The Problem of Human Rights Compliance

The problem of human rights compliance (see Figure 1)²³

is that many sovereign governments domestically abuse a set of principled ideas proffered internationally through global laws and networks of advocates. This behavior is almost always caused by purposeful disobedience by actors who choose defection from the rules. Noncompliance in the area of human rights—especially for the most egregious violations—can rarely be explained by bureaucratic failure. Human rights laws are not vague about prohibitions on torture or indiscriminate killing, and difficult social or economic changes take place inside states that do not repress their citizens. Human rights violations are by and large calculated acts taken by different actors that expect some form of gains from repression.

A powerful constituency of states and advocates around the world hold strong and well-articulated preferences to make all states accountable for violations. They seek to influence repressive governments' behaviors to become compliant with rules protecting the inalienable rights of all people. International agreements governing human rights are accordingly charged with the difficult task of changing repressive governments' behaviors inside the sovereign territory of the state.²⁴

There are two principal kinds of violators they must address.

First, elites working in some repressive governments may hold preferences for human rights that they cannot self-enforce at home. This problem is perhaps most common to newly established democracies, where recently elected leaders are likely to have strong interests in consolidating human rights, while at the same time face substantial domestic opposition toward implementation, now and into the future.²⁵

Second, other repressive governments may be ruled by decision makers with no identifiable incentives for human rights, or with strong incentives for repression. The vast literatures on repression suggest that elites ruling autocratic governments often gain substantial political and economic benefits from tyranny—benefits that range from a strong hold on political power to substantial economic wealth.²⁶ Elites facing political competition by armed insurgent groups are also among the most likely to hold strong incentives for occasional to systematic use of repression to maintain political control, which is a highly valued good.

If the problem to be solved is to sway an assortment of repressors to conform to international principles of human rights laws, the solution is to design international institutions with the capacity to influence elites operating under different domestic political situations to transform their behaviors.

Mechanisms of Influence

It is well established in the theoretical literatures that international institutions can influence governments' human rights actions through two principal mechanisms: coercion and persuasion. As I have noted above, scholars of international organization and law disagree strongly about which form of influence should be the most effective. Although the majority of human rights scholars believe that coercion may be a useful tool of domestic policy influence, many remain optimistic that international institutions lacking coercive authority can nonetheless bring about compliance with law. I now turn to consider both mechanisms more carefully as they apply to human rights.

Persuasion is “the active, often strategic, inculcation of norms.”²⁷

When they persuade, international institutions actively influence human rights by supplying targeted information to convince or teach repressive actors new ideas that are more consistent with the principles of international laws.²⁸ Persuasion is a process of changing actors' preferences and understandings of appropriate social behavior to create new social facts.²⁹ As a process, it works over time, changing beliefs about legitimate behavior through many stages of diffusion and internalization.³⁰ In this sense, a government has been persuaded when its decision-making elites have replaced a previous set of beliefs about human rights with a new set of principled ideas.

Coercion is “the threat or act by a sender government or governments to disrupt economic exchange with the target state, unless the target acquiesces to the articulated demand.”³¹

When they coerce, institutions can influence target governments' repressive behaviors by increasing the rewards of compliance or the costs of defection through material rewards and punishments.³² Coercion influences human rights behavior by changing actors' calculations of the price of adopting certain behaviors over others. Unlike persuasion, an actor can be coerced to comply with basic principles of human rights law and simultaneously hold preferences for repression, if the benefits of compliance are perceived to outweigh the costs. Moreover, coercion can influence human rights behaviors short of implementation. As the literatures on economic bargaining suggest, effective cases of coercion are often likely to end with threat of punishment rather than implementation. Compliance before sanction avoids the costs associated with sanctioning for both target and sender and is thus more efficient.³³ Threat is often enough.³⁴

Influencing Compliance

There are four main reasons to expect that persuasion, alone, is unlikely to provide strong incentives to change most repressive actors' behaviors. First, persuasion requires changing actors' preferences for repression, and these preferences are likely to be highly valued. Repression is often used as a strategy to gain or maintain political power or to accumulate wealth or redistribute resources. In 2003 alone, Amnesty International documented dozens of instances where ruling elites employed acts of terror to maintain power and suppress opposition, including targeted killings of political challengers and terrorizing voters. Repressive opponents, such as armed insurgent groups, competing elites, or low-ranking members of the civil or military services, are also documented to use repression, extracting concessions and side payments from a wide range of targeted populations.³⁵

In both cases, the gains from repression were likely to be highly valued and to be strongly preferred by the repressors. Strongly held preferences are likely to be harder to change than weakly held preferences.

