importance of human rights to law enforcement essay

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Article Contents

Introduction, the human rights paradigm in policing, making sense of human rights, the case study, the sceptics, the commonsense copper, the old guard, the conscientious constables.

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Righting the Police: How do Officers Make Sense of Human Rights?

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Richard Martin, Righting the Police: How do Officers Make Sense of Human Rights?, The British Journal of Criminology , Volume 62, Issue 3, May 2022, Pages 551–567, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab067

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Human rights have become a dominant paradigm in police reform projects worldwide, championed by policymakers, legislators and campaigners alike. Such projects are often premised on, and evaluated according to, a conception of human rights as an autonomous, coherent and legitimate body of norms. It is a paradigm made real through formal training, procedures and oversight. This paper invites a different reading of human rights. Drawing on extensive interviews with junior officers, it reveals how human rights come to be emergent from, and embedded within, the minutia of their working lives. The presence and meaning of human rights are sustained through a series of ‘sensemaking’ narratives arising from the rich intermingling of legal and organizational representations of rights and officers’ own experiences. Subtle variations, inconsistencies and contradictions in officers’ sensemaking are revealed across a four-fold typology which disrupts the stability and coherency of the human rights paradigm, but also generalizations made about police culture.

The last half-century has witnessed the ‘apparently ceaseless and expanding process of international human rights standard-setting’ ( Grear 2012 : 19). The United Nations conference on the ‘ Role of the Police in the Protection of Human Rights ’, held in Canberra in 1963, marked the beginning of this process in policing ( Hambly 2014 ). A raft of international human rights treaties, standards and codes of conduct introduced by the United Nations, Council of Europe and European Union are now directed at law enforcement agencies and disseminated through a panoply of police training courses, conferences and inspections ( Hornberger 2010 ; Kilpatrick 2018 ). The rhetorical appeal and regulatory framework of human rights have proven attractive to policymakers, legislators and campaigners, helping to establish them as the lingua franca of police reform projects in post-conflict societies, such as South Africa and Northern Ireland, as well as initiatives to improve police ethics and accountability in Europe, Canada and Australia ( Hornberger 2011 ).

The arrival of the human rights paradigm is one frequently gestured at by policing scholars, yet it is rarely interrogated on its own terms or subject to close empirical analysis. As observed by Goold (2016 : 236) in his review of literature, despite numerous works on police work, reform and culture:

there are very few empirical studies that focus specifically on the question of policing and rights, or the barriers to effective human rights policing…we know little about how the police understand human rights, how the police’s institutional and working cultures shape individual’s responses to those rights…These are all areas that need to be the subject of further research.

This raises a series of preliminary questions. How might we meaningfully engage with the human rights paradigm beyond the confines of the strictly legal realm? What presence might human rights take amidst the minutia of everyday police work? How do officers make sense of this paradigm? And how do efforts to ‘make and imagine’ ( Loader and Mulcahy 2003 : 39) policing through the lens of human rights interact with workplace cultures and personal experiences?

In this article, I want to begin to approach these questions through a sociological account of the presence of human rights law in everyday policing, set within the context of the landmark human rights reform of policing in Northern Ireland (NI). Drawing on officers’ narratives accounts elicited as part of fieldwork with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), I reveal how and why the lofty pronouncements, technicalities and foreignness of the human rights paradigm fade as it becomes embedded in, and emergent from, officers’ working lives. The article’s contribution to law, policing and culture is twofold. First, it unsettles the legal orthodoxy of human rights as an autonomous, coherent corpus of law by using a social constructivist account of the law and the concept of ‘sensemaking’ drawn from organizational studies. This provides space to consider the presence of human rights in officers’ interactions with their organization, colleagues and the public, as influenced by their personal biographies and experiences. Second, it presents a four-fold typology of how and why officers make sense of human rights in the various ways they do. The typology reveals a subtle, and hitherto underappreciated, diversity in how officers police under the weighty mantra of human rights. This typology structures the main body of the article, where the reader will meet The Sceptics, The Commonsense Coppers, The Old Guard and The Conscientious Constables. Let us first begin, though, by sketching out this human rights paradigm and how we might explore it sociologically.

The relationship between the coercive state and the individual lies at the core of the human rights paradigm. The individual is cast as a rational agent whose autonomy, dignity and capabilities ground core interests identified, elevated and protected through legal entitlement which gives rise to duties of forbearance and protection by the state. It is anti-consequentialist in so far as broader values of crime control, public safety or national security must give way to individual rights in certain sphere thus providing ‘the individual or the minority with the shield to be used against a possible tyranny or rights by the majority’. ( Barak 2012 : 22). This relationship is premised on what Mureinik (1994) famously described as a ‘culture of justification’, whereby exercises of state power ought to be fully justified, explained and communicated to rights-holders; the antithesis of a culture of fear and coercion. Police interference with absolute rights (e.g. freedom from torture) will never be justified, while the intrusion on qualified rights (e.g. private and family life) will only be permissible if proportionate to achieve a prescribed list of ‘legitimate aims’ considered ‘necessary in a democratic society’, a balancing formula common to rights treaties worldwide (see Campbell et al 2019 : 46–47). This formula requires that police actions and operations be rationally connected to the legitimate aim, other less intrusive means have been considered and the ultimate balance struck between the rights of the individual and wider community is fair ( Barak 2012 ).

A powerful example of the potential of the rights paradigm to influence policing in democratic societies is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), signed in 1950 and ratified by 47 Member States. The interpretation of the ECHR’s broadly worded articles by courts has resulted in an increasingly elaborate scheme regulating, or at least softening the harsh edges of, routine practices like stop and search 1 and the policing of protests 2 , as well as also emerging surveillance technologies such as automated facial recognition technology. 3 But so too are aspects of the police mandate being subtly shaped by the rights paradigm. Beyond constraining police power, a series of positive obligations implied from the ECHR are channelling how, when and against whom police resources are exercised ( Lazarus 2020 ). Police must now take measures to actively facilitate peaceful protest, 4 deploy measures to protect vulnerable people (e.g. domestic abuse, human trafficking, forced labour), 5 and ensure investigations are conducted to a requisite standard where credible allegations of serious ill-treatment are made. 6 Police continue to be trained and assessed to identify and consider the human rights implications of routine policies and operational decisions, even if the extent to which they competently or meaningfully do so remains questionable ( Bullock and Johnson 2012 ).

Criminological research has, of course, devoted great energy to detecting and explaining how police maintain a social order marked by profound inequalities and power asymmetries which make the realization of rights elusive ( Loftus 2009 ; Koch 2018 ). So too is it common to encounter human rights as part of wider analyses of police legitimacy, culture and discrimination (e.g. Bowling and Phillips 2007 ; Skinns 2019 ). It is much rarer, though, to find accounts that directly engage with the lexicon and logic of the rights paradigm, not least how officers make sense of and engage with it. The few works to do so have adopted either a ‘law in action’ approach, skilfully examining officers’ technical grasp of, and compliance with, legal standards ( O’Rawe 2005 ; Bullock and Johnson 2012 ; Beckley 2017 ; Pearson et al 2018 ) or a doctrinal analysis of significant legal judgments and their implications for policing ( Fenwick 2009 ; Mead 2010 ). Bullock and Johnson, for example, powerfully expose how despite the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, officers remained unattuned to issues concerning the right to privacy, reluctant to meaningfully engage with legal concepts and principally concerned with guarding against potential criticism.

Without doubting the valuable contribution of these works, they tend to be premised on a narrow conception of human rights as an autonomous set of legal norms acting upon police; a social structure, often part of programmatic reforms, directed at changing police mindsets and behaviour. Human rights come to take on a binary code of legal/illegal, violation/non-violation which enables it to retain its integrity by removing ambivalence: ‘it radically reduces its complexity, and it renders it institutionally decidable and, thus, enforceable’ ( Hoffmann 2012 : 84). This is entirely understandable given human rights norms are constitutionally determined by institutional actors, most notably the courts. It is also eminently sensible as a matter of practice; the hard-edge of enforceable legal norms are integral in efforts to monitor and hold the state to account for rights violations ( Kilpatrick 2018 ). But insights from legal consciousness can broaden our gaze by alerting us to a more imaginative and less doctrinal account of human rights such that we might better capture, and account for, the diversity of ways in which this paradigm comes to be present in, and enacted through, the every day of officers working lives.

A social constructivist account of (human rights) law is open to the diverse ways in which people come to think about, and make sense of, the social world in legal terms—as actors embodied in social and cultural contexts, capable of receiving, reimagining, and reshaping the formal law’s presence in our everyday lives ( Cotterrell 1998 , 181–6). The emphasis shifts towards an empirical account of how various actors attribute meaning, and position themselves in proximity, to the law ( Halliday 2019 ). Although sceptical to the idea that law belongs to, or exists within, a distinct legal sphere possessing its own integrity, a sociological approach does not doubt that how officers make sense of human rights is associated with, and influenced by, legal concepts and formal ideas contained treaties, standards and codes. Rather, it is to recognize that human rights norms are open-textured, making them amenable to be adopted and re-worked in various ways and to contradictory ends ( McEvoy 2003 ; Murphy and Whitty 2013 ) and, when situated in local contexts, become politically contestable in scope and significance ( Loader 2007 ).

In developing this social constructivist account and grounding the analysis that follows, I want to draw further inspiration from the conceptual and methodological insights in Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) pathbreaking study of legal consciousness. In The Common Place of Law , Ewick and Silbey set out to describe, partition and explain the diversity of law’s presence in everyday life (p51). To do so, they elicit the meanings, sources and cultural practices commonly recognized as law by ordinary people, even if invoked and enacted in ways neither approved nor acknowledged by the law—something they describe as ‘legality’. Adopting an in situ, cultural analysis of participants’ stories and narrative accounts, Ewick and Silbey reveal the diverse signs of law’s presence, specifically how their participants came to experience being ‘before’, ‘with’ or ‘against’ the law at varying times and places. The stories recounted to the authors expose residual traces and imperfect reproductions of legal concepts, but also how legality reflects and reproduces cultural schemas and social interactions from daily life (p22).

Drawing on Giddens’ structuration theory, Ewick and Silbey conceptualize legality as an iterative process of meaning-making. It aggregates and condenses social structures which become patterned and stabilized, which, in turn, constrain future ideas and invocations of legality (p39). Legality is constituted in everyday life when a person interprets some event, idea or interaction through legal concepts and terminology—‘whether to applaud or to criticize, whether to appropriate or to resist’—alongside other social structures and cultural schemas, such as education and experiences (p45). It is not only the variability of the situations faced in life that contribute to the rich, multi-faceted and, at times, contradictory associations between law and the social realm. Participant’s sense of legality is further influenced by personal understanding, values, and expectations of similar situations and what we imagine and seek to accomplish when narrating them in stories and accounts (p51). Legal consciousness is thus neither fixed nor necessarily consistent within or across groups.

While drawing inspiration from Ewick and Silbey’s style of inquiry to attend to the presence of human rights ‘legality’ in everyday policing, it remains necessary to situate such an account within the specific occupational field and cultural habitus of policing ( Chan 2007 ). The concept of ‘sensemaking’, drawn from organizational studies, offers a bridge with which to do so. Sensemaking is how people socially construct what they do, why they do so and with what effect in an organizational setting. It is a process whereby individuals reflect on phenomena to enact the social world, constituting it through descriptions that are communicated to and negotiated with others ( Brown et al 2008 : 1038). Sensemaking embodies experiences and expectations, is constructed retrospectively and centres around the cues we notice, extract and develop from organizational contexts and cultures ( Weick 1995 ). Sensemaking arises from moments within organizations that challenge members identities or established understandings about their organization ( Weick 1995 : 4). To make sense is to embark on ‘a search for plausibility and coherence, that is reasonable and memorable’ that ‘maintains the self while resonating with others’ ( Brown et al 2008 : 1038). Sensemaking is thus an ongoing process bound up with identity, influenced by personal biographies and beliefs, as well as organizational culture and norms ( Hatch and Schultz 2002 : 25).

Police forces can be thought of as ‘sensegivers’ which prime, trigger and edit sensemaking by promoting accepted identities and performance expectations, especially during periods of reform ( Chan 2007 ). Centralized efforts by police forces to socialize officers in human rights have included regulatory techniques to establish compliance with legal standards in the form of training packages, decision-making procedures and performance evaluations ( Bullock and Johnson 2012 ; Kilpatrick 2018 ). But beyond formal rules, police culture is a rich resource for sensemaking ( Chan 2007 ). Often conveyed through storytelling, police culture is a way of communicating and affirming working norms, expectations and a coping strategy that brings meaning, coherence and integrity to officers’ work ( van Hulst 2013 ). Police culture is said to be animated by officers’ sense of mission, cynicism, suspicion, isolation, conservatism, machismo, and racial prejudices ( Waddington 1999 ; Bowling et al 2019 )—traits which would sit uncomfortably with the human rights paradigm. But when re-cast through a social constructivist account of law, we can begin to think of human rights not as existing autonomously from or in contradiction with police culture, but as actually interacting and collaborating with it to influence what human rights mean in the eyes of officers.

From the conceptual starting point just sketched I want to explore how human rights might come to be emergent from, and be embedded in, everyday policing. The PSNI provides the organizational case study for doing so. If the lofty ideals of human rights and associated performance indicators are to be achieved anywhere, many commentators will point towards the PSNI ( Bayley 2008 ; Kilpatrick 2018 ). The history of policing in NI is a contested one, discussed at length elsewhere (e.g. Brewer and Magee 1991 ; Mulcahy 2006 ). As will be familiar to many readers, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), comprised almost exclusively of Protestant officers, helped the Unionist state, created in 1921, maintain a social order that discriminated against the country’s Catholic minority in many aspects of life, leaving them over-policed and under-protected ( Mulcahy 2006 ). As the conflict intensified in the late 1960s, fuelled by the IRA’s terrorist campaign but also draconian emergency powers exercised in tandem with discriminatory policing, allegations of abuses of police power only increased, further eroding the RUC’s legitimacy in the eyes of many Catholics ( Brewer and Magee 1991 ). The Good Friday Agreement (1998), which brought an end to the thirty-year armed conflict, established the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP). The ICP produced a landmark blueprint for a model of policing that would enjoy the support of all communities, central to which was a series of reforms to install human rights as ‘philosophy of policing’ which ‘should inspire everything the police do’ ( ICP 1999 : 20).

In the two decades since the PSNI’s creation in 2001, it has undertaken unprecedented reform, implementing over 200 recommendations to make real the ICP’s vision of a ‘human rights approach’ to policing ( PSNI 2016 : 3). These reforms include a new police oath and code of ethics incorporating the ECHR; extensive training in human rights standards; the recruitment of a specialist in-house human rights lawyer and a chief officer as its ‘human rights champion’ ( PSNI 2016 : 3). Like police forces in post-conflict societies in search of a fresh identity and new way of policing amidst socio-political transformation ( Marks 2005 ), the PSNI has sought to legitimate its moral authority before local audiences by reiterating its reform efforts and ongoing commitment to human rights ( Martin 2021 ). This has been rewarded by much-improved engagement with Catholic communities and their political representatives. Yet for some Protestants, a sense of having lost the RUC as ‘their’ police force still lingers on alongside broader distaste for human rights as an anti-state agenda deployed by republicans to prioritise security forces involved in the conflict and hamper contemporary police operations ( Lawther 2010 ). The conflict’s legacy sustains sectarian division and paramilitary violence which pose considerable challenges for a police service keen to look forward, not back ( Topping 2015 ; Hearty 2018 ).

