distinction of race, sex, language, or religion’. Thus, initially, human rights protection by the UN
remained in the form of a declaration.

However, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) was charged with translating this general
declaration into a human rights policy programme. To this end, as early as 1946, ECOSOC set up a
Commission on Human Rights as a subsidiary body to develop programmes for international human
rights protection. Until it was replaced by the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, the Commission on
Human Rights – with the support of the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human
Rights – represented the central forum for intergovernmental negotiation of policy programmes for the
protection of human rights through the UN.

Initially, the decision-making process was dominated by the Western coalition of liberal democracies
under the leadership of the USA. It was thus possible to reach an international consensus based on
liberal ideas about what rights should henceforth be recognized and guaranteed as human rights. As a
result, in 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( GA
Resolution 217A ( III)). The General Assembly decision was taken by majority vote and the UN human
rights programme formulated within the Declaration remained legally non-binding. Nevertheless,
thereafter states could no longer violate human rights without the risk that their actions would come on
to the agenda of the principal organs of the UN. This means that states’ exercise of authority over their
citizens was removed from their exclusive jurisdiction and the principle of non-interference in domestic
affairs began to lose its validity insofar as human rights were concerned.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established a normative frame of reference to be followed in
the second phase with the legally binding codification of human rights. Immediately following the
adoption of the Declaration by the General Assembly the Commission on Human Rights proceeded to
lengthy intergovernmental negotiations about the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

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and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Although by 1954 both
covenants had largely been negotiated, they were only adopted by the General Assembly and
recommended to states for signature in 1966. Another ten years passed before a sufficient number of
states had ratified them and they could come into force. The number of parties to the covenants grew
steadily throughout the 2000s and by the end of 2010 stood at 167 (Civil Pact) and 160 (Social Pact),
respectively.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two Covenants form the core of the UN’s policy
programme on human rights containing a large range of human rights norms. Each individual norm has a
prescriptive status and together the human rights standards form an international normative structure.
The UN programme on human rights, starting with the dignity and equality of all people ( Articles 1 and
2, Universal Declaration of Human Rights), formulates, in Articles 3 to 21 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and Articles 6 to 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a canon of
liberal rights for the protection of individuals against a state’s arbitrary and excessive exercise of power.
They include: the right to life, liberty and personal security; protection against discrimination;
prohibition of torture and slavery or servitude; protection of the private sphere; the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion; the right to freedom of expression, assembly, association and
movement; protection of the family; the right to marry; the right to equal access to public service and
the right to take part in the government of one’s country; the right to participate in periodic, universal
and equal elections; entitlement to equality before the law and to a fair and public hearing in courts of
law; the right to legal assistance in the course of court proceedings and to be presumed innocent until
proved guilty; and the right of being convicted only on the basis of laws in existence at the time the
offence was committed.

In addition, Articles 22 to 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mention basic economic,
social and cultural rights, reinforced and further developed in the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights. These include, among others, the right to sufficient food and an adequate
standard of living as well as the right to physical and mental health; the right to work, as well as to just
and favourable conditions of work; the right to strike as well as the right to leisure, holidays and social
security; and the right to education as well as to participation in the cultural and scientific life of one’s
country.

To these rights, which are subject to a multitude of reservations, others have been added in a series of
conventions for the protection of human rights, which set new standards. The most important ones
include the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the 1965
Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, the 1979 Convention on the
Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, the 1984 Convention against Torture and
other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the 1989 Convention on the
Rights of the Child, the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the 2006
Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

The activities of the UN regarding human rights violations have benefited from significant support
through the activities of NGOs. This involvement became apparent in the 1970s when the number of

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internationally active NGOs in the issue area of human rights multiplied. But in fact the NGO
involvement dates back even to the negotiations over the Universal Declaration of 1948. Since the end
of the Cold War human rights organizations have made abundant use of the platforms available to them
in the UN system, through both human rights conferences ( such as the 1993 Second World Conference
on Human Rights in Vienna or the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban) and access to
standing bodies ( such as the Human Rights Council), to give an impetus to new programmes and insist
on reliable implementation of existing norms.

