1. Introduction
Over the past half-century, a large body of international human rights law has evolved, covering
a wide range of issues such as the prevention of torture and genocide, protection of children’s rights,
the eradication of discrimination against women and minorities, and the defense of a variety of other
rights. The United Nations and its agencies alone have created over eighty original human rights
conventions and declarations since 1948. Over 4,000 bilateral, regional, and multilateral human
rights treaties and international agreements have been created since the end of World War II (UN
Treaty Series 2004). Yet human rights problems remain rampant in many parts of the world.
Torture ranges from being common to widespread in one in four countries (Hathaway 2002, 2034-
36); an estimated 246 million of the world’s 1.8 billion children are employed (ILO 2004a); nearly
two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women and women’s earnings continue to be significantly
lower than men’s in most parts of the world (UN 2000); and much of the world’s population
possesses no or minimal political rights and/or civil liberties.
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Is encouraging participation in human rights agreements – cited by the UN as a central strategy
for improving human rights across the globe (UN 2002, 2-3) – an effective means of accomplishing
this task? Would respect for human rights be better if more countries committed to more human
rights agreements – or worse if fewer did? To answer these questions, we must also understand
why states commit to these agreements in the first place. As other scholars have noted, the very
existence of human rights regimes poses several puzzles. First, unlike most other issues addressed
by international law, human rights problems generally do not create cross-national externalities
(Moravcsik 2000, 217). Why would the leaders and citizens of one state be concerned about be-
havior of another state that has no impact on them? Second, human rights agreements address
the relationship between governments and their citizens (Hathaway 2003, 1823). Why would states
willingly commit to international scrutiny an area that has historically been regarded as falling
clearly within the sole jurisdiction of the nation-state? Finally, human rights regimes rarely carry
their own ex ante costs for entry or ex post costs for non-compliance. Because they are univer-
salistic in aspiration (Wotipka and Ramirez 2003), human rights agreements seldom have selective
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Freedom House classifies 35% of the world’s population as living in countries that are completely “not free”
(Freedom House 2003).
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Convention