The data derives from semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted by the author with PSNI officers. 7 The reader will hear the accounts of junior officers who perform routine police work, specifically neighbourhood/response police teams and the Tactical Support Group involved in house searches and public order policing. A total of 65 officers participated: 42 were interviewed and 23 were involved across 6 focus groups, drawn from seven police stations located across the country (rural and urban) between November 2014 and June 2015. All officers have been given pseudonyms to ensure anonymity. Interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded thematically. Four dominant forms of ‘sensemaking’ of human rights emerged inductively from the analysis, distinguishable by officers’ personal biographies and experiences, as well as encounter and interactions with colleagues and the public. It should be stressed that these typologies are analytical constructs used to capture the subtle variations in sensemaking. The groups are not, of course, sealed clusters: some groups’ outlooks resonate with other groups albeit in a weaker form, just as it is likely officers have shifted—and will continue to shift—between outlooks over the course of their police careers.

It’s like everything in policing, it takes a while. Police initially see it as an obstruction to their job. I compare it to PACE [Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984] when it came in. Now PACE is seen as the bible... And I think human rights is going towards that. It’s not fully there, and you will still get the naysayers about some of it, but generally speaking, it’s just part and parcel of the job now. [Inspector Kevin]

The officers I came to know as The Sceptics can best be described as the residual group of ‘naysayers’. In their orientation towards the job, they espouse most obviously the ‘condemned’ traits of police culture, such as machismo, cynicism, isolation and suspicion (see Bowling et al 2019 : 171–180). But it became clear over the course of fieldwork that they were a minority. Comprised mainly of older or middle-aged officers, they were neither as comfortable with human rights nor as able to reconcile it with past policing as other groups we will encounter. They accepted human rights were part of the job and central to the organisation’s identity, but they had yet to be won over; a lingering doubt remained about efforts to re-conceive policing through the lens of rights. How officers made sense of human rights was influenced by beliefs grounded in, and interpreted through, sub-cultural values. Most prominent in the mindset of The Sceptics was cynicism and suspicion associated with a deeper conservatism police are well-known to express ( Loftus 2009 ).

The account of Sergeant Eric is typical of The Sceptic’s disposition. He is an experienced member of the TSG and a trained baton gunner, responsible for firing what is commonly known as plastic bullets in public order situations. He was a hardened man, sceptical of fresh-faced recruits who got caught up in the minutia of ‘training speak’ on the human rights standards surrounding police use-of-force. Eric’s personal biography had taught him of the need for quick, definitive action in the stressful situations he faced. As such, he felt unaffected by lofty pronouncements and legalese: ‘I try not to think too much about it, you know? I think you’ve got a gut feeling, he’s doing bad, you put a baton strike in and whatever’. The emphasis on human rights risked tipping the scale too far in favour of the aggressor. Eric described younger officers ‘walking on eggshells’ and being too reluctant to fire baton rounds because of a fear of breaching a person’s rights. ‘What’s better’, he asked, ‘a minor breach of an article or preventing someone from being seriously injured?’ Eric felt the need to push against the legalistic human rights rubric promoted in codes and aide memoirs which over-intellectualized a use-of-force decision which was, in fact, a fairly intuitive ‘gut feeling’ he made in the exigencies of public order situations to protect the rights of the law-abiding majority.

The officers belonging to this sceptical orientation did not see the allure of human rights to self-legitimate their everyday work. One of several possible examples was provided by Constable Nathan. We chatted at length in a police truck in Belfast one evening, waiting for a protest to disperse. Nathan had joined the police because he hated bullies, whether it was at school decades ago or those he saw abusing their power in the communities he policed today. We discussed the topic of human rights in the context of high-profile legal challenges to the use of stop and search powers:

There were challenges in the courts that what we were doing then [suspicion-less stop and search] wasn’t compliant [Article 8 ECHR], but when they looked at it and said, ‘Well, actually, it is compliant all we need is a code of practice to sort of governing this, and the code of practice must be ECHR compliant’. Well then, that’s what happened. But I never really had any doubt that what we were doing was the right thing… again me as an individual officer saying to myself ‘What I’m doing here is right because I’m trying to save someone’s life or I’m trying to prevent this person taking somebody else’s life or whatever, be it stopping a terrorist suspect or searching their house or stopping people with drugs and all the rest of it’. So I never really had any moral sort of conflict in my mind that I was doing the right thing.

The power to stop and search a person without reasonable suspicion was held by the European Court of Human Rights to violate Article 8 of the ECHR because it was neither sufficiently circumscribed by law nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse. 8 Nathan had some sense of the legal issues, but the morality of his power, directed as it was the ‘bullies’ in society, was never in doubt in his eyes.

Giving voice to a crime-fighting mentality and conservative disposition, The Sceptics feared human rights were thwarting their ability to maintain law and order and assert some discipline in society—something many had keenly signed up to do. The concern was that too devout a commitment to human rights came at a high cost:

Sometimes I feel that we’re trying to do the job with maybe one hand tied behind our backs with things, like the public or the average criminal now feels that they have the power , there’s no respect towards police at all and they know the police are scrutinised so much that it’s got the stage now where the average peeler is afraid now to take action because of the consequences because there are so many things that are wrapped up in human rights and whatever – not to take away from that but I think my feeling is the shift is now the other way, it makes our job so much more difficult , it’s alright to try and walk that tightrope if you’re trying to do everything right and it conforms with X, Y and Z but I think it’s wrong when the public gets the sense that that can be abused and I think it is happening. [Focus Group 4]

We also hear in this extract how the assertion of rights by citizens as a challenge to the symbolic authority of police to provide a solution to situational conflicts ( Bittner 1990 ). The rights paradigm, with its constraint on state power and demands for justification, was uncomfortable for this group. The assertion of an individual’s rights was perceived as undermining the established power dynamic, not least the deference officers expected from ‘the public or the average criminal’ in everyday interactions ( Choongh 1997 ; Loftus 2009 : 112).

A lingering cynicism and isolation—also well-known features of cop culture—were entangled with this group’s sensemaking in a yet more subtle way. Human rights had become a proxy for the seemingly lowly status of junior officers and the ‘in-the-job trouble’ that lay in wait for the unsuspecting officer ( Waddington 1999 ). The firm belief was that if anyone’s rights were not being duly respected, it was their own. The responsibility for this lay with ‘the job’ itself:

Constable Steve : If you say something to someone on the [shield] line [during a protect] and it goes to court, they’re throwing human rights, the Ombudsman’s throwing all this human rights legislation , you did all this wrong. They fell asleep at the wheel due to exhaustion, there was no one standing up for him and yeah you could probably bring that back to the human rights really. Constable Terry : There’s too many situations where the job hasn’t looked after people for the position that the job has put you in. Constable Steve : Human rights to me are only there to help the non-police, it’s not there to help us when it should be equal. It should be a right for everyone, but it’s not dealt that way – theirs are considered more than ours . [Focus Group 2]

An oft-repeated phrase was that the human rights-inspired Code of Ethics was nothing more than a ‘stick to beat us with’. The references to human rights in the Code were considered too broad and ambiguous, making them easily—and unfairly—seized upon by the internal complaints department to sanction officers. With the arrival of the human rights paradigm, The Sceptics felt vulnerable to increased accountability but also a felt sense that ‘the job’ was not looking out for, or duly acknowledging, the work of rank-and-file officers burdened with, the responsibility to police under the mantra of human rights. Working long shifts, doing overtime with little remuneration, dealing with abusive arrestees and, at times, sustaining injuries: ‘What about our rights?’ was a common refrain.

This group was distinguished by their overriding belief that police work was ultimately about ‘using your commonsense’. To pass something off as common sense is to suggest it is so obvious, banal or uncontroversial that we need not dwell upon it, let alone subject it to great analysis or discussion ( Geertz 1975 ). Police commonsense knowledge of who to trust or who to suspect, when to listen or when to talk, had long been noted as key to managing the precarity of the street and the complexities of organizational rules, procedures and policies ( Shearing and Ericson 1991 ). For this group, the presence of human rights in their training, assessments and briefings was no different:

I think this comes back to common sense, how you deal with people… If you arrest someone and you treat them properly, you do everything that is lawful, it should come as second nature, you know? The human rights are always there in the back of your mind…The word human rights is not going through my head when I’m out on the street. I’m not thinking ‘Oh, am I breaching human rights’. I’m just thinking about dealing with whatever I’m dealing with at the time, just do it right. You know what I mean? [Constable Bethany]

Hidden within the simple wisdom of commonsense, though, is a cultural system within which knowledge derives from reasoning informed by personal biographies, as well as socialisation with peers. This commonsense orientation served, I think, as a way for officers to enact identity-laden visions of what ‘good’ policing was and their own contribution to it.

Officers detached human rights from its legal concepts and organizational materiality—briefing documents, operational orders and policies—and connected it instead to a more taken-for-granted morality, maturity and discipline they saw in themselves. As argued by Frost and Morgan (1983: 207), sensemaking involves vesting objects, utterances and actions with subjective meanings that help make the world more intelligible to us. Expressed through stories and examples, often accompanied by a wry sense of humour, respecting rights came to be understood as part and parcel of being a sensible, level-headed officer. Human rights were ‘sort of human nature…you know it’s the right or the wrong thing to do without sort of having to recite the Articles’. (Constable Quin) and could be stated very simply: ‘It’s generally don’t be a scumbag, be an ordinary human being…99 people out of 100 would adhere to human rights legislation without even knowing anything about it’ (Constable Larry). Examples offered included ensuring that suspects were offered the chance to use the toilet on arrival in custody, that handcuffs weren’t fastened too tightly or that house searches were conducted in a sensitive manner regardless of the suspected offence, including not sharing details with nosy neighbours. As Constable Greg quipped in the context of house searches, ‘I will respect someone’s right to private and family life… It’s not like I’m going to run around with someone’s knickers on my head, you know what I’m saying?’

In authoring their narratives, officers were enacting visions of themselves, whether real or imagined, weaving together personal and organizational narratives of human rights. This was associated with two qualities of common sense identified by Geertz (1975 : 18, 24): naturalness (the simple natural things, the way things go) and accessibility (common-sense conclusions being ones easily grasped and embraced). The stock phrase used by officers was that human rights were ‘About treating people the way you would like to be treated yourself’ (cf Bullock and Johnson 2012 : 641). This rule of thumb was described as an easy way of ‘keeping you right’ and also reducing the chances of complaints from the public. Their commonsense disposition meant this group did not doubt the virtues or utility of the rights paradigm but rather expressed fatigue at such frequent exposure to the same organizational artefacts that gave materiality to human rights, including training programmes, aide memoirs, briefing documents, office posters etc. As Constable Larry explained:

As part of the briefing pack, it’ll generally say the search is human rights compliant and then read—‘If anyone wants to read, it’s here’ but generally we wouldn’t…a lot of the boys have heard it that many times we don’t listen to it anymore. It’s like listening to… on an aeroplane, the safety brief. Do you listen to it or do you just continue reading your book, you know?

That said, officers also readily acknowledged that the ‘naturalness’ and ‘accessibility’ of human rights was also connected in part to its enduring organizational presence, alluding to the role organizations can play in providing perceptual cues to prime specific frames and performance expectations ( Weber and Glynn 2006 ). Notably, police college was the first time many officers in this group especially had encountered human rights in a more formalized manner and it was rarely recounted to me as being commonsense from the start:

It was hard going, but again, for most of us we’d never experienced it [human rights] before and it was like being back at school, you’re trying to learn algebra. It’s exactly the same thing, your head’s pickled. [Focus Group 3]

Few officers had positive experiences of police college which was described as too academic and out of touch with practical skills. And yet human rights ideas and concepts had become commonsense over time. The ‘craft’ of policing, after all, is about getting to the essence of the situation, adeptly moving from what is happening to know what to do about it without a moment’s reflection ( Shearing and Ericson 1991 : 487). Human rights norms, often connected to the legal basis and thresholds for police powers, had been translated into organizational phrases and pneumonics, which were ably recounted in interviews and focus groups. For example, P.L.A.N’ (Proportionate, Necessary, Accountable and Legal) was commonly referred to and described using examples of house searches, use-of-force and arrest powers.

The accounts of The Commonsense Coppers resonated with a further property of common sense identified by Geertz (1975 : 22): simpleness as ‘sobriety, not subtlety, realism, not imagination, are the keys to wisdom’. Realism and sobriety were most notably at work when it came to officers’ accounts by TSG officers of the human rights standards governing the use Attenuated Energy Projectiles (AEP) (commonly known as plastic bullets). The use of AEP is heavily regulated by the use-of-force standards of Article 2 ECHR, which permits potentially lethal force only when absolutely necessary to achieve specific operational ends. 9 In contrast to the account of Sergeant Eric described earlier, for this group rights norms took became a ‘theory of action’ capable of informing how they behaved when confronted with a specific situation ( Weick 1995 : 123–4). In an account common to this group, Constable Owen described how the technicalities of Article 2 of the ECHR could be made real:

To use potentially lethal force as a baton gun there has to be an immediate threat to life or serious injury, so, the example they always use in training is if somebody is likely to throw a petrol bomb into an empty shop you can’t shoot them because it’s empty, you can’t shoot to protect property, but if somebody’s going to throw a petrol bomb into a shop where there are people in it you potentially could shoot them because there’s then a threat to life or serious injury…they [police trainers] drill it into you that you aim for the belt buckle, as opposed to chest or tummy or head, so yeah, that’s the main thing with shooting anybody.

This speaks in part to what Hornberger (2010 : 273) has described in the South African policing context as legal ‘transfiguration’: the use of a weapon that can result in serious injury of another citizen is legitimated through legal-procedural framing. This groups’ mindset, though, was less about self-legitimation per se and more about how human rights norms were translated into common-sense frame officers could use with their AEP rifle in hand and target insight—to ‘filter and interpret signals from the environment and tie stimuli to responses’ (Weick citing Hedberg 1981 : 7). The police organization, using prescriptive frames and performance scripts, had managed to steer Commonsense Constable s action in a rights compliant way they had come to take for granted.

The Old Guard were experienced officers, primarily in the TSG, who had proudly served in the RUC for around half of their careers. They began their careers in the late 1980s—a less violent, but nonetheless personally dangerous and politically turbulent period ( Brewer and Magee 1991 )—and now found themselves caught in the liminal past-present space of NI policing. This group, overwhelmingly Protestant, had experienced first-hand the deeply divisive police reforms. This kind of organizational change, especially where senses of identity and belonging are at stake, can challenge officers’ perceptions of themselves and their organizations ( Ravasi and Schultz 2006 ; Atkinson and Murray 2021 ). For The Old Guard , the RUC upheld the rights of law-abiding citizens in the face of terrorism and yet, in peacetime NI, the police reforms had required these very same officers to affirm their commitment to human rights, subscribe to a new Code of Ethics and attend human rights training courses. It is unsurprising, therefore, that The Old Guard sensemaking was intimately bound up with the identity challenge the reforms and wider peace process had provoked for them.