Second, when persuasion occurs it is likely to be a slow acting form of influence, taking place over a long-time horizon. To persuade, an institution must mobilize informed advocates to convince repressive actors that their currently held beliefs and habits are no longer appropriate. However, beliefs rarely change over night, but are often sticky. This “perseverance effect” has been confirmed in a wide variety of settings: individuals frequently adhere strongly to their beliefs even after new and better information has been presented.³⁶

Moreover, when belief change does take place, it often happens in stages, as individuals pass through intermediate periods of acceptance and rejection of new information.³⁷ Persuasion takes time.

Third, persuaded actors may not be consistent across time. New leaders may come to power, and new opponent groups may form with preferences for repression. Successful persuasion of a government thus requires that each new repressive actor is persuaded to change their beliefs about the appropriateness of their behavior. Few repressive governments, however, are ruled consistently by the same elite or face the same set of repressive opponents for periods that are long enough to enact and achieve strong belief change. Leaders of repressive states are regularly overthrown or voted out of power, while domestic human rights opponents come and go.

Finally, persuasion requires repeated access to target repressors. Some repressive actors may be intimately involved in the decision-making processes of international institutions designed to influence human rights. Chief executives or their cabinet members and staff are among the most likely to participate in the repeated interactions organized through international institutions. Other repressive actors, however, are likely to be marginalized from participation in these institutions and remain isolated from active processes of norm inculcation. Armed insurgent groups contesting the government or vigilante civilians targeting ethnic minorities, for example, are not apt to be represented at the United Nations (UN) or to participate in the decision-making processes of most institutions.

Contrary to the belief that institutions can best influence without coercion, there are several reasons to expect that coercion is likely to provide stronger incentives against repression than persuasion under some conditions, and that coercion and persuasion may effectively influence human rights when they are supplied together. First, coercion is likely to be more effective than persuasion (alone) because it does not require changing actors' deeply held preferences for repression, but rather increases the costs of employing repression and the gains of adopting better human rights practices. A coerced actor can simultaneously hold preferences for human rights and choose to curb repressive behaviors in exchange for other forms of gains from international cooperation. They are likely to do so when those gains are more valuable than the benefits of repression. Reforms can be a side payment.

Second, coercion can take place in a much shorter time horizon than persuasion. If an institution supplies valuable goods under the condition that targeted repressors make human rights policy changes now or in the short term future, repressors are more likely to react in the short term to adopt new practices. Immanent sanctions on valuable goods provide strong incentives for reforms in the present rather than repressive behavior into the future.

Third, coercion can change a variety of different repressive actors' behaviors when they value the gains of cooperation more than the gains of repression. In fact, any domestic opponent to human rights with strong preferences for the goods achieved through cooperation can, under certain conditions, be coerced into supporting human rights reforms they would not otherwise select.³⁸

Moreover, coercive instruments that successfully institutionalize new benefits can influence the preferences of future leaders with incentives for repression. In principle, these instruments can do so under the condition that institutionalization of the coercive instrument has led to new gains, now perceived to be valuable by the incoming government, that are greater than existing incentives to use repression.³⁹

Fourth, coercion does not require direct and repeated access to target repressors. It only requires that target actors are informed of the coercion trade-off and value the benefits of international cooperation more than they value the gains from repression. No repeated institutional contact between the actors governing international institutions and the repressors they are trying to influence is, in principle, necessary. In practices, coercion and persuasion may take place simultaneously and are often compatible processes of influence.

Human Rights Agreements

The international human rights regime is championed by a growing number of treaties and instruments designed to protect identifiable groups, such as women and children, as well as to protect all people against particular government behaviors, such as torture. At the heart of this regime are the UN Charter (Article 55) and seven international agreements that define a set of global regulations. Almost all states in the world have ratified one or more of these instruments.

This architecture of international law was principally constructed to influence through persuasion: to identify and classify which rights are globally legitimate, to provide a forum for the exchange of information regarding violations, and to sway governments and violators that laws protecting human rights are appropriate constraints on the nation-state that should be respected. Over the years, the regime has proven increasingly competent in supplying the instruments necessary to collect and exchange information on human rights violations, and to disseminate that information on a global scale.⁴⁰

Despite this substantial capacity to classify and disseminate human rights norms and establish monitoring institutions, most agreements were not designed to influence through coercion, and those that were often fail to be effective: they remain quite soft.⁴¹

Most HRAs supply no formal enforcement mechanisms⁴² to provide or disrupt valuable exchange with a target state.⁴³ They offer no material rewards in exchange for better practices, and they cannot directly punish violators by withholding valuable goods.⁴⁴ At their best, most HRAs influence by mobilizing human rights advocates and supplying repressors with information and legitimating motivations to internalize new norms of appropriate behavior.