The special value of the UN policy programme for human rights protection is its function as a system of
reference for criticism of violations. Thus societies affected by human rights violations can use the UN
programme to exert pressure on their governments by pointing out their disregard of internationally
recognized norms. The activities of transnational supporters of human rights contribute to the creation
of a ‘boomerang effect’, which emerges when members of national civil society do not address their
human-rights-violating government directly, since access to it is frequently blocked or suppressed, but
seek international and transnational allies. Frequently, they establish links to transnationally networked
NGOs able to mobilize international organizations, civil society and governments in liberal democracies.
These external actors can translate the information obtained from the affected societies into pressure
on the offending state.

A good example for the interplay between national and transnational human rights actors is provided by
developments in Eastern Europe and the former USSR after the 1975 CSCE Final Act of Helsinki. The
Conference on Security and Cooperation (CSCE) was established in the early 1970s as a multilateral
forum for dialogue and negotiation between members of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization ( NATO). After two years of negotiations in Helsinki and Geneva, the 35 CSCE member
states reached agreement on the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. Apart from provisions aimed at a détente in
the political relations between states of the East and the West, the Final Act also included human rights
provisions that became central to the so-called Helsinki process. So, one of the ten fundamental
principles (the ‘Decalogue’) of the Helsinki Final Act referred to respect for human rights and
fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief. The inclusion
and even more the implementation of these human rights provisions were supported by NGOs in the
East and the West. Numerous groups of dissidents were formed, such as Charter 77 in the former
Czechoslovakia, while in the Western democracies the NGO Human Rights Watch (initially named
Helsinki Watch) was established as a reaction to the dissidents’ activities. The ‘Helsinki effect’ on
domestic political change in the former Eastern bloc resulting from dissidents’ as well as Human Rights
Watch’s efforts, and strengthened by subsequent Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
meetings, has been well documented and would not have been possible without reference to the
existence of a UN human rights programme.

Operations of the UN

After concentrating until the mid-1960s almost exclusively on the generation of human rights policy
programmes, the UN has since increasingly striven for their implementation. However, the great
progress on the programme side is not matched by the UN’s operational activities.

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In analysing the UN’s operations we must differentiate between supervisory organs or procedures
existing by virtue of the UN Charter or emanating from it, and those organs and procedures created as
part of particular international human rights treaties. The latter only supervise the activities of parties to
those treaties and not those of all UN member states. ECOSOC and the Human Rights Council belong to
the former group.

Throughout the post-Second World War period until the creation of the Human Rights Council in 2006,
the Commission on Human Rights was the main human rights- monitoring body of the UN. It relied on
two supervisory procedures, i. e. procedure 1235 and procedure 1503, so named after ECOSOC
Resolutions 1235 (1967) and 1503 ( 1970). Procedure 1503 allowed individuals and groups of individuals
to submit reports to the Commission on Human Rights alleging gross and systematic human rights
violations. The Commission then confidentially examined whether such violations had taken place. If the
allegation was upheld the Commission could recommend measures against the offending state in its
annual report to ECOSOC. Under procedure 1235 the Commission on Human Rights handled information
about gross and systematic human rights violations, this time publicly. During its annual session, in
which government representatives and representatives of NGOs could refer in public meetings to
human rights violations, the Commission could decide on thorough investigations on country-specific
human rights conditions or major instances of specific gross human rights violations in more than one
country.

In 2006, after lengthy intergovernmental negotiations, the Commission on Human Rights was replaced
by the Human Rights Council through General Assembly Resolution (60/ 251). The Council replaced the
Commission on Human Rights, whose reputation had increasingly suffered from a standoff between
Western states and a group of frequently criticized states trying to prevent country resolutions and the
appointment of special rapporteurs. The Human Rights Council, which is a standing body, consists of 47
member states elected by the General Assembly. The membership rights of states with gross and
systematic human rights violations can be suspended by a two-thirds majority vote of the General
Assembly. Nonetheless, some states with a bad human rights record are still represented in the Human
Rights Council.