This group were both uneasy with the suggestion that it was something new and defensive against suggestions the RUC were not adhering to human rights standards. The introduction of human rights concepts and ideas was framed by officers as not something new to policing but rather a re discovery or re emphasis of the values and commitments they saw in RUC officers. An insistence of continuity was at the core of how this group made sense of human rights, as captured by one of its members:

I’ve been in the police before they brought in all the human rights training and your job hasn’t changed any. You have the legislation there, it was what we were doing before, only now there is legislation there to ensure that’s what we’re doing, if you know what I mean? You’re still a police officer doing your job and if you were doing it properly you wouldn’t have been breaching any of the human rights anyway. (Focus Group 4)

This narrative resonated with commonsense thinking but was more subversive. It was a form of rights talk critiqued early in the reforms due to its potential to undermine human rights training ( O’Rawe 2005 ). An objective claim, to suggest ‘nothing’s changed’ is problematic. It was clear that, even by the late 1990s, human rights law had low status in the RUC, as it likely did in many police forces across the UK at the time ( ICP 1999 : 19). Yet sensemaking is driven by plausibility, not accuracy. It involves what Fiske has described as ‘a relative approach to truth’, in so far as people believe what can account for not only their sensory experience but also what is emotionally appealing and consistent with identities (cited in Weick 1995 : 57). The question, then, is how and why the ‘nothing’s changed’ narrative was sustained despite objective challenges to its veracity. Two discursive elements were key.

The first was an acknowledgement of change in form, but not substance: human rights had just put a label on parts of training and practice that implicitly put individual’s interests first anyway. The sense was that human rights were now a way of expressing old ideas in a new, more formalized manner. The view of Sergeant Colin, a long-serving member of the TSG, is representative of The Old Guard , describing training on the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) as part of the ICP-inspired reforms:

When the HRA came in, trainers were saying we’ve nothing to fear about HRA because everything we do is human rights compliant, but it wasn’t spelt out boldly in the RUC. When it did come in and when the PSNI have come along well then like everything, every briefing we go to, every operational order we do there’s a human rights part to it, whereas the RUC wouldn’t have had that, but to me, you don’t necessarily need it, you’re doing the same thing… to me, the RUC still had a human rights approach, well I did, the way I police hasn’t changed any since I was in the RUC.

Hornberger (2011) reports similar sentiments amongst police in Johannesburg. Officers from the apartheid era referenced legislation existing then as evidence of a longer-standing commitment to the law and regulatory procedures. In similarity to their NI counterparts, this enabled South African police officers to ‘present the changes brought about by constitutional democracy as not particularly radical, and perhaps even negligible’ ( Hornberger 2011 : 104).

The second element sustaining the consistency narrative was one that closely bound human rights to officers’ personal sense of self as ethical officers and thus functioned to reduce emotional disruption and repair self-esteem (see Weick 1995 : 128–9). To talk about rights reform as bringing a new style or philosophy to policing was felt like a critique of the RUC and its officers’ professionalism. This criticism did not resonate with The Old Guard’s experience; they were proud of serving in the RUC, not least because of the resilience and sacrifice of officers. ‘The way I police hasn’t changed since I was in the RUC’, insisted TSG Sergeant Adam, who had two decades of service. The sense of identity, ethos and belief that bridged the transition from RUC and PSNI was perhaps best summed up by Sergeant Gordon:

Albeit there is a name change and a slight uniform change but the ethos to me remained the same. It didn’t matter what I was wearing one day to the next, you know, I was there for the transition, I didn’t get up the next day and go ‘Right, I’m a member of the PSNI now, I’m a different person’. You’re the same person, you have the same beliefs to go out and do the same job.

Storytelling plays an especially important role in making interruptions, challenges and surprises manageable for police officers ( van Hulst 2013 ). These two discursive elements grounded a kind of ‘stability narrative’ ( Sonenshein 2010 ) that enabled The Old Guard to make sense of human rights as a vernacular of police reform while still preserving a legacy of the RUC that was of great personal and professional significance.

What, if anything, might be the consequence of an incomplete, redacted, simplified retrospection of the past? Weick (1995 : 28) suggests that a reading of the past which favours order and oversimplifies can make enable the self-esteem needed to work effectively and buy into organizational norms—even if it is lousy history. Similarly, Sutcliffe (1994 : 1374) observes how ‘having an accurate environmental map may be less important than having some map that brings order to the world and prompts action’. Optimistically, making sense of human rights as ‘nothing’s changed’ has allowed The Old Guard to be more receptive to the rights paradigm than unionist commentators more generally who remain hostile to its use by republican groups to critique state actors during the conflict ( Martin 2020 ). This groups openness to at least use rights discourse and discuss policing in relation to it, enables space to receive and engagement with its concepts and ideas in police training, briefings and operations. But a more sceptical reading is possible too. The feeling of order and coherency The Old Guards’ narrative brings, when coupled with its defensive stance, may inhibit further retrospection ( Weick 1995 : 29). From a place of emotional stability, is there much incentive for critical self-reflection, let alone acceptance, of alternate accounts of the role policing and rights abuses played in the conflict—something transitional justice scholars have identified as key to reconciliation ( Lawther 2010 )?

A number of the new recruits I encountered conveyed a self-aware, earnest disposition belonging to a group I came to label as The Conscientious Constables . Most in this group had less than five years’ service, were university graduates and in the throes of learning their trade. Their understanding of human rights was part of broader process of making sense of their new identity as police officers. Sensemaking, it will be recalled, ‘is a search for plausibility and coherence, that is reasonable and memorable’ that ‘maintains the self while resonating with others’ ( Brown et al 2008 : 1038). This group were especially animated in our discussions of human rights and endorsed the idea that the purpose of policing was to respect and protect rights. In the words of Constable Andrew, it was ‘obviously something that a lot of thought has went into’ and was ‘as if to say, look we’re almost recognising that things weren’t done right in the past and here’s the way we’re going to do it in the future’. Fresh out of training college, officers were quick to assert how important an awareness of rights was for their careers, including passing tests, proving their credentials at refresher courses and thwarting complaints.

This group shared a striking ability to describe how their routine police work could be seen through a human rights lens, including legal concepts and ideas. This is expressed well by Constable Alan in an encounter typical of officers of this disposition:

I think it just underpins everything now, you know. Even a simple protest—forgive me, I’m not too sure, is it Article 11—Right of Assembly? We’ll do a briefing in the morning that these group of people have a right to do that, so they’re going to do it in a certain way. You then have Article 2 [Right to Life] issues in regard to ourselves maybe in a given area they’re [protestors] going into so they’re maybe we’re not welcome so we’re going to have to take that into account. If we’ve got obstructive sitters, you’ve maybe got Article 3 in regard to your inhumane treatment—and then if you’re actually taking people away or closing off roads, preventing people with access to homes.

Sensemaking narratives are ‘worked on’ using non-organizational cues to help maintain individuals’ self-identity ( Humphreys and Brown 2002 ). The self-reflective disposition of these young officers was also part of a wider attempt to come to terms with their new social identity as police officers in post-conflict NI—as citizens now in uniform. Take, for instance, Constable Emma, whose account reveals how personal biographies serve as rich resources for sensemaking ( Brown et al 2008 ). She is a new recruit from a working-class urban area where bomb threats disrupted her lunchtimes at school. She is proud of being a police officer; it is all she had ever wanted to be. A local university graduate, she was angry at the sectarianism she had grown up around and had been engaged in university politics. Emma described the prominent role of human rights in her training, but it was not a paradigm that was new to her; she had discussed it in university tutorials and in essays. But now, as a policewoman, it was interwoven with her new job, colleagues and interactions with her community:

Our superintendent said that some will view your sirens as the battle cry of angels. He said that to us on the very first day we came and that really stuck with me. Obviously, to some people, we are the thing that stops harm getting to them and it is having that ability to help people, whereas a civilian you are limited in that way and obviously yes, responsibility comes with that. But it is the same with human rights as well, everything comes with a certain amount of responsibility and everybody needs to respect each other. And you are more than a peacekeeper, sometimes you are a babysitter, sometimes you are just there to have someone tell you how awful something was. Even if police can’t do anything about it, it’s about being there for people at multiple levels if needs be.

Other officers, meanwhile, made sense of human rights in terms of the broad mandate of police, including managing vulnerable groups. The right to life and positive duties on police to protect those at risk were a frequent refrain. Officers recounted stories of calming suicidal individuals, escorting injured suspects to hospital or spending the early hours of a late shift searching for young people reported missing by frustrated care home staff.

The disposition of this group came close, I think, to what Muir, in his classic typology, classified as the ‘professional policeman’ who ‘felt morally reconciled to using coercion and at the same time he reflected empathetically upon the condition of mankind’ ( Muir 1977 : 54). While keen to recount their soft skills of being able to ‘talk down’ irate suspects or excited punters spilling out from pubs, The Conscientious Constables acknowledged that resort to the use-of-force was necessary where a person risked harming themselves or others. But the human rights concepts of necessity and proportionality were resources which made this act easier by legitimating the use of coercive force against their fellow citizens ( Weick 1995 : 128–9). The account of Constable Frank demonstrates the kind of ‘moral integration’ characteristic of Muir’s ‘professional police officer’:

I suppose it [human rights]’ gives you a clear line of what you can and cannot do…There’s a particular pressure point in there [points to his hand], if you get it spot on you know they’re going six foot [away]. So, the human rights aspect of it is if you hold that on too long when does that become torture? It’s the same as perhaps taking someone down to the ground with a set of handcuffs. You can apply pressure to a wrist and that will bring somebody down if they’re struggling but how long do you keep that pressure on you know? Once they’re down, pressure off. If they go again, pressure on. It’s being in compliance: how long do you keep that pain on for? You can’t overdo it, if you over cook it, you’re breaching somebody’s human rights, that’s torture and that’s the bottom line.

By conceiving of force as not being a breach of human rights but, positively, an act of rights compliance the infliction of pain on another was reconcilable with a moral predisposition against opposed harming others. Resonating with Hornberger’s account of legal ‘transfiguration’ mentioned earlier, for this groups, legal concepts belonging to the rights paradigm were not only a theory of action guiding their behaviour—as was the case with The Commonsense Coppers —but a resource to convert interpersonal violence into lawful force.

The nexus between rights and policing was not always so straightforward though. Constable Andrew explained how negative reporting of human rights in tabloid papers and anti-European sentiments had given human rights a bad name. Constable Andrew, reflecting on his time in court as a police officer, described how frustrating it was to see guilty defendants walk free or receive lenient punishment (cf. Loftus 2009 : 107). He tried his best to explain to community members in his patch that human rights were for everyone, and police did their best to bring offenders to justice—what the courts did was another matter. Another feature of policing in a ‘rights conscious’ society though was the ease with which seemingly spurious rights claims slipped off the tongues of the public who were keen to ‘get their way’. According to officers: “everybody, even kids nowadays, ‘I have rights, I have rights’ and I think how much they actually know but we’re well-schooled in our human rights". (Constable Vicky). There are echoes here of Hornberger (2011) has termed rights ‘fakery’: improper claims to entitlement or protection cloaked in the language of rights. In the eyes of Conscientious Constables , such rights talk often amounted to baseless moans of ill-informed members of the public. Officers quickly assessed what they perceived as the ‘authenticity’ of rights-claims, the outcomes of which reinforced their role as street adjudicators of rights claims made by the public—but also, by implication, the status of human rights as a worthy ideal and the police as upholders of law and order.

This article has explored presence and meaning of the human rights paradigm in the working lives of junior officers. The meaning of human rights is constituted through a process of interaction between formal legal norms, organizational cues and police culture but also officers’ own values and experiences. Their sense of the human rights paradigm, including its status, significance and salience, extended beyond legal concepts and ideas internal to it, becoming imbued with non-legal features arising from officers’ daily lives, including their need to bring meaning, coherency and self-esteem to their role. For those committed to a formal conception of human rights, derived exclusively from the legal realm, this re-shaping and re-purposing of the rights paradigm by officers from the ‘bottom up’ might appear to be further proof of the inability of law to properly regulate police work ( Bullock and Johnson 2012 ; Pearson et al 2018 ). An understandable response might be to simply concede that when confronted with the wayward forces of police culture, imbued with competing values or visions of policing, the concepts and ideas of the rights paradigm get distorted, if not marginalized; that doctrinal slippage and the deflation of lofty ideals are an unfortunate but inevitable feature of efforts to make rights real.

Such a reading, though, risks losing sight of some of the subtle and diverse ways in which the human rights paradigm has come to be present in, and be enacted through, everyday narratives of policing. Well-intentioned reformers might well take solace from the fact that traces of the rights paradigm were , to varying extents, being consciously considered and ably drawn upon by officers in narrating and accounting for their relationship with the policed. This was especially so for Conscientious Constables, but also Commonsense Coppers —groups which warn against generalizations of police culture ( Waddington 2015 : 685) and emphasize calls for an attentiveness to new directions and trends in police culture ( Campeau 2015 ). Officers exhibited a sense of policing as being talked about, directed by and regulated through a fundamental set of rights which they were broadly cognisant of. For well-intentioned reformers, tailoring how the human rights paradigm—as pronounced in international treaties, domestic law or ethical codes—is communicated so as to account for the understandings, expectations and concerns that mark out groups like The Sceptics and The Old Guard seem especially important. For most officers, though, the material presence of rights in training, assessments and documentation, coupled with organizational cues and expectations, had created a consciousness of the nexus between rights and policing amongst the rank-and-file even if it resonated with them to differing degrees.

This significance of such diversity should not be overlooked. The fact there is vibrant, varied and contradictory deviations from the strict legalese of human rights might well explain why, two decades after the landmark reforms, officers are still willing and able to talk about human rights as means of making sense of policing. The rights paradigm remains a central feature of the organization’s collective conscious, animating officers’ narratives and accounts of their work precisely because human rights, like legality, ‘relies on and invokes commonplace schemas of everyday life’. ( Ewick and Silbey 1998 : 17). If a strictly formal account of human rights was the sole narrative promoted or permitted to exist, it would have soon proven too brittle, too idealistic, too remote to possibly endure in any meaningful sense amidst the working lives, cultural norms and affective needs of rank-and-file officers. The sustained presence of a broadly well-informed and lively rights discourse – even if diverse and inconsistent in tone – found in this case study remains a fertile arena within which to pursue the finer details of the rights paradigm. But it raises questions about how the same rights paradigm has fared in the other societies it has been transported to, where distinct cultures, histories, and experiences of policing might re-shape and re-purpose its concepts and ideas. What other typologies might exist? How do they reflect cultural and societal features of everyday life in their specific locality? And where does law enter and leave such accounts?

I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the doctoral research upon which this article’s fieldwork is based.

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Article contents

Human rights: effectiveness of international and regional mechanisms.