There are therefore good reasons to be skeptical that most HRAs directly or frequently persuade repressive actors to change their human rights behaviors, especially among those who value repression highly. HRA's supply strong tools of moral suasion but offer few valuable incentives for repressors to change their beliefs about appropriate behaviors. They identify and lobby target individuals and groups, but they are often limited to accessing repressors that consent to be targeted to receive information. The exchange of information, once it begins, usually takes place over many months, if not years, and repressive actors inside the targeted state may well have changed during this time. What is more, there is no single HRA effectively able to punish perpetrators of even the most egregious violations of human rights.⁴⁵

The best case study evidence to date supports the argument. Risse and colleagues show that influence through persuasion depends crucially on the establishment of sustainable networks of advocates among domestic and transnational actors; that persuasion happens through several stages over time; and that the inculcation of new norms among the worst abusers often requires some coercive processes of instrumental bargaining, at least in the beginning.⁴⁶

Because repressors value the gains from repression highly, they often use repressive acts to effectively outlaw or restrict domestic human rights mobilization.

All told, HRAs rarely create the conditions necessary for state compliance with human rights because they are soft: persuasion, alone, is a weak mechanism of influence that does not supply strong enough incentives or commitment instruments to outweigh defection.

H1: State commitment to HRAs does not systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors after commitment.⁴⁷

Preferential Trade Agreements

Trade liberalization is today regulated by multilateral institutions. At the heart of this system of liberalization is the 1947 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the WTO. This movement toward the globalization of trade has taken place in the context of regionalism, as a growing number of states commit to regulate trade through preferential agreements.⁴⁸

These institutions establish macroeconomic measures that prohibit or restrict access to national markets of products and services imported from other partners, and they prescribe legitimate trade actions and decision-making procedures that states should take to comply with their commitments. PTAs exist alongside the WTO agreements and their prescriptions for the liberalization of trade in goods and services are organized vertically, so that states achieve market liberalization at the national level, voluntarily.

PTAs were not principally designed to solve problems of human rights compliance. They are designed to resolve collective action dilemmas and internalize externalities that cross state borders. The instruments of preferential trade chiefly influence through coercion: they coordinate mutually beneficial rules of market access between states and limit defection through threats or acts to disrupt exchange with violating members. Not all PTAs are likely to supply the same degree of credible coercion; some may provide more valuable benefits and greater willingness to enforce the rules than others. All PTAs are nevertheless likely to supply some degree of valuable economic incentives (and thus the potential to change repressors' incentives to support human rights through threat to withdraw goods). Many supply mechanisms of persuasion coupled with coercion.

A growing number of PTAs provide member governments with a mandate to observe human rights (see Figure 2). These agreements fall into two main categories. In the first category are a great many PTAs that provide member governments with soft standards to manage their policy commitments (that is, agreement benefits are unconditional on member states' actions). PTAs do so by incorporating human rights principles and language into the trade contract, “affirming,” “recognizing,” or “declaring” member states' commitments to various human rights principles in the preamble of the contracts, or making reference to specific international human rights laws. The benefits of integration, however, are not conditional on the observation of these principles.

An example is useful, and there are many from which to choose. Article 6 of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Treaty articulates the “recognition, promotion and protection of human and people's rights in accordance with the provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights; accountability, economic justice and popular participation in development; [and] the recognition and observance of the rule of law”⁴⁹

These principles are soft because the agreement provides no active mechanism to sanction or to threaten sanctions against COMESA members that do not respect these rights. Indeed, recent acts of terror in member state Zimbabwe have been formally unobserved by the agreement.

These agreements supply similar human rights influence properties as most HRAs: a set of principled ideas legitimating appropriate and accepted behavior among a community of states. Because the standards are soft—agreement benefits are unconditional on human rights behaviors—this class of institution supplies no coercive mechanisms of influence. If these organizations influence human rights at all, they influence through persuasion, and one should now expect that they are unlikely to change most repressors human rights beliefs or practices.

H2: State commitment to PTAs supplying soft human rights standards does not systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors after commitment.

Other PTAs provide member governments with “harder” institutional channels to manage and enforce their policy commitments (that is, benefits that are in some way conditional on member states' actions). These PTAs do so by placing the language of human rights in an enforceable incentive structure designed to provide members with the economic and political benefits of various forms of market access. These benefits are supplied under conditions of compliance with the protection of human rights principles or laws identified in the agreement. Behavioral change is a side payment for market gains, enforced through threat (direct or tacit) to disrupt integration or exchange unless a trade partner complies with their human rights commitments specified in the contract. A list of PTAs offering standards, hard or soft, is available in the Appendix 1.