The supervisory procedures of the Human Rights Council resemble those at the disposal of the
Commission on Human Rights. In the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) the compliance of all UN member
states with their human rights obligations is assessed once every four years. For that purpose, a working
group, consisting of the members of the Council, is set up, which takes into account reports and
comments from the state under review, the OHCHR, other UN and treaty organs, as well as civil society
organisations. However, it mainly asks states to declare what actions they have taken to improve the
human rights situations in their countries. Its main outcome is a final report (‘outcome report’) which
documents the questions, comments and recommendations directed at the country under review, as
well as the responses by the reviewed state. In the following review, the state must provide information
on how it implemented the recommendations from the preceding review.

Special Procedures are mechanisms established by the Human Rights Council to address country-
specific situations or global thematic issues. As of December 2010 there are 33 thematic and eight

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country mandates. The mandate holders (‘special rapporteurs’ or ‘independent experts’) ask for
information from governments on their human rights policies, carry out country visits, prepare reports
as well as draft resolutions and provide technical assistance and capacity-building measures. These
procedures were largely taken over from the Commission on Human Rights. The Special Procedures do
not provide for hard sanctions in the case of states’ non- compliance with their human rights
obligations.

Finally, the Human Rights Council uses complaints procedures which are open to individuals as well as
organizations and generally correspond to the 1503 procedure of the Commission on Human Rights.
Incoming complaints (‘communications’) are first examined by a Working Group on Communications,
which consists of five independent experts and assesses the admissibility of a communication. If the
communication is admissible, it is transferred to the Working Group on Situations, which finally presents
the Council with a report on proven human rights violations and policy recommendations for the
respective country. Again, apart from suspension of membership in the Council, there are no sanctions
beyond ‘naming and shaming’ available to the Human Rights Council, even in cases of reliably attested
gross and systematic human rights.

The powers to examine human rights practices by way of the second group of supervisory organs or
procedures, those based on human rights treaties, are limited to the signatory states. All major human
rights treaty systems share the relatively weak instrument of accepting and examining reports. In these
reports, which have to be completed every four to five years or at the request of the competent treaty
organ, signatory states give an account of their implementation of the respective human rights treaty.
However, these reports are frequently lacking in detail, and often merely contain a general assurance
that the binding human rights obligations are being observed, or a list of the national laws meant to
guarantee national observance of the internationally negotiated rights. Many states fail to comply with
their reporting obligation. The competent treaty organ simply examines the reports in the light of the
information available to it, which it may have gained through the media or human rights NGOs. In case
of inconsistencies the organ can publicly request further information from the country under
examination. The results of this state-by-state scrutiny are contained in reports published by the treaty
organ, which are circulated to all parties to the treaty and to ECOSOC.

In some treaty systems for the protection of human rights the possibilities for supervision go beyond the
duty to report. With the exception of the procedures for states within the framework of the Convention
on Racial Discrimination, these additional supervisory procedures can only be used by the treaty organs
once the parties to the treaty have either ratified an additional protocol or declared their willingness to
submit to these far-reaching procedures. The best known of such protocols, the first Optional Protocol
to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, establishes the right of individuals, or
their families, who claim to have been the victims of human rights violations to submit a complaint to
the Human Rights Committee. The Human Rights Committee was founded on the basis of the Covenant
and not only receives complaints from individuals as well as states but is also the competent treaty
organ to examine the periodic reports submitted by member states. This committee of 18 experts,
which meets three times a year for four- week sessions in Geneva and strictly speaking is not a UN
organ, analyses the complaints submitted by individuals or states. The human rights violations treated

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under the Optional Protocol do not have to be gross and systematic. Individual human rights violations
can be examined by the Committee. By the end of 2010 a total of almost 2000 complaints (by individuals
and states) had been registered and more than half of them were deemed admissible. If the Committee
decides that human rights have been violated it will communicate its findings to the state concerned
and the individuals who have complained. In its annual report, which reaches the General Assembly
through ECOSOC, the committee lists the states that have been investigated, thus putting violations by a
state into the public domain. These investigations, although relatively well conducted, are limited by the
fact that the Optional Protocol needs to be ratified; by the end of 2010, 113 states, that is,
approximately two- thirds of all signatories, had ratified it and were therefore subject to its procedures.