• Par Engstrom Par Engstrom Institutional Research Information Service, University College London
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.214
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017

The issue of human rights presents a dilemma for the discipline of international relations (IR) in general and the literature on international institutions in particular. Since international human rights institutions are primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with how states treat their own citizens, they seek to empower individual citizens and groups vis-à-vis their own governments. A major concern is whether such institutions make a difference for the protection and promotion of human rights. This concern has spawned a series of research questions and some major lines of enquiry. The study of human rights regimes has developed at the interface between IR and international law, along with the norms and practices of global human rights institutions. In addition, human rights has been institutionalized globally through the United Nations system and the connections between the development over time of international human rights institutions on the one hand, and their relative effectiveness in shaping human rights behavior on the other. The development and impact of international human rights law and policy have also been influenced by regionalism. While the research on human rights regimes has provided important insights into the role of institutions in narrowing the gap between the rhetoric and practice of human rights, there are crucial areas that need further scholarly attention, such as the domestic actors and institutions that act and could potentially act as “compliance constituencies” and conduits of domestic implementation linking international human rights norms to domestic political and legal institutions and actors.

• human rights
• international relations
• international institutions
• human rights regimes
• international law
• United Nations
• human rights behavior
• international human rights law
• regionalism

Introduction

This essay examines the study of human rights regimes in the field of International Relations (IR). In particular, it explores the links between theories of regimes (how are the origins, development and effects of regimes on politics explained?) on the one hand, and the evolving norms and practices of human rights embedded within the institutions of international and global society, on the other. Despite the ubiquitous institutional presence of human rights in world politics, the subject of human rights regimes remains somewhat elusive. The first section therefore seeks to give a general overview of how the study of human rights regimes has developed at the interface between IR and international law with a view to outlining the subject of research; to survey the main approaches adopted; to give a sense of why regimes matter and to what extent they could be understood to be “effective.” In particular, the implications of the analytical shift from the inter-state dynamics of international society to its transnational dimensions for the study of human rights regimes are outlined. Building on this last point, the second section explores the ways in which the norms and practices of global human rights institutions have evolved since World War II and into the age of globalization. The focus here is on the institutionalization of human rights globally through the United Nations system and the connections between the development over time of international human rights institutions on the one hand and their relative effectiveness in shaping human rights behavior on the other. Against this global background, the third section examines the comparative development of regional human rights regimes. Particular emphasis is put on the role and influence of regionalism in shaping the development and impact of international human rights law and policy.

The Study of Human Rights Regimes

In recent decades the scholarship on international organizations, institutions, and regimes has burgeoned in response to the increasingly institutionalized character of world politics (Martin and Simmons 2001 ). In the early years of the post-war era, the term “international institution” generally referred to international organizations (IOs). Yet, over time the distinction has been established between “the role of institutions , defined […] as settled practices, and formal organizations that possess formal hierarchies of decision making and that are palpable entities, such as bureaucracies with headquarters that issue directives and might administer certain programs and activities” (Kratochwil and Mansfield 1994 : Preface). The perceived gap between the formal structures of IOs on the one hand and the actual processes of international politics on the other led in the 1970s to a move away from the study of formally established international organizations to that of “regimes” (Krasner 1983 ). The study of international regimes sought to supplement the technical aspects of formal IOs within an analytical framework that focused on the rules, norms, and principles governing state behavior. Regimes were specifically concerned with state cooperation in particular issue-areas, and on one influential account were defined as “persistent and connected sets of rules (formal and informal) that prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations” (Keohane 1988 ). However, as noted by Simmons and Martin ( 2002 :194), this definition of regimes makes it difficult to assess whether institutions affect behavior and shape expectation, that is, to evaluate institutions’ “effectiveness.” Other critiques of the early regime literature highlighted its relative neglect of international law, and broader institutional and normative dynamics of the international system in which regimes are embedded (Hurrell 1993 ). The term “international institution” now tends to coexist and is often equated with “international regime” (Hasenclever et al. 1997 ), and though institutions are generally considered to be specifically normative (i.e. they identify general standards of behavior, and define actors’ rights and obligations), for some, the definition does not insist that institutions are “effective,” that is, that they necessarily affect behavior (Levy et al. 1995 ). On this account, international institutions are broadly understood as sets of rules meant to govern international behavior in specific issue-areas, whilst rules in turn are seen as statements that forbid, require, or permit certain kinds of actions.

The particular issue-area of human rights raises a puzzle for the discipline of IR in general and the literature on international institutions in particular. As Moravcsik notes, unlike other forms of institutionalized cooperation that are designed to manage international concerns – trade, monetary, environmental, or security policy for example – international human rights seek to monitor and regulate essentially domestic political activities. Moreover, “[i]n contrast to most international regimes […] human rights regimes are not generally enforced by interstate action” (Moravcsik 2000 :217). Instead, since international human rights institutions are primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with how states treat their own citizens, these institutions seek to empower individual citizens and groups vis-à-vis their own governments. From this perspective, states are the source of the international human rights system and the principal contemporary mechanisms for implementing and enforcing rights (Henkin 1989 :25). Yet, the expansion of human rights norms during the second half of the twentieth century and in recent decades in particular has increasingly blurred the boundaries and highlighted the multiple linkages between the national and the international. It is through these broader concerns with international regimes, transnational dynamics, and the role of norms in international life that human rights institutions now have entered mainstream IR scholarship.

Compliance, Enforcement, and Effectiveness

The creation and evolution of human rights as embodied in international human rights law and its associated institutions and mechanisms is a very significant feature of the legal and normative changes that international society has undergone since the end of World War II. Human rights scholarship has traditionally focused on the emergence of particular human rights claims and their incorporation through international legal processes into binding legal norms. Significant attention has also been given to the development of the international legal and institutional machinery that is designed to monitor human rights and pursue strategies for greater recognition and implementation of human rights. While this scholarship has overall generated significant insights into the conditions under which international institutions are created and why states “design” them the way they do, relatively little consideration has been given to questions of how human rights institutions actually work, and why and when they “matter.” Hence, the general development of human rights scholarship toward a focus on institutional impact and effectiveness has led scholars to turn from questions of why international institutions exist to how they significantly affect state behavior and outcomes, that is, issues of compliance, enforcement and effectiveness specifically (Schmitz and Sikkink 2002 ).

As questions surrounding state compliance with international legal norms have entered mainstream IR scholarship, the scope for increasingly fruitful engagement with international law scholarship has significantly widened, particularly in relation to the role of legal rules in shaping behavior. Raustiala and Slaughter ( 2002 :539) argue in a recent review of the literature that “most theories of compliance with international law are at bottom theories of behavioural influence of legal rules” and they define compliance as “a state of conformity or identity between an actor’s behavior and a specified rule.” On this understanding, compliance is distinct from (although related to) questions of effectiveness. For example, international rules as embedded in regimes can be effective even if compliance is low as “high levels of compliance can indicate low, readily met and ineffective standards” and regimes with “significant non-compliance can still be effective if they induce changes in behavior.” For Levy et al. ( 1995 :292) in contrast, international regimes generally emerge in response to problems, and “[e]ffective regimes cause changes in the behaviour of actors and in patterns of interaction among them in ways that contribute to the management of targeted problems.” From this perspective, assessments of regime effectiveness focus on the capacity of regimes to generate specific policies and the extent to which these are implemented through the passage of legislation, the creation or reform of domestic institutions that prove effective in attaining regime objectives. On this account, the emphasis lies on observable behavior and effectiveness is evaluated on the basis of the degree to which a regime ameliorates the problem that prompted its creation in the first place. In much international law scholarship, understandings of effectiveness tend to focus on the degree to which a particular issue or problem give rise to contractual obligations, become regulated by law, and the extent to which the legal rules are complied with. From this perspective, the question of effectiveness is understood to relate to whether international law and institutions make a difference to how states and domestic actors behave.

In the area of international human rights, the specific question of regime effectiveness has been the focus of much recent quantitative research on the relationship between international human rights law and actual protection of human rights, and whether human rights institutions are effective in affecting behavior. This framing of the research problem of institutional effectiveness has generated an important methodological diversity in the study of human rights regimes. However, this research also tends to underplay the long-term evolution of human rights norms and institutions. Schmitz and Sikkink ( 2002 :525–6) emphasize that the “initial recognition of a norm or even binding conventions have often highlighted, rather than immediately narrowed, the gap between rhetoric and practice.” Young ( 1992 :160) notes that regime effects – variably understood in the literature in terms of regime consequences, impact and effectiveness – are difficult to separate from broader questions concerned with regime origins and evolution. In other words, although questions of regime effectiveness focus on the role of institutions in shaping human rights behavior (institutions as independent variables), the importance of thinking about these institutions as dependent variables whose character is shaped by a variety of factors is frequently emphasized in the literature. For example, Levy et al. ( 1995 ) argue that the nature and course of the evolution of international institutions can indicate the extent of autonomy, robustness, and authority these entities develop over time; factors that are commonly considered to shape institutional impact. Also, in a recent review of the literature Hafner-Burton and Ron ( 2009 ) argue that scholarly assessments of the role of law and institutions in protecting human rights tend to be significantly shaped by choice of research method. Whilst statistically inclined research generally attributes very little impact, if any, to international human rights institutions, qualitative case studies tend to find often significant influence of international law and institutions on political behavior. Such divergent assessments may, they note, be grounded in often-irreconcilable epistemological positions with many qualitative scholars rejecting the utilitarian groundings of research into questions of “effectiveness.” These methodological divisions are partly reflected in the IR literature in relation to understandings of human rights compliance, enforcement and regime effectiveness.

How Human Rights Regimes Affect Behavior

For some, human rights only come to matter when powerful states take them up and seek to use their own power to enforce human rights standards. On this view, human rights institutions are of only marginal importance, as “[m]ost human rights practices are explained by coercion or coincidence of interest” (Goldsmith and Posner 2005 :134). Thus, governments will only dispense political capital to enforce international human rights when it serves their political interests, and, moreover, states sometimes cynically use human rights to justify certain acts of foreign policy. From this perspective, the question of why and when states comply with human rights regimes “is a function of the extent to which more powerful states in the system are willing to enforce the principles and norms of the regime” (Krasner 1993 :140–1). Moreover, as argued by Downs et al. ( 1996 ) in relation to state cooperation in general, the realist insistence on the strategic dimensions of cooperation emphasizes the role of enforcement and contends that the deeper the agreements (the more ambitious and intrusive the human rights norms, for example), the increasing need for more severe punishments to deter non-compliance. Reliance on enforcement as the route to compliance raises, however, important questions of legitimacy both in terms of what is likely to be the selective enforcement of human rights norms and the more long-term costs of the use of coercive measures. Along these lines, hegemonic stability theorists, for example, have argued that although hegemonic power facilitates regime creation, it is more problematic when it comes to effective and legitimate implementation over time.

Although the realist tradition offers important insights into the role of power asymmetries in shaping enforcement and state compliance, explanations along realist lines have difficulties, as Sikkink ( 2004 ) argues, to account for why states are willing to pursue human rights norms in the first place, and why powerful countries that were not previously concerned with human rights adopt policies espousing these norms when they do. Moreover, most realist accounts do not answer the question why states agree to expend resources to set up human rights institutions and commit to and be constrained, however minimally, by their rules and norms.

For others, states set up international institutions and give them certain functions in order to overcome problems of inter-state collaboration and coordination. The focus here is on the effects on state behavior as institutions alter incentives thereby making it rational for states to cooperate (Koremenos et al. 2004 ). Institutions affect actor strategies – but not their underlying preferences – by reducing transaction costs, by identifying focal points for coordinated behavior, and by providing frameworks for action on a wide range of issues (Keohane 1982 ). In this literature international agreements are generally thought to be “self-enforcing” in that they rely on the interests of states themselves to comply with the terms of the agreement, even in the absence of an external enforcement mechanism. Overall, on these accounts, human rights institutions matter but primarily because of what they can do to shift the incentives facing member states – by generating publicity, by naming and shaming, and by creating positive or negative linkages with other issues (Hafner-Burton 2008 ).

In this vein, a number of studies have sought to explain why countries ratify treaties and whether states’ treaty commitments actually change human rights behavior. Based on theories of delegation and agency, the core assumption of this literature is that states create institutions and delegate power to them in order to resolve collective-action problems (Hawkins et al. 2006 ). In part drawing from managerial models of compliance in international legal scholarship, this literature generally posits that states have an interest in compliance with rules, a propensity to comply with their international commitments, and therefore rejects sanctions and coercive enforcement in favor of collective management of (non)performance of treaty obligations, such as monitoring, non-confrontational, and facilitative measures. These general propositions have generated a burgeoning literature on quantitative measures of treaty participation. Generally skeptical of the impact of international human rights institutions, these statistical analyses of specific human rights treaties (drawing on standardized measures of the International Covenant for Political and Civil Rights and the Torture Convention in particular) have highlighted the limits of international law in ensuring the protection of human rights. In a recent review, Landman ( 2008 ) summarizes the general findings of the statistical studies on the impact of states’ human rights treaty commitments on rights protection. According to Landman, there is statistical evidence to suggest that international human rights treaties have at least a limited impact on actual state human rights behavior (for contrasting views see Camp Keith 1999 ; Hathaway 2002 ); domestic regime type matters; the gap between treaty ratification and human rights protection narrows over time; and membership in international governmental organizations and presence of international NGOs lead to higher state participation in human rights regimes. The positive and significant statistical relationship between treaty ratification and rights protection disappears however, Landman notes, when studies control for the other independent effects of democracy, wealth, conflict, and population.

However, such global comparisons do not capture what may be strong regional diversity in these relationships including the relative effectiveness of regional human rights regimes to which countries are a party, a point that will be returned to below. Also, this literature focuses exclusively on compliance with formal treaties, and largely ignores what may be the significant role of broader categories of rules and norms, including customary international law and jus cogens norms. Clearly treaty ratification does not necessarily set in motion an automatic process of domestic reform. Yet, as emphasized by Schmitz and Sikkink ( 2002 ), formal state ratification of a human rights treaty is often part of a prolonged and continuous process of political struggle about the domestic implementation of human rights norms. Schmitz and Sikkink therefore suggest that compliance with human rights treaty obligations is best understood along a continuum that includes ratification of human rights treaty; fulfillment of reporting and other requests by supervisory bodies; implementation of norms in domestic law; and rule-consistent behavior on the domestic level. This perspective also allows for consideration of what constitutes “partial compliance” which in the area of human rights is often the most frequent outcome. Hence, theories of self-enforcement and credible commitments that underpin much of the literature on treaty ratification, and in which efficiency arguments carry most of the analytical weight, may not be very persuasive in matters of human rights.

On an alternative account however, state decisions to create and join international human rights mechanisms are driven by domestic political calculations and domestic “compliance constituencies” (Dai 2007 ). On this view, the submission to an international regime constitutes an act of political delegation that could be used by governments to “lock in” and consolidate domestic policies, thereby enhancing their credibility and stability vis-à-vis domestic political opponents (Moravcsik 2000 ). In a similar vein some scholars have emphasized the role of domestic institutional and normative preferences to conform to rules denominated as law, and the ways in which domestic regime type may affect compliance with international commitments.

