Political Repression. Linda Camp Keith

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СКАЧАТЬ decreased state repression of personal integrity rights, torture, and civil and political rights. Simmons extends Landman’s work and finds that participation in the ICCPR, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Children’s Convention are associated with the provision of several related rights. In the case of the CAT and the ICCPR in regard to fair trials she finds that the influence is limited to a narrow set of circumstances. For example, the impact of the CAT is conditioned on the strong rule of law. In most empirical studies of compliance, the theoretical mechanisms (for example, cost/benefit calculations and power relationships) are merely assumed rather than directly tested in the models. Kelley’s (2007) work on bilateral nonsurrender agreements represents a significant exception and takes advantage of a unique opportunity to test particular costs that a state could not have anticipated when it became a party to the Rome Statute. Contrary to realist expectations, she finds that approximately half of the countries pressured by the United States went against their own self-interest and resisted the pressure, incurring diplomatic and sometimes economic costs. She does find some evidence to support realist assumptions in that states that have Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) status with the United States, poor states, and members of the “Iraq coalition of the willing” were more likely to sign nonsurrender agreements.

      We find another notable exception within the asylum literature. A growing body of research has examined the United States’ obligations under the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and under the CAT to respect the norm of nonrefoulement.¹ Most of these empirical studies have demonstrated that U.S. foreign policy interests (security and trade relationships) and domestic policy interests (economic and national security concerns) influence decisions on who receives a grant of asylum in the United States (Rosenblum and Salehyan 2004; Salehyan and Rosenblum 2008; Rottman, Fariss, and Poe 2009; Keith and Holmes 2009). Overall, the weak association of human rights with treaty commitment supports realist expectations. However, most of these studies do not specifically operationalize and test the underlying assumptions that would predict no effect; thus our confidence in this conclusion is rather weak. Moreover, Kelley’s findings and those in the asylum literature, which account more directly for realist and rationalist assumptions, suggest that interests may not matter as much as the realists think; and, indeed, their analyses demonstrate that norms and domestic political contexts also matter.

      Assumptions of the domestic institutions approach have received much more specific empirical attention than those of realist and rationalist theory; presumably because scholars can more readily observe and more directly measure domestic institutional contexts than cost/benefit calculations or the diffusion of norms. Several studies have examined the conditional or interactive effect of democratic regimes on treaty compliance. When Hathaway (2002) limited her analysis to democratic regimes she continued to find no effect of the ICCPR and negative effects of the CAT on human rights behavior; but she did find that participation in the Genocide Convention, CEDAW, and the ICCPR’s Optional Protocol produces a significant positive effect on related human rights. Neumayer (2005) examines whether the impact of ratification is conditional upon regime type, and finds that in pure autocracies, ratification of the CAT and the ICCPR is associated with worse human rights practices, but that ratification has a “more and more beneficial effect” as democracy strengthens.² Landman (2005) conceptualizes and models ratification as a function of the underlying processes of democratization, economic development, and global interdependence, which he finds influence human rights moderately but consistently across the various treaties that constitute the international human rights regime. It is difficult to separate out the influence of democratic institutions in his human rights analysis, although we do know that the relative weight of democratization is likely to be rather small because its effect on ratification is minor relative to that of other factors. As reported above, Powell and Staton’s (2009) study of the CAT makes a significant contribution by moving our attention to the domestic legal system. They find that as the effectiveness of the judiciary increases, the joint probability of ratifying the CAT in full and then violating the treaty decreases; however, they find only mixed evidence that the joint probability of not ratifying and torturing increases with an effective judiciary in place. Kelley (2007) also demonstrates that states with a stronger domestic commitment to the rule of law are less likely to violate their treaty commitment by signing a nonsurrender agreement.

      Finally, if we broaden the scope of compliance to include the asylum literature, Salehyan and Rosenblum (2008) make a significant contribution, demonstrating that public and media attention to immigration and asylum issues increases the impact of humanitarian concerns in U.S. asylum outcomes. However, their findings in regard to congressional influence on human rights concerns in asylum outcomes are less encouraging, as the effect is contingent upon partisan politics and whether congressional hearings are framed in terms of immigration enforcement, which reduces the humanitarian dimension of the outcomes, or in terms of refugee and asylum issues, which increases the importance of the humanitarian dimension. Overall, the literature clearly demonstrates that domestic institutions and politics influence a state’s compliance with its treaty obligations, and that the influence of democratic institutions extends beyond the traditional electoral components to the judiciary and the rule of law.

      Measuring norms is probably the most difficult task that empiricists face in testing normative approaches, and thus most empirical studies of compliance have examined surrogate indicators. Powell and Staton (2008) test regional and global norms, as indicated by past rates of torture, in their CAT models; however, they find little evidence that norms influence state torture practices. Kelley’s (2007) study of bilateral nonsurrender agreements provides the best opportunity to examine the influence of norms on state values. She finds that even while controlling for a significant number of realist assumptions, states that have demonstrated a prior normative affinity for the International Criminal Court (ICC) are less likely to sign nonsurrender agreements; however, she does not find that human rights norms influence signing of the nonsurrender agreements. Even though the asylum literature has consistently demonstrated that security and material interests strongly influence U.S. asylum decisions, these studies have also consistently demonstrated that humanitarian norms (especially human rights conditions) do influence U.S. compliance with its commitments under international law (Rosenblum and Salehyan 2004; Salehyan and Rosenblum 2008; Rottman, Fariss, and Poe 2009; Keith and Holmes 2009). The presence of transnational networks or civil society pressure (typically measured as the number of INGOs in which citizens have membership) is much easier to measure than the presence of norms; however, the direct link between treaty ratification and civil society pressure is not typically tested in human rights models. Both Hafner-Burton and Tsutsui (2005) and Powell and Staton (2008) find that as the number of INGOs to which citizens belong increases, so does the level of protection of human rights. Neumayer (2005) provides the most rigorous analysis, examining specifically the effect of treaty commitment on human rights behavior, conditioned upon the strength of civil society organizations. His results are mixed: he does find that the stronger the state’s participation in INGOs, the greater the beneficial effect of ratification of the CAT on human rights behavior; however, the results do not hold for ICCPR ratification. He also finds mixed results in regard to regional treaties.

      For example, ratification of the Inter-American torture convention with INGO participation is beneficial, but the effect does not hold for the European torture convention. Overall, the observable effect of norm diffusion is weak and inconsistent at best. The evidence of a strong positive influence by NGOs on states’ human rights practices is more convincing; however, we must keep in mind that the civil society link through treaty ratification is not directly demonstrated except in Neumayer’s work. In the following chapters I continue to explore the role of norms diffusion and treaty ratification in regard to state commitment to constitutional freedoms and subsequent state rights behavior.

       Moving the Literature Forward

      In this book I seek to build upon this substantial body of human rights literature, examining the core assumptions of multiple subfields in political science through the organizing concepts of opportunity and willingness, arguing that state actors’ choice to employ various tools of repression is shaped factors based СКАЧАТЬ