The Lomé and Cotonou Agreements are strong examples of these types of PTAs. Cotonou provides the new institutional structure for the European Community's (EC) largest financial and political framework for cooperation, offering nonreciprocal trade benefits for certain African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) states, including nearly unlimited entry to the EC market for a wide range of goods. The agreement, which replaced successive Lomé Agreements, commits “Parties [to] undertake to promote and protect all fundamental freedoms and human rights, be they civil and political, or economic, social and cultural”⁵⁰

These principles are supported through a political dialogue designed to share information, to cultivate mutual understanding, and to facilitate the formation of shared priorities, including those concerning the respect for human rights (Article 8). Obligations are binding on recipients. They are supported by a review mechanism established in the consultation procedures of Article 96, which require habitual assessments of national developments concerning human rights.⁵¹ Alongside the agreement are conditional financial protocols allocating resources available to eligible countries through the European Development Fund (EDF). When members are perceived to violate agreement terms, a variety of different actions can be taken to influence behavior. These include the threat or act of withdrawal of membership or financial protocols, as well as the enforcement of economic or political sanctions. Cotonou thus supplies strong elements of both coercion and persuasion.

This second category of agreement supplies coercion mechanisms of influence that most HRAs and all soft PTAs cannot supply. PTAs with hard standards can, under certain conditions, influence through coercion by changing repressive actors' costs and benefits of actualizing their preferences for repression. Consider again the abusive elite with strong preferences for repression. Where persuasion alone is likely to fail, hard standards can influence the problem of compliance without changing actors' preferences. They provide an economic motivation to promote human rights policy reforms that would not otherwise be implemented, and they do so in a relatively short time horizon. When institutionalized PTAs create new and valuable gains, hard agreements can also commit future elites with preferences for liberalization to human rights reforms they would not otherwise select. While influence through persuasion requires leveling a campaign to change a new leader's preferences for repression, influence through coercion requires only that the leader value the gains of integration more than the gains of repression. PTAs, moreover, may increase the costs of repression for any domestic actors that favor liberalization.

Hard PTAs are not a panacea for repression. They are likely to be much less effective in influencing armed opposition groups or governments under insurrection, where preferences for liberalization are low or absent among opponents. To be sure, not all leaders are likely to be influence by all agreements. Severely repressive elites that reap extensive benefits from repression that they value more than integration are apt to defect from agreements that offer only small gains or that require large-scale political upheaval. Moreover, target repressors that can secure an alternative supply of the goods achieved through cooperation without conditionality are likely to reject membership in PTAs that require human rights reforms. Exclusive of these conditions:

H3: State commitment to PTAs supplying hard human rights standards does systematically produce improvement in human rights behaviors after commitment.

Membership

States increasingly create and join hard PTAs, and for the past twenty years, repressive governments have been among their many members. In 2002 nearly 30 percent of all states in the international system belonged to a hard agreement of some kind. Figure 3 shows that 40 percent of all agreement members were reported by Amnesty International to employ frequent acts of repression—political imprisonment, execution and other forms of political murder, detention without trial, and other acts of terror. Sixty percent of all members were reported by Freedom House to repress civil liberties. In both cases, the percentage of repressive members has grown substantially over time.⁵²

Hafner-Burton⁵³

has studied the selection process for hard agreements more systematically, controlling for domestic political institutions, economic development, and social movement mobilization across the period 1976 to 2002. Multivariate analyses of membership selection show that repressors are no more or less likely than protectors to select agreements with hard standard. Violators join these agreements almost as often as protectors. Rather, selection is driven strongly by level of institutionalized democracy and economic development. Poor democratizing states in need of economic resource are most likely to select hard agreements. These states are often but not always repressive. Moreover, there is no systematic difference between repressive states' selection of hard compared to soft standards.

Influence

There is strong evidence that PTAs have influenced their repressive members' human rights behaviors by direct coercion—where contract obligations have been ceased with a target abuser, a set of demands for policy change have been issued, and new behaviors have consequently been adopted.⁵⁴

A refugee massacre in Rwanda after the genocide is one such case.