While most rationalist accounts of institutions assume largely invariable interests and constant state preferences, what may be best referred to as ideational perspectives emphasize the role of ideas in bringing about political and normative change. On this view, states are not seen to be rationally adapting, nor coercively compelled, but are motivated by a “logic of appropriateness” to adhere to human rights norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998 ). These perspectives emphasize the potential of institutions to shift actors’ understandings of problems either by providing the possibilities for cooperative outcomes or via processes of socialization by which norms and values are diffused (Goodman and Jinks 2004 ). The main thrust of sociological institutionalism, for example, lies in the claim that ideas have a strong and continuous influence on state policy as they become embodied in institutions and that institutions themselves can become autonomous and powerful political actors (Barnett and Finnemore 2004 ). This highlights the importance of social context, and how acting in ways perceived to be illegitimate by the collectivity concerned can significantly raise the material costs of the action. Yet, although this literature provides important insights into the processes of diffusion of norms and practices, and the constitutive and empowering potential of human rights discourse and institutions in general, it has difficulties in explaining why certain norms become institutionalized and not others. Moreover, it often neglects the more regulative and coercive dimensions of norms by which interests and power shape their creation, implementation, and enforcement.

Transnational Human Rights

Although the IR literature on international institutions generally focuses on efforts of states to provide international collective and redistributive goods, international human rights norms and institutions have increasingly come to affect many of the social, political, and economic problems traditionally seen to be within the exclusive jurisdiction of the state. Therefore, a narrow focus on the dynamics of interstate interactions does not fully capture the ways in which international human rights institutions may be effective. Recent scholarship has emphasized the transnational character of human rights institutions in terms of the emergence of a transnational legal and political space and ongoing challenges to state sovereignty; in terms of how this affects political actors and notions of the state as a unified actor in world politics; and in terms of how a transnational perspective shapes conceptual understandings of “compliance” and “enforcement.”

First, the consolidation of human rights institutions raises questions regarding the legitimate form and scope of international intervention in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. The establishment of supranational jurisdiction over fundamental political choices and decisions underscores the extent to which current trends in global governance have led to the emergence of a transnational political space in the field of human rights and emphasizes the depth of interaction between international human rights developments and national-level political and legal debates. Hence, on this account, the expansion and institutionalization of human rights highlights the reality of constant renegotiations of state sovereignty in matters of human rights, and the extent to which sovereignty in the sense of power of the state over its nationals has been eroded by human rights law, the increased use of international human rights norms in national courts, and the increased availability of a variety of international tribunals. These trends also invoke understandings of sovereignty not as entitlement but as status, understandings of what it means to be a legitimate member of an international society, and the capacity to engage in increasingly complex transactions with other members of the system.

Second, as the density and complexity of international institutions grow, and as new channels of transnational political action open up, so the process of norm creation becomes more complex, more contested, and harder even for powerful states to control. Although non-state actors remain excluded from the formal negotiations of international human rights instruments and decision-making fora, a considerable body of research indicates that they have gained significant informal influence through their agenda-setting activities and expertise in the context of evolving and increasingly complex global governance structures (Price 2003 ). From this perspective, international human rights institutions have provided the platforms upon which the struggle over human rights between and among activists and states has played out (Keck and Sikkink 1998 ). For some, this process has not only resulted in the construction of a normative framework but also a globalizing process that is driven by the struggles of transnational actors and social movements (Goodale and Engle Merry 2007 ). Hence, viewing international human rights institutions in transnational terms highlights a number of important ways in which these institutions affect domestic political actors. The role of civil society organizations in mobilizing domestically for reform and effective implementation of human rights legislation while linking their demands with the state’s international commitments has attracted growing scholarly attention (Neumayer 2005 ).

Beyond civil society activism, a growing literature emphasizes the extent to which international human rights norms are incorporated into domestic legal systems and how these legal processes of internalization affect political actors (Koh 1997 ). This perspective on the role of international human rights law in shaping domestic policies and legal developments highlights on the one hand the multiple linkages that exist between the domestic and the international, and the importance of disaggregating the state (Slaughter 2004 ) on the other. On this view, the political costs of violating international rules are domestic as, for example, they provide focal points around which domestic opposition is able to mobilize (Simmons 2009 ). It is also important to consider how far interaction with international human rights institutions may affect the relative power of sections of the state bureaucracy dealing with human rights; or may lead to processes of socialization on the part of those state officials involved.

Similarly, it is also important to see domestic judiciaries as political actors. There is widespread variation not just in the effective enforcement of human rights within domestic legal systems but also in the capacity and willingness of judges to engage in the transnational legal culture of human rights and to take advantage of the potential legal and argumentative resources available. Understanding the sources of this variation in terms of judicial independence but also in terms of divergent national legal traditions, patterns of legal education, and engagement with the transnational legal community, forms an important part of understanding the ways in which human rights regimes do or do not affect political outcomes. Also, the general accessibility of human rights institutions to individual complaint needs to be noted. Indeed, the general tendency observable in the 1990s – evidenced in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court, the Pinochet case, and the various cases before national courts including tort cases in US federal courts – is toward the “individualization” of allegations involving violations of human rights. Clearly, the consolidation of a system of international criminal law has resulted in complex and interlocking processes of human rights enforcement (Broomhall 2003 ). However, within the broader universe of human rights institutions, adjudication still captures only a small part of how human rights regimes matter.

Third, conventional accounts of state compliance with international human rights norms that adopt predominantly top-down perspectives on international institutions, law and human rights tend to pay little attention to relevant domestic mechanisms and the conditions under which international norms are more, or less, likely to be effective or politically salient at the domestic level (Cortell and Davis 2002 ). Hence, evaluating human rights regimes in transnational terms also shapes how we might best think about “compliance” and “enforcement.” For many, the study of the role of law, and norms more generally, in world politics has suffered from inadequate attention given to the processes of legitimizing law as well as from failing to properly recognize that international law consists of processes as much as of its structural manifestations of law in international institutions (Kingsbury 1998 ). As Finnemore and Toope ( 2001 :744–7) emphasize in relation to international human rights law generally, “[o]utside of the European context, the entire law of human rights operates and affects world politics without any mechanisms of compulsory adjudication. Where modern treaties create mechanisms to promote implementation, they are often premised on the need for positive reinforcement of obligations rather than on adjudication and sanctions for noncompliance.” For Finnemore and Toope, international law is more than merely a matter of cases and courts or formal treaty negotiation. It has a constructive dimension in which actors participating in law’s construction “contribute to legitimacy and obligation, and to the continuum of legality from informal to more formal norms.” Law in this view draws attention to those rules, norms and decision-making procedures of institutions that shape expectations, interests, and behavior. The force of law in politics – its “effectiveness” – therefore does not merely manifest itself in the form of constraints, but it also has important creative, generative, and constitutive influences on political practice. In the context of the international human rights system, this perspective on the role of law in shaping political developments brings to our attention the criteria established by the system on which to judge the legitimacy of states’ behavior.

Global Human Rights: The United Nations System

The literature on the UN system and its relative effectiveness in shaping world politics in general and human rights in particular has waxed and waned according to broader political trends in international relations and reflects fluctuating scholarly perspectives on the potential of international institutions in influencing state cooperation as discussed in previous sections. As a consequence of the gradual evolution toward the institutional complexity of the contemporary UN human rights regime, the literature on human rights at the UN is vast and has become a technical and specialized field of legal expertise. Increasingly however, the IR literature on the UN system has broadened its focus beyond issues of institutional development to engage with questions of institutional impact and effectiveness.

Institutional Change and Hardening of Enforcement

Both the substantive issues in the field of human rights and the procedures in the UN for handling them have changed dramatically over time (Buergenthal 2006 ). From not having any formal powers to take any action in regard to human rights complaints at its inception, by the end of the 1990s the Commission on Human Rights annually reviewed the human rights records of UN member states (Lebovic and Voeten 2006 ).

A substantial literature has traced the UN’s remarkably successful record of standard-setting in the area of human rights (for an overview, see Forsythe 1985 ). There is a tendency in the human rights literature to portray the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two International Covenants, and subsequent human rights treaties as an authoritative international expression of the human rights obligations of contemporary states, as those states have themselves agreed to, and as a reflection of global human rights as a universal, uniform, and coherent set of norms. However, the adoption of the various international human rights instruments varies considerably between states with the Convention on the Rights of the Child having the largest number of state parties and the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty being the treaty with the fewest state parties excluding the treaties most recently opened for signature. A burgeoning literature seeks to evaluate the empirical relationship between country participation in human rights treaties and country performance on different measures of human rights in practice (Hathaway 2002 ; Goodliffe and Hawkins 2006 ; Vreeland 2007 ). This literature has generated important insights into the political dynamics of state commitment to international human rights and the effects of treaty ratification on state behavior, though some argue this has been achieved at the expense of a more holistic understanding of the inter-related nature of global human rights politics. On this view the different committees monitoring compliance with and implementation of the respective treaties form part of a complex system of universal mechanisms that are best understood and evaluated not as isolated organs functioning within the particular treaty but also as part of the larger UN system.

The issue of human rights moved to the forefront of UN activities and since 1997 within the broader UN reform process the idea is for human rights to become operational (the so-called mainstreaming of human rights) throughout the UN organization (Oestreich 2007 ), with a High Commissioner for Human Rights serving as a focal point for UN action and information in the field of human rights (van Boven 2007 ). The UN itself has grown both in size and ambition, and through the expansion of different human rights mechanisms and specialized agencies in conjunction with a rapid growth in human rights NGOs worldwide a veritable “human rights industry” has been formed.

The 1990s also saw another dramatic opening for the UN’s human rights regime as the UN’s new peace-building role increasingly incorporated human rights protection in its mandate (Katayanagi 2002 ). Although the limitations of the UN in solving violent conflicts and ensuring human rights protection around the world were highlighted in, for example, the conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans, the extent of efforts to “mainstream” human rights and the more overtly coercive dimensions of human rights enforcement could be seen in debates surrounding humanitarian intervention (Welsh 2006 ) and more recently, the principles of the “responsibility to protect,” and associated efforts to redefine threats to international peace and security that have introduced human rights on the agenda of the UN Security Council (Bailey 1994 ). However, these debates have also exposed the fissures in the dominant narrative of the 1990s regarding the potential of a more activist UN human rights program. As the establishment in 2006 and the early proceedings of the UN Human Rights Council (replacing the Commission on Human Rights) have highlighted, the divisions and tensions – despite the creation of novel monitoring procedures – over the role and purpose of global human rights institutions remain. Similarly, attempts in recent years on the part of the most powerful states in the international system to shift the normative balance between human rights and security in the name of “war on terrorism” has showed, according to some, the inherent power-based logic underpinning the global human rights regime (Sands 2005 ; Dunne 2007 ). For others however, the resilience and normative strength of the human rights system are demonstrated by the ways in which the human rights discourse has re-asserted itself at various levels (Foot 2007 ). However, beyond the more immediate human rights concerns, others envisage a more uncertain future for the global human rights regime as highlighted in the debates surrounding the meaning and wider implications of the rise of non-Western states, shifting global power balances, and what some predict could be the beginning of the end of the period of US hegemony (Evans 1996 ).

Overall, the development of the institutional human rights framework under the auspices of the UN has been far from linear (Alston and Megret 2004 ; Oberleitner 2007 ). The broader trend however, although uneven and contentious, could be characterized by normative expansion and increasing intrusiveness of international norms and institutions for the protection of human rights, an increased plurality of actors involved in the creation and implementation of these norms, and, over time, the hardening of enforcement. Many IR scholars note however that these enforcement procedures have not significantly altered the allocation of responsibility for human rights implementation. Whilst norm creation in the human rights field has been internationalized reflecting in large part the increasing role and influence of NGOs in this area of global governance, implementation remains largely with sovereign states (Wheeler 2003 ). Yet, contrasting visions of the UN’s institutional mechanisms of human rights implementation range between those based on state agreement, peer review, recommendations, and then possibly conciliation, as opposed to harder enforcement mechanisms based on binding legal and judicial measures, sanctions, and referral to the UN Security Council. As argued by Steiner et al. ( 2008 :735–6), those who focus on the role of sanctions and coercive measures targeting rights violators consider compliance to be a question of choosing the appropriate means of enforcement in a world of state actors. For others, compliance is mainly an issue of institutional design and judicial process, which focus attention on the features of the implementation mechanisms developed by the UN’s human rights institutions and the extent to which they are able to shift the incentives of states. And, for some, the pathway to compliance lies in the ability of non-state actors and coalitions to persuade and potentially socialize states through norm-driven arguments, which highlights the importance of meaningful NGO participation in UN human rights fora.

Regional Human Rights Regimes

As with international institutions more generally, regional human rights regimes need to be understood in the context of the broader normative structures in which they are embedded (Shelton 2008 ). Clearly, significant differences underpin the development of the regional systems with comparatively deep and complex institutionalization of human rights in Europe and the Americas, a mainly promotional regime in Africa, and Asia and the Arab world still without established human rights institutions. This regional variance partly reflects the extent of the cultural embedding of human rights norms across regions, but patterns of state formation, colonization and decolonization, civil society activism, legal and judicial traditions, democratization, and economic development also shape the scope and depth of regional institutionalization. Also, while some regional systems may actively draw on global human rights norms (the Americas), other regional institutions seek to more actively resist extra-regional pressures for human rights (Africa). In other words, the impact of processes of regionalization on the development of international law lies in the ways in which they shape the interaction between “universal” human rights standards and regional diversity and traditions (Fawcett and Hurrell 1995 ). Methodologically speaking, moreover, a regional perspective provides a more nuanced understanding of the relative impact of international human rights institutions more generally (Hafner-Burton and Ron 2007 ) as it allows for a contextualized examination of the actual processes underpinning the interaction between national, regional, and global human rights (Buergenthal 1977 ).

This section emphasizes the evolutionary character of regional organizations as each has undergone reform since its creation and has strengthened the human rights obligations of member states. Although compliance remains an issue in each system, as several studies have shown the regional systems have increasingly converged by developing similar norms, institutions and procedures to promote and protect human rights (Weston et al. 1987 ; Heyns et al. 2006 ). In particular, the impact of each regional system depends in large part on the uses domestic and transnational actors make of the system; how the system responds to developments under its jurisdiction; and, crucially, the responses of national governments, as there is significant variation amongst different states within the same regional system.

In 1950 the member states of the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention on Human Rights (Robertson and Merrills 1993 ). The Convention initially established a Commission and a Court to monitor state compliance. Yet, the drafters of the Convention made the Court’s jurisdiction optional, and while creating the world’s first individual petition procedure for human rights violations this was again made optional. The Convention also conferred some supervisory functions on the Committee of Ministers, the governing body of the Council of Europe. Hence, the standard procedure envisaged under the Convention was one over which states maintained considerable control and where inter-state complaints brought through the Commission to the Committee of Ministers, a political body, constituted the primary route to enforcement (Simpson 2001 ).