The four other human rights treaty systems – the Convention against Torture or other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – which foresee the possibility of complaints by
individuals after agreement by the state parties ( in the form of ratification of an optional protocol or a
formal declaration) are in a similar situation. In all these cases cooperation restraining the arbitrary or
excessive exercise of state authority is easiest to achieve where it is least required; those states which
have ratified the protocols or have made additional declarations generally do not belong to the group of
‘ black sheep’ in the international human rights field.

The plethora of organs dealing with human rights violations raises the question of coordination of the
preparatory work of all the committees. The response, in 1993, was the establishment of the Office of
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights ( OHCHR) by the General Assembly ( Resolution 48/ 141).
Following restructuring in 1997, operational activities now form the core of the High Commissioner’s
role. The OHCHR endeavours to promote worldwide respect for the human rights enshrined in
international law by supporting the bodies created by human rights treaties and the Human Rights
Council as well as through technical assistance programmes in many countries. However, its work is
severely hampered by financial constraints and lack of personnel.

Despite these serious efforts an effective supervisory system is still a long way off. However, there is
sufficient transparency to make human rights violations more susceptible to discovery. This has been
substantially facilitated through information supplied by NGOs such as Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch. The NGOs also make it their business to scrutinize the operational activities of the
UN and the various treaty bodies. Effective supervision of human rights practices through international
organizations presupposes the employment of sanctions against states committing violations. Despite
significant advances during the 1990s, such sanctions are still in their infancy. The most frequent
although not the only form of sanction remains the publication and denunciation of violations by
individual states, that is, ‘naming and shaming’.

Far-reaching collective sanctions against a state are only possible in cases where the UN Security Council
declares the human rights violations of that state to be endangering international peace and security.
This allows the Security Council to take all the measures listed in Chapter VII of the Charter. With the
end of the Cold War the Security Council redefined its role in implementing the human rights codified in

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the framework of the UN. Whereas before 1990 the Security Council did not take collective enforcement
measures against perpetrators of human rights violations – with the exception of economic sanctions
against the former Rhodesia and the arms embargo against South Africa, the behaviour of the Security
Council has changed somewhat. Since the early 1990s the Security Council has agreed to enforcement
measures in a substantial number of humanitarian crises such as those in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia,
East Timor, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya.

If, however, one compares the number of resolutions in which the Security Council declares itself ‘
worried’ about human rights violations or humanitarian crises with the frequency of enforcement
measures – that is, sanctions – a substantial gap comes to the fore. For example, the civil war in the
Darfur region of Sudan ( 2003– 10), in which gross and systematic human rights violations took place
and several hundred thousand people were killed, was condemned by the Security Council in several
resolutions. At the same time, resembling its hesitancy and ineptitude in the Rwandan Genocide ( 1994),
the Security Council was unable to reach agreement on substantial enforcement measures to stop these
gross human rights violations. Moreover, there have been many humanitarian crises on which the
Security Council did not agree in time or did not agree at all. For example, gross human rights violations
in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s and in the Sri Lankan civil war throughout the 1980s, 1990s and
2000s have been widely ignored by the Security Council. In addition, in some humanitarian crises the
enforcement measures decided by the Security Council have failed; this is the common perception of
the humanitarian intervention in Somalia ( 1992– 95). These failed interventions and non- interventions
overshadow the successes of the UN, such as the intervention in East Timor.

However, at least in part driven by motives to avoid costly military sanctions, the Security Council has
revitalized another instrument of adjudication and sanctioning, that of international courts for the legal
pursuit of individuals – rather than states – who are accused of being responsible for gross infringement
of international humanitarian law. Acting under Article 29 of the UN Charter, the Security Council set up
two international ( ad hoc) tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. With its Resolution 827 (
1993) the Security Council, starting from the procedures adopted by the Allied Powers after the Second
World War in Nuremberg and Tokyo, created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia ( ICTY) in The Hague for the prosecution of persons accused of being responsible for serious
violations of international humanitarian law. Later Security Council Resolutions 955 ( 1994) and 977 (
1995) established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ( ICTR). The offences prosecuted are
genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Both tribunals have led to the arrest, handover and
sentencing of a number of prominent war criminals. The former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
was accused of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide and handed over to the ICTY in 2001,
but died before his trial was completed. By contrast, the former Prime Minister of Rwanda, Jean
Kambanda, was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide in 2000.