Rwanda was a nonreciprocal trade member of the EC under the Lomé IV Treaty, which contained a human rights clause guaranteeing member commitment toward the improvement of basic human rights as a fundamental condition of market access.⁵⁵

In reaction to the genocide in 1994, the EC halted Lomé benefits to the Rwandan government.⁵⁶ Although the agreement was in no way equipped to address the causes of genocide and remained inactive during the period of extreme violence, it became influential only in the postgenocide period. Lomé earmarked 22 million ECU for reconstruction under conditions that the new government respect basic human rights and operate under rule of law.⁵⁷

Before the first transfer of resources could take place, the Rwandan army evacuated a refugee camp, violating the rights of many people. In direct reaction, the Commission suspended payment and EC ministers appealed to the Rwandan government to investigate the massacre and to arrest and detain the perpetrators as a precondition for payment. Resistance by the government to impose sanctions on members of the army led to the unconditional withholding of funds until sanctions were implemented. In 1995 the government agreed to prosecute those responsible, and the Commission conditionally reinstated payments under Lomé.⁵⁸

Influence was direct and actively coercive.⁵⁹

In two similar cases, human rights reforms were initiated in both Togo and Fiji through direct coercive measures enacted under a hard PTA with the EU. In the case of Togo, following unsuccessful political consultations, the EC enacted Article 366a—the suspension clause of the Lomé IV Convention—in reaction to violation of democratic and human rights principles enshrined in the PTA, including serious irregularities in the application of political and civil rights.⁶⁰

Cooperation under Lomé was reinstated only after the government demonstrated significant steps had been take toward compliance with reforms identified by the EC, including the establishment of a new electoral code and new elections.⁶¹ Cooperation was similarly suspended in the case of Fiji after the overthrow of the democratically elected government and the repeal of the constitution. Threatening to impose sanctions and invoking the human rights clause under Cotonou (Article 96), the EC postponed financing of investment projects under the 9th EDF until political reforms were undertaken to secure democracy and respect for human rights.⁶²

Evidence also shows that PTAs have at times been influenced by threat of sanction without implementation. Pakistan is one such case. The Pakistani government has long had trade relations with Europe. The EC's generalized system of preferences (GSP) establishes protective labor conditions with Pakistan on the importation of certain industrial and agricultural products.⁶³

Respect for worker's rights was established as a condition for tariff preferences. In 1995 the Trades Union Confederation mobilized against the government's use of forced child labor, and the European Parliament requested an immediate investigation of the misconduct.⁶⁴ Although the European Commission deliberated a ban on imports to coerce new policies on child labor, it ultimately did not implement a ban. Rather, the Commission chose to pursue influence through the threat of a ban coupled with positive incentives for Pakistan's active participation in the International Labor Organization's (ILOs) program for the eradication of child labor (IPEC). During the proceedings, which continued into 1997, Pakistan introduced national legislation outlawing child labor as a direct response to the investigation, and subsequently supplied the Commission with regular information of the government's efforts to implement the new human rights policies, which remain problematic but are under reform.⁶⁵

Brandtner and Rosas (1999) identify a Commission statement that reveals the Community's strategy in this case:

Human rights reforms have similarly been initiated in the Comoros Islands and Niger under threat to enact measures supplied by a hard PTA. In both cases, suspension of market access under Lomé was threatened by the EC following military coups leading to human rights violations. Substantial reforms by each government to comply with the EC's demands were initiated and cooperation was conditionally reinstated during consultations in lieu of suspension.⁶⁷

Still other cases offer evidence that some PTAs influence through coercion coupled with persuasion. Slovakia is a strong case.⁶⁸

At the 1993 Copenhagen European Council, the EC adopted a number of political criteria for accession candidates, including “Human Rights and the Protection of Minorities.” Article 49 of the Treaty on the European Union established that accession must be approved by unanimous vote of the Council and an absolute majority of the Parliament, with the Opinion of the Commission playing an important role. Early on, the European Commission expressed the opinion that Slovakia did not qualify for accession negotiations, citing the government's failure to fulfill the democratic and human rights elements of the Copenhagen criteria, and in particular, respect for minorities.⁶⁹ Several precise violations were formally articulated over several years, including recommendations for changes in national laws and policies concerning the rights of the political opposition, limitations on the power of the executive, the activities of police and secret service, and repression of Hungarian and Roma minorities.⁷⁰

In the subsequent phases of negotiations, the Commission cites substantial improvements in respect for civil and political rights in Slovakia, including support for civil society organizations and protection of the rights of minorities.⁷¹

These improvements were required in order to be considered eligible for accession, giving Slovakia's rulers considerable incentives to change their domestic policies. In 1999 the Commission determined that Slovakia had taken the necessary steps to fulfill the basic Copenhagen political criteria, although the report identified further areas of human rights policy for reform.⁷² By 2003 the government had ratified all of the human rights legal instruments under the justice and home affairs acquis, and the Commission was of the opinion that Slovakia was continuing to meet the human rights requirements of accession and taking positive steps toward improvement.⁷³

