(Previously titled "Confronting a Repressive Regime: Individual Petitions in the Human Rights Committee")
Best Graduate Student Paper, Law and Courts Section, American Political Science Association 2022
An established body of scholarship analyzes why states participate in international human rights institutions and the effect of this participation on compliance. These bodies by design also invite non-state actors to participate, accepting on-the-ground information on state human rights practices, which can improve compliance. Bureaucratic data offer exciting opportunities to understand these dynamics and processes within institutions like the United Nations. In this chapter, the author examines the UN treaty body system, specifically the individual petition mechanism, in which victims of human rights abuse and their representatives can file complaints against governments. The author details their data collection of petitions against repressive governments in the Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The author shows the barriers to participation that non-state actors face in global governance — and how they can be overcome — and suggests several possible state responses, including improved compliance.
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Under review
How does institutional design affect non-state actors' preference for regional and global organizations? While existing research highlights the importance of international organizations' activity, it often treats civil society actors as exogenous and their involvement as given. In contrast, our approach considers these actors as strategic decision-makers, choosing where to engage based on the costs and benefits associated with each IO's institutional design. Focusing on the human rights regime, where non-state actors can submit complaints to multiple fora (but not simultaneously), we compare the Inter-American System of Human Rights and the UN human rights treaty system using novel individual petition data. Our findings show that when actors have the ability to receive a legally binding decision, petitions increase in such organizations and decrease in alternative ones. In the absence of Court jurisdiction, UN bodies become a more attractive organization for individual petitioners given the decreased time until a decision.
Presented at: PEIO 2024, ISA 2024, APSA 2023
How do institutional design changes and expanded access affect international organizations? We present a theory of institutional flexibility in which entrepreneurial actors participate in international organizations reflecting two structural conditions: (1) emerging crises and (2) exiting fora for these issues. Flexible international institutions can evolve to reflect these changing conditions when actors explore whether new institutions can help them achieve favorable outcomes. We apply this theory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which expanded access to victims of human rights abuse twenty-one years after treaty adopted. We argue that this expanded access altered the topics considered by the organization in unanticipated ways, yet is still in line with the intention and purpose of the institution. We find support for this argument using a variety of qualitative and quantitative evidence, including negotiation archives, ratification patterns, text analysis of Committee on the Rights of the Child documents, and interviews with key actors including former and current Committee expert members, civil society organizations, and lawyers representing victims before the Committee. This research speaks to literatures in international relations regarding institutional design and change, regime complexity, and non-state actor access.
Presented at: ISA 2025, PEIO 2025, and Biennial Conference on International Law and the Social Sciences (American Society of International Law), APSA 2024