Whereas the ICTY and the ICTR are clearly subsidiary organs of the UN, there are also so-called hybrid
tribunals with a mixed composition of national and international personnel. These hybrid tribunals, such
as the Special Court for Sierra Leone ( SCSL, 2002) or the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia (‘ Khmer Rouge Tribunal’, 2004), rest on a contractual agreement between the UN and the
national government to address past international crimes in post-conflict societies.

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The symbolic significance of these tribunals and their precursor role in relation to the Statute for an
International Criminal Court, signed in Rome in 1998 by representatives of 120 states, is widely
recognized. Equally important was the advocacy work by a transnational Coalition for the International
Criminal Court ( CICC) which supported a substantial number of small and middle powers ( the Like-
Minded Group) in calling for a strong, independent court. In contrast to the ICTY and the ITCR, the
authority of the ICC is not limited to prosecuting and sentencing gross violations of international
humanitarian law on the territory of two countries, namely the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It can
sentence crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression and genocide either committed on
the territory of a country that has ratified its statute or committed by a citizen of such a country. While
the ICC is an independent international organization located in The Hague and is not part of the UN
system, it maintains in general cooperative relations with the UN, in particular with the Security Council.
The ICC prosecutor can initiate investigations on the basis of a referral from any state party or from the
Security Council, but also by his or her own initiative on the basis of information received from
individuals or ( civil-society) organizations. States parties must cooperate with the Court, which also
includes surrendering suspects upon request of the Court. As of June 2011, 116 states have ratified the
Rome Statute, with powerful states such as China, India, Russia and the USA still not being party to the
ICC. The ICC has begun its work in 2002, conducting investigations, issuing arrest orders and hearing
cases concerning situations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic
and Sudan.

Information activities of the UN

Although UN human rights organs and treaty bodies rely largely on information from the media and
NGOs for their supervisory activities, they also contribute to the generation of such information. The
Human Rights Council can appoint a special ( country or thematic) rapporteur responsible for
generating, transmitting and evaluating all relevant information to and for members of the Council.
Similarly, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also has a rapporteur responsible
for examining each state’s submission prior to discussion in the Committee.

In addition, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has endeavoured to function as an
exchange market for information on the protection of international human rights. Through its website
(www. unhchr. ch) it has been collecting information about the work of the UN organs and the main
treaty bodies. The OHCHR provides statistical information about the ratification of all relevant human
rights treaties and reports in detail on the meetings of the Human Rights Council and the treaty bodies.
In addition, the OHCHR website includes reports about its own activities and a range of publications
(including fact sheets, special issue papers, and training and education material) on topics related to
human rights, thus contributing to creating its own profile. These information activities help to raise the
profile of the OHCHR as a centre for collecting and coordinating information on human rights questions,
despite the institutional fragmentation of political human rights activities within the UN.

Evaluation of the organization’s effectiveness

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The effectiveness of the UN’s response to human rights violations must be assessed against the
background of particularly challenging conditions for international cooperation and governance in this
field. International human rights protection affects the core of states’ domestic sovereignty since it rules
out and/ or demands particular practices of rule within states. Authoritarian states, in particular, tend to
reject their domestic practices of rule being subject to international scrutiny. Moreover, it is still
debated in how far human rights constitute truly universal or culturally specific (above all Western
liberal) values, which further complicates consensus on international human rights norms and their
implementation.

One first indication that UN activities in the human rights field can nonetheless have a positive impact
on the human rights situation within member states might be that the global human rights situation has
improved since the 1980s. This finding is underlined by an intertemporal comparison of country ratings
by the American NGO Freedom House. Freedom House rates all countries in the world based on criteria
of political participatory rights and civil liberties. Figure 11.1 shows that between 1972 and 2010 the
share of ‘ free’ countries has increased whereas the proportion of ‘ not free’ countries has become
smaller. This improvement in the global human rights situation correlates with UN human rights
activities being no longer limited to policy-programme activities but increasingly including operational
activities, as well.

However, this improvement of the global human rights situation ( particularly in the field of political
rights and civil liberties) might have very many reasons, some of which are unrelated to the UN human
rights regime. Therefore, a closer look at the effectiveness of specific UN activities is warranted.

