Abstract
Compliance in international law remains a challenge and the search to understand whether and why states comply with international human rights law endures as well. This essay endorses van Aaken and Simsek's contention that rewarding is an important yet underexplored mechanism for ensuring compliance with international law, but suggests that certain features of international human rights law may make rewarding less apposite in the human rights sphere for three interrelated reasons. First, compliance with international human rights law depends on domestic as well as international action, potentially rendering rewarding between states less relevant. Second, the unique and complex structure of international human rights law obligations and their measurement may make an assessment of the effectiveness of rewarding more difficult, at least for certain categories of rights and obligations. Third, rewarding may be inappropriate in international human rights law given its core normative purpose of protecting human dignity. As such, this essay explores whether rewarding can or should be pursued in international human rights law.
Highlights
Compliance in international law remains a challenge and the search to understand whether and why states comply with international human rights law endures as well.[1]
The major engines of international law compliance are absent since “the costs of retaliatory noncompliance are low to nonexistent, because a nation’s actions against its own citizens do not directly threaten or harm other states. . . . As Henkin observed, ‘[t]he forces that induce compliance with other law. . . do not pertain to the law of human rights.’”10 Human rights treaties are unique because while they are concluded between states, the impetus to police compliance does not rest with states but with individuals who are not party to those treaties
A human rights indicator is “specific information on the state or condition of an object, event, activity or outcome that can be related to human rights norms and standards that addresses and reflects human rights principles and concerns; and that can be used to assess and monitor the promotion and implementation of human rights.”[35]. Drawing on the framework developed by the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, the process of international human rights law compliance can be conceived as an arc comprising several interrelated stages that ensures human rights accountability
Summary
Compliance in international law remains a challenge and the search to understand whether and why states comply with international human rights law endures as well.[1]. Gratification is the payment for passage, and which, as a result, often suffer from indifferent enforcement and limited impact.”[7] From the legal perspective of states parties to human rights treaties, the beneficiaries are “third parties.”[8] The legal accountability underpinning human rights treaties operates both horizontally (between states parties),[9] and vertically (between rights-holders (citizens or those within the state’s effective control) and duty-bearers (primarily states)) This special feature of international human rights law treaties impacts compliance. While van Aaken and Simsek make a number of novel proposals for rewarding in international human rights (such as UN human rights treaty bodies showcasing best performing countries in annual reports or concluding observations), and while they note that international trade and foreign investment may encourage government respect of human rights, the effectiveness of any such proposals will be limited because of the bifurcated nature of accountability under international human rights law.
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