Côte d'Ivoire's trading relationship with the United States demonstrates a similar process of influence through coercion, although influence has been limited and confined to workers' rights in the export sectors. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2000, which is an autonomous U.S. trade instrument signed into law as Title 1 of The Trade and Development Act of 2000, provides concrete market incentives for certain African states to liberalize their economies. The agreement aims to increase trade and investment in the region, while pressuring governments through the implementation of hard standards to promote the basic observance of human rights as a fundamental principle of trade, with specific attention to workers' rights. Côte d'Ivoire has been a candidate government since 2000, although the government (brought to power by military coup), was repeatedly denied trade benefits by the U.S. trade representative, “largely because of concerns related to rule of law, human rights, political pluralism, and economic reform.”⁷⁴

Although violations of civil and political rights were a serious problem in both rebel and government areas of control, the United States recently granted Côte d'Ivoire membership in exchange for several minor advances toward protection of workers' rights. Specifically, the government agreed to support a protocol initiated by the U.S. Chocolate Manufacturers Association to address forced and hazardous child labor in the cocoa sector, which is one of the largest agricultural sectors and, together with coffee, accounts for three quarters of the country's export earnings. The government also began drafting legislation to conform to ILO conventions, as requested by the U.S. trade representative.⁷⁵

Reforms, although limited, have taken place to gain trade membership. Côte d'Ivoire's exports under the agreement were valued at roughly $50 million in 2002, representing 13 percent of the country's total exports to the United States. While the United States used market access to press for reforms of labor rights, the EU opened consultations under Article 366a of Lomé to press for improvements in civil and political rights. The Commission recognizes that progress has been minimal but gradually improving.⁷⁶

These cases show clear instances where an agreement with hard standards influenced a repressive government to improve specific human rights practices after joining.⁷⁷

The cases show various forms of influence across various actors facing different kinds of human rights problems, in different regions of the world. They also show that there is significant variation across hard PTA design, and thus effectiveness in influencing compliance.⁷⁸ It is regrettably difficult, however, to collect evidence from all existing PTAs with hard standards. So many agreements are new, are in the process of being institutionalized, or have yet to take actions based on their human rights standards. Moreover, few agreements offer transparent reporting mechanisms that reveal their human rights actions and most do not yet supply assessments of their influence on standards. The cases selected here thus focus on agreements with Europe or the United States precisely because these PTAs offer some degree of transparency and substantial institutional histories of using standards. Nevertheless, several hard agreements now coordinate trade among states outside of Europe or North America. There is at present no strong case study evidence to either support or reject the proposition that these PTAs influence members' human rights practices, and further research into these new cases will be crucial in the next few years.

Moreover, human rights conditionality is by no means without its critics. Several lessons have emerged from theses cases that suggest limits to PTA capacity to shape human rights.⁷⁹

PTA influence is almost always limited to “first generation” human rights protecting civil and political liberties and securing freedom from torture and violent repression.⁸⁰ The United States is one of the only countries to prioritize workers' rights over the rights of all people, and in fact, to acknowledge reforms in workers rights while ignoring violations of civil and political rights, as in the case of the Côte D'Ivoire. Implementation of trade coercion measures has historically been selective, while influence is partial and sometimes sectoral.⁸¹ PTAs are not designed to transform governments from serious repressors into committed protectors, but rather to provide the incentives for small and often incremental changes in some policies. Sometimes this process should fail, as policy implementation requires a high degree of conceptual clarity in an agreement's human rights mandate, as well as the commitment by agreement shareholders that violation will be punished by reducing or ceasing trade agreement benefits.⁸² Failure on the part of member states to enforce the human rights conditions of the contract can effectively reduce the credibility of future threats of enforcement and weaken the organization's ability to tie the hands of local elites to accept human rights–related trade practices.⁸³

Data

This study follows an increasing number of human rights scholars in the use of data measuring political terror. The dependent variable, repression_it, offers information about murder, torture, or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; prolonged detention without charges; disappearance or clandestine detention; and other flagrant violations of the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person. I draw on two existing data sources. Poe and Tate offer data on 153 governments' reported levels of repression (or political terror) from 1976 to 1993.⁸⁴

Gibney offers repression data from 1980 to 2002 across a different sample of 141 states and territories.⁸⁵ Data were collected in both cases through content analysis of annual human rights reports issued by Amnesty International. I combine information from the two data sets to create repression indicators on a total sample of 176 states over twenty-six years, 1976 to 2001. The observed value of repression_it is ordinal, ranging across five levels of behavior.⁸⁶