Some, mainly qualitative, studies suggest that international human rights norms have a positive impact
on states’ human rights policies. Keck & Sikkink ( 1998) show that, especially in Latin America,
transnational networks of human rights NGOs relied on international organizations’ programme,
operational and information activities in bringing about significant change in the human rights policies of
particular states. In a similar vein, Risse et al. ( 1999) find evidence that cooperative efforts by
transnationally operating networks of human rights NGOs, international organizations, Western states
and domestic opposition groups have indeed brought about improvements in domestic human rights
practices in 11 countries representing five different world regions – Northern Africa, Sub- Saharan
Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. They show that UN human rights norms
provide transnational human rights networks with an important reference system, allowing them to put
pressure on states to improve their record of human rights protection. Furthermore, UN human rights
norms offer transnational human rights networks important arguments with which to convince
democratic states to engage in more active human rights policies which then lead to improved human
rights policies in, or even a democratic transition of, non-democratic countries. Klotz ( 1995) was, for
instance, able to demonstrate that international human rights norms helped advocacy groups to force
the US government to impose sanctions on South Africa which, in the late 1980s, clearly contributed to
the collapse of the apartheid regime.

In a large-scale, statistical study, Simmons ( 2009) finds that, at state level, international human rights
law has made a positive contribution to the respect for human rights, in particular in the fields of civil

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rights, equality for women, prevention of torture, and the rights of the child. States’ ratifications of
treaties do lead over time to improved human rights practices by influencing legislative agendas,
altering intra-state political coalitions, and defining the terms of acceptable state action. However, other
scholars are more sceptical. In a quantitative analysis encompassing 166 states over a period of almost
forty years in five areas of human rights law, Hathaway ( 2002) examines whether countries comply with
the requirements of human rights treaties that they have joined. Hathaway finds that, although the
practices of countries that have ratified human rights treaties are generally better than those of
countries that have not, noncompliance with treaty obligations is still common. Hathaway explicitly
blames weak monitoring and enforcement of human rights treaties for these incidences of non-
compliance which give rise to a gap between formal acceptance and actual implementation of human
rights norms. Institutional weaknesses in monitoring and sanctioning allow states to reap the
reputational benefits of treaty membership, while the risks of detection or even hard sanctions in the
case of non- compliance are relatively low.

As outlined above, for most human rights treaty regimes mandatory state reporting is the most
important monitoring mechanism. Against this background, Liese ( 2006b) analyzes the impact of the
Civil Pact’s mandatory system of state reporting on national human rights policies. She finds that,
despite restricted competences and limited resources of the Human Rights Committee, the reporting
procedure contributes to a certain extent to compliance de jure, i. e. states usually comply with their
reporting obligations. However, it is much more difficult to establish whether the reporting procedure
contributes to the de facto improvement of national human rights performance, i. e. whether it has a
positive impact on the human rights situation in reporting states ( Liese 2006b). There seems to be a
clear gap between compliance with reporting on human rights practices and their actual improvement.

Naming and shaming of human rights violations is still the most common instrument of ( promoting)
international and transnational human rights enforcement. Thus it is encouraging that states’ practices
of naming and shaming in UN organs is indeed based less on partisan ties among political allies and
power politics, and more on countries’ actual human rights records and treaty commitments. This holds
especially for the time after the end of the Cold War. Moreover, naming and shaming by NGOs, organs
of the UN human rights regime, and the Council of Europe can contribute to some change in intrastate
human rights policies, especially as far as the adaptation of formal- legal and institutional provisions is
concerned ( Liese 2006a). It is also noteworthy that international organizations that do not belong to the
core of the international human rights regime may give bite to multilateral naming and shaming in UN
and human rights treaty bodies. The World Bank and other multilateral aid institutions have sanctioned
human rights violators based on shaming in the (then) UN Commission on Human Rights. The adoption
of a resolution condemning a country’s human rights record regularly produces a sizeable reduction in
multilateral, and especially World Bank, aid – whereas it has no significant effect on the country’s
aggregate bilateral aid receipts.