Over time, however, the regional system has developed into a “complex system of norms, institutions and procedures [that] have regionalized many aspects of human rights law in Europe” (Shelton 2003 :95). In addition, although the mechanisms of the Council of Europe constitute the principal human rights organ in the region, the regional system consists of two other entities with partially overlapping membership, the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) (Brett 1996 ; Alston et al. 1999 ). The expansion of European institutions has generated an extensive research agenda that seeks to specify the driving forces behind the increasingly intrusive nature of European legal and political integration, including state interests, national courts, individual litigants, and supranational actors such as the European Court of Justice. These developments have made EU law in general increasingly embedded in national legal systems and have offered domestic actors additional tools to influence national policies (Drzemczewski 1998 ). In the field of human rights specifically, the proliferation of European human rights bodies has considerably expanded and deepened the regional system and in the process enmeshed European states in an increasingly intrusive network of human rights institutions. In many ways this complex regional system invokes aspects of regional constitutionalization of human rights norms and the Court developed into what resembles a regional constitutional court (Merrills 1993 ). Madsen ( 2007 ) also notes that these developments have in some important ways transformed the Convention into a deeply specialized field of law and legal practice whereby the regional system has gained a considerable degree of legal autonomy vis-à-vis member states and is increasingly used by individuals across the region (Helfer 2008 ).

The expansion and increasing intrusiveness of the system have given rise to tensions between establishing and enforcing uniform regional standards and the need to respect member states’ diversity, and moreover, achieving the appropriate balance between individual rights and what may reasonably be claimed to be in the public interest. At the core of this system the European Court of Human Rights deals with questions of uniformity and diversity in judging whether a given state practice falls below “common European standards.” According to the Court’s doctrine of the “margin of appreciation,” the Court seeks to ensure minimum regional standards by testing the limits states themselves have decided to impose on the rights of the Convention outside the set of core rights. The Court has had a considerable influence on human rights standards in Europe, shaping domestic legislation in various domains across the region (Wildhaber 2007 ). In the process, the regime has developed from a system of human rights protection based solely on litigation to a complex network of interlocking bodies focused on standard-setting, prevention, monitoring, and enforcement. From a comparative perspective therefore, the European system has developed into the most legalistic of the regional human rights regimes where implementation has to a considerable degree become institutionalized. Explanations for the relative effectiveness of the European system have focused on broadly converging state interests; the institutional autonomy of a productive and authoritative Court; the embedment of the system in domestic legal systems; significant transnational connections with domestic litigants; and an interlocking framework for human rights enforcement that draws from the political resources of other European institutions. The regional system, however, has had to deal with few cases of gross and systematic violations of human rights. Therefore, the democratization of the wider Europe and the integration of new member states have posed a considerable challenge to the human rights system as it has become increasingly difficult to maintain uniform regional standards and high levels of state compliance with Court judgments in a system overloaded with cases and only limited resources.

The Americas

With the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948 , an American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man was adopted by OAS member states. But it was not until 1978 with the entry into force of the American Convention on Human Rights that the inter-American system adopted the institutional structure that has remained to this day composed of a Commission and a Court (Medina 1990 ). Throughout its existence the OAS has been comprised of member states many of which at numerous occasions have been governed by repressive regimes with scant regard for human rights.

Yet, through the latter part of the Cold War and particularly in the 1990s, there was a significant expansion of regional institutions and important changes in the ambition, scope and density of regional governance in the Americas (Sikkink 1996 ). With the transition to democracy in the region the human rights system extended its reach as seen in the increasing number of ratifications of human rights instruments and the increasing acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction (Pasqualucci 2003 ). The inter-American system also adopted numerous mechanisms to address the many human rights challenges confronting the region, thereby developing increasingly extensive and intrusive human rights norms (Moir 2003 ). For many of the democratic governments in the region, the question of how to deal with human rights abuses under prior governments would come to define the nature of the new democracies, and although differences in national approaches to “transitional justice” reflected country-specific political concerns the policies eventually adopted by governments were in part shaped by international legal norms developed and formalized by the regional system (Méndez and Mariezcurrena 1999 ).

In the process the inter-American human rights system has emerged, from its roots as a quasi-judicial entity with an ill-defined mandate to promote respect for human rights in the Americas, as a legal regime formally empowering citizens to bring suit to challenge the domestic activities of their own government (Medina Quiroga 1988 ; Harris and Livingstone 1998 ). The inter-American human rights regime has developed in an independent fashion with, at its most positive reading, benign neglect on the part of most OAS member states vis-à-vis the system (Cerna 1996–7 ). The Court has also taken the view that the objective of the Convention is to integrate the regional and global systems of human rights protection and the regional system has also sought to explicitly link the democratic form of government with the promotion of human rights in the region (Cooper and Legler 2006 ).

In comparative terms the inter-American system has developed ambitious human rights norms that to a significant degree draw from regional legal traditions of expansive formal constitutional protections of individual rights. A considerable literature on the regional system has focused on the political and quasi-judicial role of the inter-American Commission with a mandate not found in the European system to put pressure on regional states to comply with its recommendations. Since the introduction of the right of individual petition, the system has become, many observers argue, more effective in addressing human rights problems; although the capacity of domestic litigants to turn to the regime varies considerably between countries in the region reflecting uneven patterns of civil society mobilization. Moreover, in recent years the literature on the system has given increasing attention to the Court and its role in ensuring compliance with the norms of the system. However, again, there is significant regional variance in adherence to and ratification of the system’s human rights instruments with the US, Canada, and much of the English-speaking Caribbean not accepting the Court’s jurisdiction (Helfer 2002 ). Pasqualucci ( 2003 ) also argues that the effectiveness of the Court is limited owing to the failure of the political organs of the OAS to adequately support the human rights system as evidenced in inadequate funding and quality control of judges elected to the Court, but also in the absence of a supervisory body that would fulfill the enforcement role of the Council of Ministers in the European system. Beyond the internal workings of the regional system however, the spread of elected governments across the region has clearly marked an improvement in the condition of human rights in most countries. Yet, not only has the system begun to receive more cases from the “grey borderland where the state’s authority to promote the general interest collides with individual rights” (Farer 1997 :543), but it also has to confront cases of structural human rights violations the causes of which do not lie in the exercise of arbitrary state power but are rather the consequences of state weaknesses and failures to act. These trends pose major challenges for a regional human rights system that is geared toward the protection of individuals against actions of the state, built around legal notions of state responsibility, and that assumes, politically, that pressure can be exerted on states which possess the levers to improve the situation – in other words that states which are part of the problem can also be part of the solution.

The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was established in 1963 in the early phases of decolonization during which newly independent African states sought to consolidate their status as sovereign states whilst pursuing more ambitious goals of African unity and solidarity. The adoption of the African Charter of Human Rights and Rights of Peoples in 1981 (Kannyo 1984 ) created an African Commission, which allowed for interstate complaints and further envisioned a mechanism for the receipt of individual petitions. In terms of particular regional characteristics the Charter emphasized notions of collective or “peoples’ rights,” such as the rights to peace and development, and gave a particularly prominent place to individual duties (wa Mutua 1995 ). However, the Commission was established as a weak monitoring body and did not provide for a judicial organ or any other mechanism for authoritative regional enforcement of decisions. It is frequently noted that the African institutional environment is extremely unconducive to the pursuit of ambitious organizational objectives and that the OAU developed into a highly politicized organization for which questions of human rights came to play a marginalized role. Yet, as emphasized by Odinkalu and Christensen ( 2001 :327), “[t]he perception of the African regional human rights system generally has been significantly shaped […] by and filtered through a pessimism about Africa” (see further Murray 2006 ). However, the capacity of the human rights system to consider individual petitions, to provide remedies for violations, and to monitor states’ compliance with Charter obligations has remained significantly constrained (Viljoen and Louw 2007 ).

These structural and institutional challenges notwithstanding, since the end of the Cold War and during the last decade in particular the African system has undergone significant changes (Evans and Murray 2008 ). In 1998 , the OAU created an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Mutua 1999 ; Van Der Mei 2005 ). In 2001 , moreover, African states adopted the Constitutive Act of the African Union marking the transition from the OAU to a new regional organization, the African Union (AU) (Murray 2004 ). Significantly, with the establishment of the AU, the member states formally endorsed the AU’s right to intervene in a member state in particularly grave circumstances such as cases involving war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Hence, the regional system has developed in response to a variety of internal and external factors, including tensions within existing regional institutions and the growing pressure exerted by international organizations and donor countries on African governments. Williams ( 2007 ) argues that a normative shift in regional institutions has taken place – from an emphasis on non-intervention to a “doctrine of non-indifference” – which has imposed limits on the applicability of the non-interference norm, and which may indicate some steps toward accountability of state officials who have committed atrocities.

Overall, the regional system has developed increasingly intrusive and robust institutions. In addition, an increasingly large number of international and local NGOs and other civil society actors have helped to put human rights issues on the OAU’s and now AU’s agenda (Okafor 2007 ). Yet, despite the greater normative and legal weight given to human rights norms in the region, the extent to which these norms have been internalized in countries across the region remains highly uneven, regional variance in terms of state and civil society engagement with the system is significant, and enforcement mechanisms remain weakly institutionalized and contested as reflected in ongoing debates surrounding the mandate and functions of the new regional human rights court (Bekker 2007 ).

Asia-Pacific and the Middle East

In relative terms the regional institutionalization of human rights in the Asia-Pacific and the wider Middle East remains patchy. The various regional entities that make up the organizational map of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East are yet to set up formal human rights institutions. Donnelly, for example, identifies a number of reasons for the absence of regional human rights institutions in Asia, including low levels of regional cooperation and weak perceptions of regional community (Donnelly 1986 :628). Moreover, human rights norms remain deeply contested in many parts of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East where, it is argued, such international norms are variably perceived as vehicles for external interference in domestic affairs and ill-suited to local cultures, customs and values.

However, in recent decades developments toward the strengthening of regional human rights norms and incipient institutional initiatives have been noted. For example, the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has since the early 1990s considered the establishment of a regional human rights mechanism (Thio 1999 ). Partly reflecting the informal networking and consensus-seeking style that has traditionally characterized ASEAN cooperation, and partly as the result of active resistance on the part of some member states to commit to human rights, the development toward a more robust institutional human rights framework has been slow. Yet, efforts by Asian and international NGOs led to the creation of an Asian Human Rights Charter in 1998 that urges regional states to establish an Asian Human Rights Commission and a Court (Harris 2000 ) and the newly adopted ASEAN Charter includes provisions for the establishment of an ASEAN human rights body. Many ASEAN member states remain reluctant however to the idea of a supranational human rights monitoring body and some states have instead emphasized the need for national human rights institutions under closer state control (Maznah 2002 ).

In the Middle East these tensions between broader normative changes internationally and resistance by regional states run equally deep (An-Na’im 2001 ). The League of Arab States established the Permanent Arab Commission on Human Rights in 1968 but the subsequently proposed Arab Charter of Human Rights was largely ignored. However, in 1994 the Arab League adopted the Charter and after significant criticisms by regional human rights NGOs adopted a revised Charter in 2004 , which entered into force in 2008 . Yet, although the Charter declares “human rights [to be] at the centre of the key national concerns of Arab States” Rishmawi ( 2005 :368) argues that there is still no “common vision and position among Arab states on human rights.”

This essay has focused on a series of research questions and puzzles that arise from the central concern whether international human rights institutions make a difference for the protection and promotion of human rights. It identified some major lines of enquiry that have emerged in response to these questions with a particular emphasis on the increasing transnationalization of the study of human rights regimes on the one hand and the range of conceptual understandings of regime effectiveness on the other. The research on human rights regimes has clearly generated important insights into the role of institutions in narrowing the gap between the rhetoric and practice of human rights; yet crucial areas seem to call for further scholarly attention. One particularly important area of research consists of identifying and explaining the mechanisms for institutional effects located at the transnational and domestic levels; and that seeks to “disaggregate” the state. Further study is required on the domestic actors and institutions that act and could potentially act as “compliance constituencies” and conduits of domestic implementation linking international human rights norms to domestic political and legal institutions and actors. Also, human rights scholarship tends to examine only a narrow set of human rights that are institutionalized in international human rights regimes (predominantly civil and political rights). With the more systematic recognition of social, economic and cultural rights within human rights institutions, norm-setting efforts are increasingly targeting other actors than states. Efforts to push beyond state-centric understandings of human rights should also be seen in the light of many contemporary human rights violations that are occurring in the context of weak and fragile states where state responsibility for violations is difficult to establish and often even absent. Finally, a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to the study of human rights regimes calls for a dislocation of disciplinary boundaries between international and national law, IR and comparative politics on the one hand, and between law and politics on the other. This seems particularly important as studies of regime effectiveness increasingly engage with studies of what explains repression and human rights violations in the first place. Moreover, although increasing methodological diversity is enriching our understandings of both the potential and limits of human rights regimes, the central questions and research puzzles of this particular field of enquiry should guide the appropriate methods and disciplinary approaches and not the other way around. This essay has identified a number of areas in which scholarly efforts are exploring such links to foster better understandings of the role of international and regional human rights institutions in human rights protection.

Acknowledgments

The author is particularly grateful to Andrew Hurrell whose guidance and insights on many of the themes covered in this essay continue to be inspiring. Carolyn Haggis , Thomas Pegram , Ioanna Thoma and two anonymous reviewers provided very helpful comments on a previous draft. Chandra Sriram ’s patience in pushing this essay through the editorial process is gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors of fact and interpretation remain the sole responsibility of the author.

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Links to Digital Materials

Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. At www.ohchr.org , accessed January 16, 2009. The official website of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. Provides an accessible introduction to the UN’s human rights system including data on both charter- and treaty-based human rights bodies. Includes relevant information of UN member states’ human rights records and useful contact information.

University of Minnesota Human Rights Library. At www1.umn.edu/humanrts , accessed January 16, 2009. Provides a large collection of human rights documents, including human rights treaties and other international human rights instruments from the UN and regional human rights systems. The site also provides access to a vast number of links categorized according to human rights topics and is a useful search engine.

Bayefsky.com. At www.bayefsky.com , accessed January 16, 2009. Offers a wide range of information concerning the application of the UN human rights treaty system by its monitoring treaty bodies. Includes UN documents organized by state and human rights theme.

International Service for Human Rights (ISHR). At www.ishr.ch , accessed January 16, 2009. The ISHR is a service organization that seeks to support the work of others with and within the UN and regional human rights systems. Monitors, analyzes, and reports on the developments within the UN human rights system primarily and provides useful guides and contact information on the UN system.

European Court of Human Rights. At www.echr.coe.int/echr , accessed January 16, 2009. The official website of the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Court. Includes the basic texts of the European human rights system and a searchable database of the Court’s judgments and decisions.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. At www.osce.org/odihr , accessed January 16, 2009. The official website of the specialized institution of the OSCE dealing with elections, human rights, and democratization. Includes relevant OSCE documents.

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). At www.cidh.org , accessed January 16, 2009. The official website of the IACHR of the American Organization of American States (OAS). Provides the basic documents pertaining to the inter-American human rights system. Includes annual reports, on-site reports, cases, and recommendations issued by the IACHR.

Inter-American Court of Human Rights. At www.corteidh.or.cr , accessed January 16, 2009. The official website of the OAS’ Court of Human Rights. Includes a searchable database of the Court’s jurisprudence and information on past and ongoing cases.