The first set of independent variables, repression(1)_it−1, repression(2)_it−1, repression(3)_it−1, repression(4)_it−1, are binary indicators measuring a state's previous level of repression. They are included in place of the standard lagged dependent variable to account for dependence across the categories of the dependent variable over time.⁸⁷

It is important to control for three independent variables that capture elements of the domestic political context. First, democracy_it−1 measures Polity IVd regime characteristics, coded by Jaggers and Gurr. The well-known variable takes on values ranging from 10 (most democratic) to −10 (most autocratic).⁸⁸

Second, durability_it−1 counts the number of years since a state has undergone a structural regime transition, defined as a movement on the Polity scale of three points or more. Previous research has shown that state level of institutionalized democracy has an important effect on government respect for human rights—democracies are less likely to commit human rights violations than autocracies.⁸⁹ Regime transitions may also affect level of repression inside a state. It is thus important to control for domestic political institutions to isolate the influence of international institutions. Consistent with the literature, I expect the estimates on democracy_it−1 and durability_it−1 to be negative. Third, density_it−1 measures state population density (per kilometer), collected by the World Bank. Scholars are concerned that population pressure can exacerbate resource scarcity and increase the likelihood that a government will use repression to control civil violence.⁹⁰

It is equally important to control for three independent variables that capture elements of the domestic economy. trade_it−1 and investment_it−1 control for the possible effects that international financial and market transactions may have on human rights, independent from the international economic institutions. Past studies provide evidence that global economic flows shape government repression of human rights, either encouraging governments to improve protection of human rights, or promoting repression.⁹¹

I draw on data from the World Bank in order to measure these flows in the broadest sense possible. trade_it−1 measures the sum of a state's total exports and imports of goods and services measured as a share of gross domestic product. investment_it−1 measures the sum of the absolute values of inflows and outflows of foreign direct investment recorded in the balance of payments financial account.⁹² The indicator is calculated as a ratio to gross domestic product (GDP) converted to international dollars using purchasing power parities.⁹³

Finally, pcgdp_it−1 measures GDP per capita in constant US dollars. Many studies on human rights practices examine the effects of economic development. Mitchell and McCormick proffer the “simple poverty thesis,” a commonly accepted view that lack of economic resources creates fertile ground for political conflict, in many cases prompting governments to resort to political repression.⁹⁴

In an advanced economy where people are likely to have fewer grievances, political stability is often achieved more easily, reducing the likelihood of human rights violations.⁹⁵ All three measures are logged in order to reduce the skew of their distributions. I expect the estimate of pcgdp_it−1 to be negative.

I analyze the effects of state commitment to HRAs and PTAs by introducing three core variables. In order to test Hypothesis 1, I consider state commitment to implement human rights agreements, hras_it−1. Specifically, I consider ratification, succession, and accession to two treaties designed to influence political terror and civil rights, and thus directly related to the dependent variable: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture. hras_it−1. is an ordinal variable ranging from 0 to 2, derived from the total number of the two treaties that a state i has ratified into national law in time t.⁹⁶

Next, I consider state commitment to trade through PTAs offering human rights standards. Coding state membership in PTAs is not as straightforward as coding state ratification of human rights law. Of the more than 200 regional agreements today in effect, many states belong to several agreements simultaneously. In contrast to international human rights law where all states in the international system are eligible to join, PTAs also limit potential membership to a core economic region of states. All states are thus not eligible to belong to all agreements, and all PTAs do not incorporate human rights standards. Consequently, I test Hypotheses 2 and 3 using two binary measures of state membership in PTAs with human rights standards.⁹⁷

ptasoft_it−1 measures state membership with PTAs supplying soft standards: state i in year t takes on a value of 1 if that state belongs to any soft PTA. ptahard_it−1 measures state membership with PTAs supplying hard standards: state i in year t takes on a value of 1 if that state belongs to any hard PTA.

I coded each policy outcome using content analysis of all PTA formal contracts, including treaties, protocols, and other forms of amendments. For each agreement, I assigned yearly values measuring membership of all states in the international system, the explicit⁹⁸

adoption of human rights language and principles, and whether the benefits accorded by the contract formally depend on those principles (benefits can be withheld for violation). I then transformed the data into state-years and assigned a single binary value for each outcome. Finally, e_it is a stochastic error term.

