Courtney Hillebrecht

The power of human rights tribunals: : Compliance with the European Court of Human Rights and domestic policy change

When international human rights tribunals like the European Court of Human Rights find states responsible for human rights abuses, they ask governments to pay reparation to the victims, engage in symbolic measures, and enact the policy changes necessary to ensure that the violations do not recur. This article considers the conditions under which states comply with these rulings, especially when the tribunals are unable and often unwilling to provide strict enforcement. This article extends current theories about the domestic politics of compliance with international human rights law to the case of the European Court of Human Rights. This article analyzes a new, hand-coded data set on states’ compliance with over 1000 discrete obligations handed down by the European Court of Human Rights that ask states to change their human rights policies. The results of these analyses suggest that robust domestic institutions, particularly executive constraints, are the key to compliance with the European Court of Human Rights. When domestic institutions enforce the Court’s rulings, the results can be significant changes in states’ human rights policies and practices.

A neglected nexus: Human rights and public perceptions

ABSTRACT Although human rights scholars have extensively focused on the origins of human rights, research is underdeveloped that attends to the origins of public perceptions of human rights. We expand our knowledge of state-level and individual-level determinants of human rights perceptions. Unlike prior work that ignores within-country variation, we take advantage of state-level variation within Mexico to explore the extent to which human rights perceptions are influenced by context. Specifically, we examine whether the publics human rights perceptions are influenced by violence levels and human rights organizational activities at the state level. Additionally, we assess whether the publics human rights perceptions are related to trust in domestic institutions and security forces and whether sharing partisan ties with the current administration is a contributing factor. Finally, we assess how education levels moderate human rights perceptions. Our results show that human rights perceptions are linked to both state-level and individual-level factors.

The Deterrent Effects of the International Criminal Court: Evidence from Libya

ABSTRACT The International Criminal Court (ICC) was designed to try the worst war criminals for crimes against humanity, genocide, and other instances of mass human suffering. By providing a permanent, international mechanism to hold perpetrators of mass human rights abuse accountable, the ICC is also meant to be a deterrent—to prevent potential genocidaires from committing systematic human rights abuses in the first place. But what if the effect is actually quite the opposite? While advocates of international justice have made conjectures about the effect of the ICC on stopping human rights abuses, the existing scholarship does not empirically test assumptions about the relationship between international criminal justice and violence. This article outlines the causal mechanisms by which the ICC could affect ongoing violence and tests these assumptions using event count models of the relationship between the ICC and the level of violence against civilians in Libya during the 2011 crisis. These analyses suggest that the ICC’s involvement in conflict does have a dampening effect on the level of mass atrocities committed. The results also call for a broad and sustained research agenda on the effect of international accountability efforts on ongoing violence.

Institutional change and the Inter-American Human Rights System

ABSTRACT This article introduces the special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights on institutional change in the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS). In doing so, it identifies the main concepts and ideas central to understanding the institutional change the IAHRS has experienced over the past six decades. Since the adoption of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man by the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948, the IAHRS has undergone a series of institutional changes and transformations that have affected and been affected by the System’s normative leanings, rules of procedure and institutional design, as well as by the position of the System within the broader landscape of the Americas. This special issue explores these changes from a variety of angles, including the process of change in historical context, normative and legal changes in the Inter-American Court’s jurisprudence, and the changing relationship between the IAHRS and other regional and international human rights institutions. This special issue features contributions and insights from the disciplines of history, law, and political science, among others.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Effects of Overlapping Institutions: A Preliminary Study

While much of the scholarly literature on the effects of international human rights institutions looks at the impact of one institution or mechanism in isolation, the human rights landscape is actually quite dense, being comprised of regional and international treaties and enforcement mechanisms. States face multiple and sometimes competing demands from these various human rights institutions. In this chapter, Hillebrecht addresses the interconnectivity of this human rights framework by focusing on the relationship between the Inter-American and United Nations (UN) human rights systems, the recommendations they issue and the ways in which states implement and comply with these mandates using the examples of Uruguay, Brazil and Mexico.