African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. At www.achpr.org , accessed January 16, 2009. The official website of the African Union’s Human Rights Commission. Provides the basic texts of the African human rights system, including state reports and communications, and the special human rights mechanisms established by the Commission.

Working group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism. At www.aseanhrmech.org , accessed January 16, 2009. The website of a coalition of national working groups from ASEAN member states composed of government representatives, parliamentary human rights committees, academics, and NGOs with the objective to establish an ASEAN human rights commission and Court. Includes draft agreements and proposals submitted to ASEAN member states.

Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). At www.ahrchk.net , accessed January 16, 2009. The AHRC is a regional NGO that seeks to promote human rights in Asia. Its website contains wide-ranging information on the situation of human rights in regional states and various ongoing campaigns and thematic human rights issues.

The Arab Association for Human Rights. At www.arabhra.org , accessed January 16, 2009. At the time of writing only the version in Arabic is available.

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"Why Human Rights?": Reflection by Eleni Christou

This post is the first installment from UChicago Law's International Human Rights Law Clinic in a series titled — The Matter of Human Rights. In this 16-part series, law students examine, question and reflect on the historical, ideological, and normative roots of the human rights system, how the system has evolved, its present challenges and future possibilities. Eleni Christou is a third year in the Law School at the University of Chicago.

Why Human Rights?

By: Eleni Christou University of Chicago Law School Class of 2019

When the term “human rights” is used, it conjures up, for some, powerful images of the righteous fight for the inalienable rights that people have just by virtue of being human. It is Martin Luther King Jr. before the Washington monument as hundreds of thousands gather and look on; it is Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom; or a 16-year-old Malala telling her story, so others like her may be heard. But what is beyond these archetypes? Does the system work? Can we make it work better? Is it even the right system for our times? In other words, why human rights?

Human rights are rights that every person has from the moment they are born to the moment they die. They are things that everyone is entitled to, such as life, liberty, freedom of expression, and the right to education, just by virtue of being human. People can never lose these rights on the basis of age, sex, nationality, race, or disability. Human rights offer us a principled framework, rooted in normative values meant for all nations and legal orders. In a world order in which states/governments set the rules, the human rights regime is the counterweight, one concerned with and focused on the individual. In other words, we need human rights because it provides us a way of evaluating and challenging national laws and practices as to the treatment of individuals.

The foundational human right text for our modern-day system is the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December, 1948, this document lays out 30 articles which define the rights each human is entitled to. These rights are designed to protect core human values and prohibit institutions and practices that are contrary to the enjoyment of the rights. Rights often complement each other, and at times, can be combined to form new rights. For example, humans have a right to liberty, and also a right to be free from slavery, two rights which complement and reinforce each other. Other times, rights can be in tension, like when a person’s right to freedom of expression infringes upon another’s right to freedom from discrimination.

In this post, I’ll provide an example of how the human rights system has been used to do important work. The international communities’ work to develop the law and organize around human rights principles to challenge and sanction the apartheid regime in South Africa provides a valuable illustration of how the human rights system can be used successfully to alleviate state human rights violations that previously would have been written off as a domestic matter.

From 1948 to 1994, South Africa had a system of racial segregation called ‘ apartheid ,’ literally meaning ‘separateness.’ The minority white population was committing blatant human rights violations to maintain their control over the majority black population, and smaller multiethnic and South Asian communities. This system of apartheid was codified in laws at every level of the country, restricting where non-whites could live, work, and simply be. Non-whites were stripped of  voting rights ,  evicted from their homes  and forced into segregated neighborhoods, and not allowed to travel out of these neighborhoods without  passes . Interracial marriage was forbidden, and transport and civil facilities were all segregated, leading to extremely inferior services for the majority of South Africans. The horrific conditions imposed on non-whites led to  internal resistance movements , which the white ruling class responded to with  extreme violence , leaving thousands dead or imprisoned by the government.

While certain global leaders expressed concern about the Apartheid regime in South Africa, at first, most (including the newly-formed UN) considered it a domestic affair. However, that view changed in 1960 following the  Sharpeville Massacre , where 69 protesters of the travel pass requirement were murdered by South African police. In 1963, the United Nations Security Council passed  Resolution 181 , which called for a voluntary arms embargo against South Africa, which was later made mandatory. The Security Council condemned South Africa’s apartheid regime and encouraged states not to “indirectly [provide] encouragement . . . [of] South Africa to perpetuate, by force, its policy of apartheid,” by participating in the embargo. During this time, many countries, including the United States, ended their arms trade with South Africa. Additionally, the UN urged an oil embargo, and eventually  suspended South Africa  from the General Assembly in 1974.

In 1973, the UN General Assembly passed the  International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid , and it came into force in 1976. This convention made apartheid a crime against humanity. It expanded the prohibition of apartheid and similar policies outside of the South African context, and laid the groundwork for international actions to be taken against any state that engaged in these policies. This also served to further legitimize the international response to South Africa’s apartheid regime.

As the state-sanctioned violence in South Africa intensified, and the global community came to understand the human rights violation being carried out on a massive scale, countries worked domestically to place trade sanctions on South Africa, and many divestment movements gained popular support. International sports teams refused to play in South Africa and cut ties with their sports federations, and many actors engaged in cultural boycotts. These domestic actions worked in tandem with the actions taken by the United Nations, mirroring the increasingly widespread ideology that human rights violations are a global issue that transcend national boundaries, but are an international concern of all peoples.

After years of domestic and international pressure, South African leadership released the resistance leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 and began negotiations for the dismantling of apartheid. In 1994, South Africa’s apartheid officially ended with the first general elections. With universal suffrage, Nelson Mandela was elected president.

In a  speech to the UN General Assembly , newly elected Nelson Mandela recognized the role that the UN and individual countries played in the ending of apartheid, noting these interventions were a success story of the human rights system. The human rights values embodied in the UDHR, the ICSPCA, and numerous UN Security Council resolutions, provided an external normative and legal framework by which the global community could identify unlawful state action and hold South Africa accountable for its system of apartheid. The international pressure applied via the human rights system has been considered a major contributing factor to the end of apartheid. While the country has not fully recovered from the trauma that decades of the apartheid regime had left on its people, the end of the apartheid formal legal system has allowed the country to begin to heal and move towards a government that works for all people, one that has openly embraced international human rights law and principles in its constitutional and legislative framework.

This is what a human rights system can do. When state governments and legal orders fail to protect people within their control, the international system can challenge the national order and demand it uphold a basic standard of good governance. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the human rights system has grown, tackled new challenges, developed institutions for review and enforcement, and built a significant body of law. Numerous tools have been established to help states, groups, and individuals defend and protect human rights.

So why human rights? Because the human rights system has been a powerful force for good in this world, often the only recourse for marginalized and minority populations. We, as the global community, should work to identify shortcomings in the system, and work together to improve and fix them. We should not —  as the US has been doing under the current administration  — selectively withdraw, defund, and disparage one of the only tools available to the world’s most vulnerable peoples. The human rights system is an arena, a language, and a source of power to many around the world fighting for a worthwhile future built on our shared human values.

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Why is Law Enforcement Important

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Preserving public safety, upholding the rule of law, crime prevention and deterrence, emergency response and disaster management, protection of individual rights, building trust and community relations.

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Human Rights Enforcement Mechanisms of the United Nations

Since the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, several United Nations mechanisms for enforcing and protecting economic, social, and cultural rights have emerged. One of the most important international mechanisms for defending and promoting ESCR is the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) whose mandate is to specifically monitor state parties fulfillment of their obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights . Articles 16 and 17 of the ICESCR require states to prepare reports every five years on the situation of ESCR in their country, which are reviewed by the CESCR. The CESCR examines the extent to which ESCR are being achieved by state parties, serves as a base for formulating policies that promote ESCR via General Comments , and allows the public to learn about the work of their government concerning the achievement of ESCR. The CESCR overviews five or six reports every year. If a country fails to report, the CESCR may review the situation in that country using alternative sources. After examining a country's report and other sources, the CESCR then releases concluding observations which highlight the progress made in fulfilling ESCR, difficulties in achieving these rights, areas of concern, and recommendations. CESCR also accepts reports by members of the civil society on the situation of ESCR in their countries as part of the review process. The CESCR is an organ of the United Nations Economic and Social Counci l (ECOSOC). It has 18 members who are experts in the area of human rights and are elected by the ECOSOC. Beside the CESCR, other important mechanisms for human rights within the UN are the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) , the Human Rights Council , and treaty-monitoring bodies like The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and The Committee on the Rights of the Child. High Commissioner on Human Rights

The role of the OHCHR is to protect and promote human rights. It is the main office in the United Nations that deals with human rights and it works to ensure that human rights standards are applied in all of the UN's activities. It collaborates with governments to strengthen their human rights capabilities, encourages states to develop policies and institutions that are conducive to human rights, and provides advice and technical assistance to achieve these goals. The Human Rights Council, Special Procedures and Working Groups

Recent reforms at the UN have altered the structure of its human rights enforcement bodies. The Human Rights Council replaces the Commission on Human Rights as the main UN body charged with monitoring and evaluating conditions of human rights in countries around the world and identifying major areas of concern.  This includes a system of special procedures, expert advice, and a complaint procedure.  Composed of 47 Member States elected by the UN General Assembly, the Council serves as a round-table for governments and civil society groups to raise concerns about human rights abuses in particular countries, as well as thematic areas of concern. The Council meets at least three times a year and also functions through a series of working groups and special procedures . These include the Open-ended working group to consider options regarding the elaboration of an Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights , which would include an individual complaint mechanism.  Special procedures with thematic mandates include Special Rapporteurs on Adequate Housing, the Right to Education, the Question of Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, the Right to Food and the Right to Health, who are able to receive information on specific allegations of human rights violation and send urgent appeals or letters of allegation to governments asking for clarification, as well as reporting on visits and investigations.  The Human Rights Council is currently undertaking a review that may ultimately reshape and rationalize mandates and mechanisms of the former Human Rights Commission. United Nations Human Rights Treaty Mechanisms

One of the most important international mechanisms for defending and promoting ESCR is the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) whose mandate is to specifically monitor state parties fulfillment of their obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Articles 16 and 17 of the ICESCR require states to prepare reports every five years on the situation of ESCR in their country, which are reviewed by the CESCR. The CESCR examines the extent to which ESCR are being achieved by state parties, serves as a base for formulating policies that promote ESCR via General Comments, and allows the public to learn about the work of their government concerning the achievement of ESCR. The CESCR overviews five or six reports every year. If a country fails to report, the CESCR may review the situation in that country using alternative sources. After examining a country's report and other sources, the CESCR then releases concluding observations which highlight the progress made in fulfilling ESCR, difficulties in achieving these rights, areas of concern, and recommendations. CESCR also accepts reports by members of the civil society on the situation of ESCR in their countries as part of the review process. The CESCR is an organ of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). It has 18 members who are experts in the area of human rights and are elected by the ECOSOC. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women monitors the progress of women's rights in those countries that are parties to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Members of CEDAW are obligated to submit reports every four years on the steps that they have taken to improve the condition of women in their territory. The Committee meets twice a year to review these reports and comments on them. Another important function of the Committee is to single out the problems that predominantly affect women, such as sexual harassment and domestic violence, and to make recommendations to members of CEDAW on how to tackle these issues.  In regard to ESC rights, CEDAW prohibits discrimination in the right to: Article 10 Education; Article 11 Employment; Article 12 Health; and Article 13 Economic and Social Benefits.  In addition, CEDAW reaffirms in Article 14 the equality rights of rural women to health care, education, economic opportunity, social security, land, housing, and water supply. The Committee on the Rights of the Child monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by member states. The Committee meets in Geneva and holds three sessions a year. States parties to CRC are required to submit reports on the situation of children in their territory every five years. The Committee reviews these reports and makes recommendations to state parties. The Committee holds annual thematic discussions on issues that affect children. The ESC rights enshrined in the CRC are: Article 7 Right to care; Article 6 Right to survival and development; Article 18 Right to state assistance; Article 20 Rights of children deprived of family environment to care; Article 24 Right to health and health services; Article 26 Right to social security; Article 27 Right to adequate standard of living; Article 28 Right to education; Article 31 Rights to leisure, play and culture; and Article 32 Child labor. Apart from ICESCR, CEDAW, and CRC, economic, social and cultural rights are also recognized in many other international conventions and declarations.  CERD is a key convention in regards for those seeking to challenge racial discrimination in the respect of economic, social and cultural rights. As with ICESCR, CEDAW and CRC, there is a UN enforcement mechanism, the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination which monitors adherence to the principles set forth in the convention. Additionally, people and communities who have been denied there ESCR on the basis of race or ethnicity may approach the committee with individual complaints, if their country has recognized the authority of the Committee to do so.  In addition, all people, whether citizens of a country or not, are entitled to fundamental human rights, including basic economic, social and cultural rights. The Committee on the Protection of Migrant Workers monitors implementation of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Family. The Committee meets once a year and can accept individual complaints under certain circumstance if the state in question has accepted the authority of the Committee to accept individual complaints concerning the state's jurisdiction. 

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Enforcement of Human Rights

Introduction, general overviews.

• Human Rights Council
• The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
• The Principal Organs
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• European Court of Human Rights
• Other Enforcement Mechanisms
• Enforcement in the European Union
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Enforcement of Human Rights by Marko Milanovic LAST REVIEWED: 25 June 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 25 June 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199796953-0062

This bibliographical section will present literature on the various mechanisms designed to secure effective compliance by states with their human rights obligations. These mechanisms are by and large set up by the specific sources of international law—particularly treaties—which define the relevant substantive human rights obligations. As such, the issue of enforcement is inextricably linked to the question of scope of the relevant treaties, for which the reader is referred to the article on Human Rights . Similarly, this article’s examination of enforcement will generally exclude the broader question of why states choose to assume and comply with international legal obligations generally. It should also be noted that large-scale human rights violations can also implicate other areas of international law, such as international humanitarian law and international criminal law, and that one could for instance see trials before international criminal courts and tribunals as methods of human rights enforcement broadly speaking. Again, however, the reader is referred to the relevant articles examining these topics in more detail. There are several ways in which this article could be structured. Rather than grouping the various enforcement mechanisms by their method of operation (e.g., monitoring and reporting, inter-state and individual complaints), the sections will be organized by the various systems of protection, each of them based on a particular set of legal instruments, and each of them including various enforcement mechanisms. The reason for doing so is that the relevant scholarship is by and large focused on one particular system, or one particular aspect of a system. After first covering some standard general works, this article will look at the various mechanisms of enforcement within the universal human rights system, and then at the several regional systems and at enforcement within the state.

Alfredsson, et al. 2009 ; Baderin and Ssenyonjo 2010 ; and Bloed, et al. 1993 are excellent edited collections wholly or partly devoted to human rights enforcement. Moeckli, et al. 2010 is a recent textbook, useful for further research. Tomuschat 2008 could be read as a textbook, but it is also a book equipped with a central thesis that requires a thorough examination of human rights enforcement, while Shelton 2005 connects enforcement to the law of remedies.