However, naming and shaming by no means guarantees sustained norm compliance in political practice;
its impact on the actual day-to-day human rights situation within countries is often limited. Hafner-
Burton ( 2008) quantitatively analyses the effect of naming and shaming on states’ human rights policies
for 145 countries from 1975 to 2000. Her statistics show that governments put in the spotlight for

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abuses continue or even exacerbate some violations afterwards, while reducing others. Governments
may make improvements in response to international pressure to stop violations of particular rights for
which they are publicly named and shamed; however at the same time they frequently continue with
other less exposed (and less criticized) violations. Moreover, human rights improvements are often not
sustained once international criticism ebbs down.

One way to make sense of these mixed results of the UN’s programme, operational as well as
information activities in terms of improving human rights policies within states, is to contextualize their
impact. International commitments and activities of UN and treaty bodies are the more likely to improve
the human rights situation the more democratic the country is or the more INGOs its citizens participate
in. By contrast, there is empirical evidence that in autocratic regimes with weak civil society, ratification
can be expected to have little or no positive effect. While this contextualization seems highly plausible in
the light of the mechanisms that are commonly associated with domestic change of human rights
policies, it also suggests a conclusion that is sobering from a normative point of view: the more
improvement of domestic human rights policies is needed, the harder it is to achieve.

For cases of gross and systematic human rights atrocities, international criminal tribunals provide
relatively hard adjudication and sanctioning mechanisms– and they do so in increasing scale and
normative scope. Despite their proliferation, international criminal tribunals such as the ICTY and the
ICTR have often been regarded as relatively ineffective or at least inconsistent in the promotion of
international justice. Sceptics of international criminal tribunals argue that these tribunals are irrelevant
or even dangerous for achieving the goals of justice, deterrence of human rights violations and peace.
Ku & Nzelibe ( 2006) doubt that international criminal tribunals can deter crimes because perpetrators’
calculations are much more influenced by harsh local sanctions than uncertain and usually lighter
international ones. Thus, pessimists are largely unconvinced of international criminal tribunals’
transformative potential. All- too bleak assessments of international criminal tribunals do not seem
justified, though. It can be shown that international criminal tribunals have important influences on
domestic values and cultural orientations towards violence. Moreover, while there are certainly deficits
in the reliability with which perpetrators of gross human rights violations have actually been brought
before the tribunals, sweeping claims that international criminal tribunals are unable to deter any
atrocities are questionable on both methodological and empirical grounds.

At any rate, these ad hoc international criminal tribunals were important precursors for the
establishment of the ICC, which enjoys considerably broader authority. As the ICC has been operating
for only about ten years, it is too early to make definite assessments of its effectiveness in combating
impunity, deterring human rights violations and reducing intra- state violence. In an early study of the
ICC’s effects on member states’ human rights policies in violent conflict, Simmons and Danner ( 2010)
come to the conclusion that ratification of the Rome Statute is associated with tentative steps towards
violence reduction and peace, at least in some countries, and that the ICC is potentially helpful as a
mechanism for governments to credibly commit to reduce violence and get on the road to peaceful
negotiations.

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Finally, the hardest sanction available to the UN in cases of gross and systematic human rights violations
is military intervention authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII. The Security Council needs
to find that these human rights violations constitute a threat to international peace and security.
However, as mentioned above, Security Council authorization of military intervention to stop massive
atrocities within states is highly selective, which hampers its effectiveness in stopping or even deterring
gross human rights violations. Multilateral military interventions to protect citizens from their
government are thus far from being a reliable bulwark against the worst human rights atrocities.

Conclusion

In the end, the advanced system of human rights protection in Europe is only effective because it
reflects a high degree of consensus of values among European societies and states. If this consensus is
not present, as was the case during the Cold War, or if there are normative differences about some
aspects of the legitimate exercise of state authority ( as it has been the case, for example, with Russia),
the Council of Europe and its organs quickly reach the limits of their effectiveness. This also explains the
even greater limits to the impact that international organizations on the global level have on the human
rights policies of their member states. Nonetheless, both regional and global organisations play a key
role in enhancing, in coalitions with national and transnational NGOs, the recognition and
implementation of international human rights. Without the relevant international organizations,
international cooperation and governance in the issue area of human rights would hardly be feasible.

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