Statistical Results

Column (1) of Table 2 reports ordered logit estimates of the parameters in equation (1). Although I propose several unidirectional hypotheses, I report two-tailed test statistics for all parameters. State commitments to comply with HRAs and soft PTAs do not systematically lead to decreasing repressive behavior in the following year. Quite the contrary, hras_it−1 and ptasoft_it−1 have no significant effects on the likelihood of repression.⁹⁹

When PTAs contract hard human rights standards, by contrast, member states are systematically more likely to decrease repression.

I compute predicted probabilities of repression_it to interpret these results. Table 3 displays the probabilities, given Model (1), that a state employing repression in time 1 will employ different levels of repression in time 2. For example, the first two rows presents the probabilities that a state with a repression_it level of 5—an extreme abuser—will remain an extreme abuser or reform behaviors (to be a level 4, 3, 2, or 1) in the following year. The first of these rows shows probabilities calculated when a state belongs to no hard PTAs, while the second shows probabilities calculated when a state belongs to at least one hard agreement, all else at the mean.¹⁰⁰

The probabilities show quite simply that states belonging to hard PTAs have a lower probability of repressing human rights than states without memberships. A level 4 abuser, for example, is 6 percent more likely to reduce repression in the following year if they belong to a hard agreement, and 2 percent less likely to backslide into more abuse. Repression, however, is sticky, and changes are partial rather than absolute. States are likely to hold to status quo behaviors over time, and when they do reform, repressive states are most likely to move to the next category of repression_it (from a 3 to a 2), rather than to skip categories (from a 5 to a 1).

Further Considerations

It is important to consider the robustness of the dependent variable by considering different samples and sources. To this end, I offer two additional measures of the dependent variable and reestimate ordered logit models in columns (2) and (3) of Table 2. impute_it imputes missing values of repression_it for 114 state-years during which Amnesty International did not produce annual reports. This variable is a robustness check against possible bias in Amnesty International's selection of state-years to report. Data were imputed for missing years on repression data coded from the U.S. State Department annual reports of political terror and several partisan variables in order to control for possible bias from the State Department—such as UN General Assembly voting agreement with the United States.¹⁰¹

impute_it offers information on 181 states during the period 1976–2002.

civilliberty_it offers information about repression of civil rights collected annually by Freedom House. Civil liberties include the freedom of expression, assembly, association, education, and religion, protected by an equitable system of rule of law, as well as freedom from political terror. Each country is assigned a value ranging across seven levels of behavior, from strong protection to extreme repression. The variable offers information from 1972 to 2001, on a total sample of 185 states.¹⁰²

The substantive findings are robust across both alternative measures: hard PTAs encourage better human rights practices, while soft agreements and HRAs do not exert a strong influence on behavior.

Table 4 offers three additional robustness checks. Column (1) tests for a European influence. Only 12 percent of states belonging to a hard PTA do not also belong to trade agreements with the EU, and the best information about the ways in which hard agreements influence human rights comes from EU case studies. It is thus possible that PTA influence is a European phenomenon rather than a global one. States with stronger institutionalized trade ties to the EU may be more likely than states with weak ties or with no ties to be influenced by hard PTAs. The limitations of the statistical data make it impossible to analyze the effects of these agreements past 2002, and several PTAs have adopted some measure of hard standards since this time. However, I control for this possibility to the best extent possible by including a new variable. eu_it−1 measures the degree of trade integration between a state i in year t and the EU, coded by the number of shared PTAs. The findings show that the influence of hard PTAs is not driven by trade integration with the EU alone, although the EU is certainly the largest supplier.

Column (2) controls for fixed-time effects, which do not change the substantive results for hard PTAs. Fixed-time effects are useful because they allow one to consider the possibility that time is driving the result; that a norm of human rights has emerged and developed and spread during the past thirty years that accounts for why states more and more sign contracts with human rights standards and implement better practices. The results, however, show us that the institutional effects are not simply time-dependent. Controlling for every year in the sample, hard PTAs have the expected effect.¹⁰³

Finally, column (3) considers the issue of economic leverage. PTAs influence because they coerce actors into adopting behaviors they might not otherwise adopt, providing economic incentives to actors that value them. Testing economic leverage directly, however, proves to be a difficult task. As a preliminary step, I include two interaction terms between ptahard_it−1 and the GDP and population variables, under the logic that the gains from integration are likely to be more significant for smaller and poorer nations.¹⁰⁴

The interaction between hard standards and GDP, surprisingly, is negative. The results, however, are rather hard to interpret because of extremely high collinearity (above 0.95) between the interaction variable and hard standards, clearly inflating the standard errors. The interaction with population has no clear or significant effect. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to derive better measures of economic leverage, the issue is of clear importance to research on PTA influence and deserves serious further consideration.¹⁰⁵