Alfredsson, Gudmundur, Jonas Grimheden, Bertrand G. Ramcharan, and Alfred de Zayas, eds. International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms: Essays in Honour of Jakob Th. Möller . 2d ed. Leiden, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009.

DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004162365.i-728

A remarkable collection of essays—indeed, one of the few Festschrifts ever to actually have a second edition—which comprehensively covers the topic of human rights monitoring mechanisms, with sixty-eight individual contributions by leading authors in the field, running at more than seven hundred pages. The standard work on the subject.

Baderin, Mashood A., and Manisuli Ssenyonjo, eds. International Human Rights Law: Six Decades After the UDHR and Beyond . Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010.

A recent edited collection generally on human rights law by leading scholars. Chapters 11–20 are specifically devoted to mechanisms of enforcement.

Bloed, Arie, Liselotte Leicht, Manfred Nowak, and Allan Rosas, eds. Monitoring Human Rights in Europe: Comparing International Procedures and Mechanisms . Leiden, The Netherlands: Kluwer/Martinus Nijhoff, 1993.

Despite its title, this edited collection is not confined solely to European regional monitoring mechanisms. While by now dated and interesting mainly for the assessment of human rights enforcement mechanisms as they stood at the beginning of the 1990s, it is still notable both because of the expertise of its contributors and because of its explicitly comparative perspective.

Moeckli, Daniel, Sangeeta Shah, Sandesh Sivakumaran, and D. J. Harris, eds. International Human Rights Law . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

An excellent postgraduate textbook in international human rights law, with Part 4 (chapters 18–22) covering the various universal and regional systems of human rights protection. A good first port of call for further research.

Shelton, Dinah. Remedies in International Human Rights Law . 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

A different look at the enforcement of human rights. While this important book does deal with the institutional aspects of human rights enforcement mechanisms, its primary focus is on the theoretical and practical analysis of the remedies that they can provide.

Tomuschat, Christian. Human Rights: Between Idealism and Realism . 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

A good general book on human rights law, with specific emphasis throughout on mechanisms of enforcement and implementation.

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Essay on Human Rights: Samples in 500 and 1500

• Updated on  
• Dec 9, 2023

Essay writing is an integral part of the school curriculum and various academic and competitive exams like IELTS , TOEFL , SAT , UPSC , etc. It is designed to test your command of the English language and how well you can gather your thoughts and present them in a structure with a flow. To master your ability to write an essay, you must read as much as possible and practise on any given topic. This blog brings you a detailed guide on how to write an essay on Human Rights , with useful essay samples on Human rights.

This Blog Includes:

The basic human rights, 200 words essay on human rights, 500 words essay on human rights, 500+ words essay on human rights in india, 1500 words essay on human rights, importance of human rights, essay on human rights pdf.

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What are Human Rights

Human rights mark everyone as free and equal, irrespective of age, gender, caste, creed, religion and nationality. The United Nations adopted human rights in light of the atrocities people faced during the Second World War. On the 10th of December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Its adoption led to the recognition of human rights as the foundation for freedom, justice and peace for every individual. Although it’s not legally binding, most nations have incorporated these human rights into their constitutions and domestic legal frameworks. Human rights safeguard us from discrimination and guarantee that our most basic needs are protected.

Did you know that the 10th of December is celebrated as Human Rights Day ?

Before we move on to the essays on human rights, let’s check out the basics of what they are.

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Here is a 200-word short sample essay on basic Human Rights.

Human rights are a set of rights given to every human being regardless of their gender, caste, creed, religion, nation, location or economic status. These are said to be moral principles that illustrate certain standards of human behaviour. Protected by law , these rights are applicable everywhere and at any time. Basic human rights include the right to life, right to a fair trial, right to remedy by a competent tribunal, right to liberty and personal security, right to own property, right to education, right of peaceful assembly and association, right to marriage and family, right to nationality and freedom to change it, freedom of speech, freedom from discrimination, freedom from slavery, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of movement, right of opinion and information, right to adequate living standard and freedom from interference with privacy, family, home and correspondence.

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Check out this 500-word long essay on Human Rights.

Every person has dignity and value. One of the ways that we recognise the fundamental worth of every person is by acknowledging and respecting their human rights. Human rights are a set of principles concerned with equality and fairness. They recognise our freedom to make choices about our lives and develop our potential as human beings. They are about living a life free from fear, harassment or discrimination.

Human rights can broadly be defined as the basic rights that people worldwide have agreed are essential. These include the right to life, the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to health, education and an adequate standard of living. These human rights are the same for all people everywhere – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, regardless of our background, where we live, what we think or believe. This basic property is what makes human rights’ universal’.

Human rights connect us all through a shared set of rights and responsibilities. People’s ability to enjoy their human rights depends on other people respecting those rights. This means that human rights involve responsibility and duties towards other people and the community. Individuals have a responsibility to ensure that they exercise their rights with consideration for the rights of others. For example, when someone uses their right to freedom of speech, they should do so without interfering with someone else’s right to privacy.

Governments have a particular responsibility to ensure that people can enjoy their rights. They must establish and maintain laws and services that enable people to enjoy a life in which their rights are respected and protected. For example, the right to education says that everyone is entitled to a good education. Therefore, governments must provide good quality education facilities and services to their people. If the government fails to respect or protect their basic human rights, people can take it into account.

Values of tolerance, equality and respect can help reduce friction within society. Putting human rights ideas into practice can help us create the kind of society we want to live in. There has been tremendous growth in how we think about and apply human rights ideas in recent decades. This growth has had many positive results – knowledge about human rights can empower individuals and offer solutions for specific problems.

Human rights are an important part of how people interact with others at all levels of society – in the family, the community, school, workplace, politics and international relations. Therefore, people everywhere must strive to understand what human rights are. When people better understand human rights, it is easier for them to promote justice and the well-being of society. 

Also Read: Important Articles in Indian Constitution

Here is a human rights essay focused on India.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. It has been rightly proclaimed in the American Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Created with certain unalienable rights….” Similarly, the Indian Constitution has ensured and enshrined Fundamental rights for all citizens irrespective of caste, creed, religion, colour, sex or nationality. These basic rights, commonly known as human rights, are recognised the world over as basic rights with which every individual is born.

In recognition of human rights, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made on the 10th of December, 1948. This declaration is the basic instrument of human rights. Even though this declaration has no legal bindings and authority, it forms the basis of all laws on human rights. The necessity of formulating laws to protect human rights is now being felt all over the world. According to social thinkers, the issue of human rights became very important after World War II concluded. It is important for social stability both at the national and international levels. Wherever there is a breach of human rights, there is conflict at one level or the other.

Given the increasing importance of the subject, it becomes necessary that educational institutions recognise the subject of human rights as an independent discipline. The course contents and curriculum of the discipline of human rights may vary according to the nature and circumstances of a particular institution. Still, generally, it should include the rights of a child, rights of minorities, rights of the needy and the disabled, right to live, convention on women, trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation etc.

Since the formation of the United Nations , the promotion and protection of human rights have been its main focus. The United Nations has created a wide range of mechanisms for monitoring human rights violations. The conventional mechanisms include treaties and organisations, U.N. special reporters, representatives and experts and working groups. Asian countries like China argue in favour of collective rights. According to Chinese thinkers, European countries lay stress upon individual rights and values while Asian countries esteem collective rights and obligations to the family and society as a whole.

With the freedom movement the world over after World War II, the end of colonisation also ended the policy of apartheid and thereby the most aggressive violation of human rights. With the spread of education, women are asserting their rights. Women’s movements play an important role in spreading the message of human rights. They are fighting for their rights and supporting the struggle for human rights of other weaker and deprived sections like bonded labour, child labour, landless labour, unemployed persons, Dalits and elderly people.

Unfortunately, violation of human rights continues in most parts of the world. Ethnic cleansing and genocide can still be seen in several parts of the world. Large sections of the world population are deprived of the necessities of life i.e. food, shelter and security of life. Right to minimum basic needs viz. Work, health care, education and shelter are denied to them. These deprivations amount to the negation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Also Read: Human Rights Courses

Check out this detailed 1500-word essay on human rights.

The human right to live and exist, the right to equality, including equality before the law, non-discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and equality of opportunity in matters of employment, the right to freedom of speech and expression, assembly, association, movement, residence, the right to practice any profession or occupation, the right against exploitation, prohibiting all forms of forced labour, child labour and trafficking in human beings, the right to freedom of conscience, practice and propagation of religion and the right to legal remedies for enforcement of the above are basic human rights. These rights and freedoms are the very foundations of democracy.

Obviously, in a democracy, the people enjoy the maximum number of freedoms and rights. Besides these are political rights, which include the right to contest an election and vote freely for a candidate of one’s choice. Human rights are a benchmark of a developed and civilised society. But rights cannot exist in a vacuum. They have their corresponding duties. Rights and duties are the two aspects of the same coin.

Liberty never means license. Rights presuppose the rule of law, where everyone in the society follows a code of conduct and behaviour for the good of all. It is the sense of duty and tolerance that gives meaning to rights. Rights have their basis in the ‘live and let live’ principle. For example, my right to speech and expression involves my duty to allow others to enjoy the same freedom of speech and expression. Rights and duties are inextricably interlinked and interdependent. A perfect balance is to be maintained between the two. Whenever there is an imbalance, there is chaos.

A sense of tolerance, propriety and adjustment is a must to enjoy rights and freedom. Human life sans basic freedom and rights is meaningless. Freedom is the most precious possession without which life would become intolerable, a mere abject and slavish existence. In this context, Milton’s famous and oft-quoted lines from his Paradise Lost come to mind: “To reign is worth ambition though in hell/Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

However, liberty cannot survive without its corresponding obligations and duties. An individual is a part of society in which he enjoys certain rights and freedom only because of the fulfilment of certain duties and obligations towards others. Thus, freedom is based on mutual respect’s rights. A fine balance must be maintained between the two, or there will be anarchy and bloodshed. Therefore, human rights can best be preserved and protected in a society steeped in morality, discipline and social order.

Violation of human rights is most common in totalitarian and despotic states. In the theocratic states, there is much persecution, and violation in the name of religion and the minorities suffer the most. Even in democracies, there is widespread violation and infringement of human rights and freedom. The women, children and the weaker sections of society are victims of these transgressions and violence.

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights’ main concern is to protect and promote human rights and freedom in the world’s nations. In its various sessions held from time to time in Geneva, it adopts various measures to encourage worldwide observations of these basic human rights and freedom. It calls on its member states to furnish information regarding measures that comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whenever there is a complaint of a violation of these rights. In addition, it reviews human rights situations in various countries and initiates remedial measures when required.

The U.N. Commission was much concerned and dismayed at the apartheid being practised in South Africa till recently. The Secretary-General then declared, “The United Nations cannot tolerate apartheid. It is a legalised system of racial discrimination, violating the most basic human rights in South Africa. It contradicts the letter and spirit of the United Nations Charter. That is why over the last forty years, my predecessors and I have urged the Government of South Africa to dismantle it.”

Now, although apartheid is no longer practised in that country, other forms of apartheid are being blatantly practised worldwide. For example, sex apartheid is most rampant. Women are subject to abuse and exploitation. They are not treated equally and get less pay than their male counterparts for the same jobs. In employment, promotions, possession of property etc., they are most discriminated against. Similarly, the rights of children are not observed properly. They are forced to work hard in very dangerous situations, sexually assaulted and exploited, sold and bonded for labour.

The Commission found that religious persecution, torture, summary executions without judicial trials, intolerance, slavery-like practices, kidnapping, political disappearance, etc., are being practised even in the so-called advanced countries and societies. The continued acts of extreme violence, terrorism and extremism in various parts of the world like Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Somalia, Algeria, Lebanon, Chile, China, and Myanmar, etc., by the governments, terrorists, religious fundamentalists, and mafia outfits, etc., is a matter of grave concern for the entire human race.

Violation of freedom and rights by terrorist groups backed by states is one of the most difficult problems society faces. For example, Pakistan has been openly collaborating with various terrorist groups, indulging in extreme violence in India and other countries. In this regard the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva adopted a significant resolution, which was co-sponsored by India, focusing on gross violation of human rights perpetrated by state-backed terrorist groups.

The resolution expressed its solidarity with the victims of terrorism and proposed that a U.N. Fund for victims of terrorism be established soon. The Indian delegation recalled that according to the Vienna Declaration, terrorism is nothing but the destruction of human rights. It shows total disregard for the lives of innocent men, women and children. The delegation further argued that terrorism cannot be treated as a mere crime because it is systematic and widespread in its killing of civilians.

Violation of human rights, whether by states, terrorists, separatist groups, armed fundamentalists or extremists, is condemnable. Regardless of the motivation, such acts should be condemned categorically in all forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever they are committed, as acts of aggression aimed at destroying human rights, fundamental freedom and democracy. The Indian delegation also underlined concerns about the growing connection between terrorist groups and the consequent commission of serious crimes. These include rape, torture, arson, looting, murder, kidnappings, blasts, and extortion, etc.

Violation of human rights and freedom gives rise to alienation, dissatisfaction, frustration and acts of terrorism. Governments run by ambitious and self-seeking people often use repressive measures and find violence and terror an effective means of control. However, state terrorism, violence, and human freedom transgressions are very dangerous strategies. This has been the background of all revolutions in the world. Whenever there is systematic and widespread state persecution and violation of human rights, rebellion and revolution have taken place. The French, American, Russian and Chinese Revolutions are glowing examples of human history.

The first war of India’s Independence in 1857 resulted from long and systematic oppression of the Indian masses. The rapidly increasing discontent, frustration and alienation with British rule gave rise to strong national feelings and demand for political privileges and rights. Ultimately the Indian people, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, made the British leave India, setting the country free and independent.

Human rights and freedom ought to be preserved at all costs. Their curtailment degrades human life. The political needs of a country may reshape Human rights, but they should not be completely distorted. Tyranny, regimentation, etc., are inimical of humanity and should be resisted effectively and united. The sanctity of human values, freedom and rights must be preserved and protected. Human Rights Commissions should be established in all countries to take care of human freedom and rights. In cases of violation of human rights, affected individuals should be properly compensated, and it should be ensured that these do not take place in future.

These commissions can become effective instruments in percolating the sensitivity to human rights down to the lowest levels of governments and administrations. The formation of the National Human Rights Commission in October 1993 in India is commendable and should be followed by other countries.

Also Read: Law Courses in India

Human rights are of utmost importance to seek basic equality and human dignity. Human rights ensure that the basic needs of every human are met. They protect vulnerable groups from discrimination and abuse, allow people to stand up for themselves, and follow any religion without fear and give them the freedom to express their thoughts freely. In addition, they grant people access to basic education and equal work opportunities. Thus implementing these rights is crucial to ensure freedom, peace and safety.

Human Rights Day is annually celebrated on the 10th of December.

Human Rights Day is celebrated to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UNGA in 1948.

Some of the common Human Rights are the right to life and liberty, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom from slavery and torture and the right to work and education.

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Sonal is a creative, enthusiastic writer and editor who has worked extensively for the Study Abroad domain. She splits her time between shooting fun insta reels and learning new tools for content marketing. If she is missing from her desk, you can find her with a group of people cracking silly jokes or petting neighbourhood dogs.

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