Forthcoming at The Review of International Organizations
Non-state actors filing human rights complaints can often choose between international organizations. How does institution design shape these choices? We consider strategic forum shopping, arguing that individuals and NGOs select venues based on two key institutional features: whether decisions are legally binding and how long decisions take. We test this argument using original data on over 3,400 petitions filed in the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) and the UN Human Rights Committee (CCPR) over a period of forty years (1980-2020). We find that when states recognize the jurisdiction of an international court, making legally binding decisions possible, petitions to the IAHRS increase and petitions to the CCPR decrease. The two features trade off differently across actor types: NGOs are willing to tolerate lengthy processes in exchange for the prospect of binding, precedent-setting decisions, while individual victims are more sensitive to decision time and prefer the faster UN system. These findings show that overlapping institutions produce systematic sorting with important implications for the design, resilience, and enforcement capacity of the international human rights regime.
Recent scholarship in international relations has shown that nonstate actors’ access to international institutions has expanded, including for victims of human rights abuse. Yet, although children are protected by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and are considered ideal victims, they face significant barriers to justice. In 2011, children gained direct access to submit petitions to the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Who are these children, and what do they petition about? We introduce novel data on children’s petitions, including country targets, topics, ages, legal representation, and decisions. We find that migration is a dominant topic of petitions and that young children are unlikely to be the authors of petitions. In contrast to scholarship for other treaty bodies, we also find that children are overwhelmingly accompanied by lawyers and family members in the Committee on the Rights of the Child. This article centers children themselves as active participants in international governance and provides meaningful insights into both academic and policy debates over children’s agency and nonstate access to international institutions.
Best Graduate Student Paper, Law and Courts Section, American Political Science Association 2022
Who files petitions against repressive regimes in the United Nations? Victims of human rights abuse face high personal costs of participation, including retaliation from the government against whom they are filing a complaint. There is also a significant information barrier. Despite these costs, several hundred petitions (or complaints) have been filed against repressive governments in just one United Nations treaty body. I frame filing international petitions as a form of antiregime mobilization; if mistreated, political individuals and organizations file petitions as a part of their broader mobilization efforts to improve human rights. This article introduces individual-level data of individuals who file complaints in the United Nations. I find there are two main categories of petitioners: (1) individuals with prior political involvement and (2) individuals represented by civil society organizations. This dataset includes identities of individuals, involvement of legal representation, specific rights under contestation, and other identifying individual characteristics. These data on individuals who overcome high costs help improve our understanding of broader processes of mobilization, both domestic and international.
Can individual participation in international legal institutions affect state behavior? Much of the existing literature believes that international law has a limited effect in the countries where it’s needed the most, especially in the absence of enforcement mechanisms. Focused on repressive regimes, this paper analyzes petitions (complaints) filed by victims of human rights abuse in United Nations human rights treaty bodies. As a form of naming and shaming, I theorize that violation decisions– in which a monitoring body confirms a treaty violation– may improve human rights when paired with civil society organizations that publicize the decisions. Leveraging a new dataset, I find that governments improve respect for the most severe abuses involving bodily harm immediately after violation decisions. In support of the theory, these short-lived effects are driven by petitions where civil society actors are listed as representation. This work improves our understanding of the role of non-state actors in global politics and compliance with international institutions. International organizations can, under certain conditions, provide information on non-compliance that sufficiently pressures governments to change domestic practices and decrease repression.
The growing literature explaining why repressive regimes ratify human rights treaties fails to explain why some regimes take the additional step to delegate authority to their people to file international legal complaints while others do not. I examine individual petition mechanisms in the United Nations which allow individuals to file complaints to an overseeing treaty body. I argue that repressive regimes face international incentives to signal their commitment to the European Union, a global power with a strong and continued interest in the global human rights regime. Repressive regimes, however, only ratify agreements when they perceive low domestic costs with little institutional constraints on the executive. In support of my theory, I find that repressive regimes are more likely to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ Optional Protocol allowing individual petitions when they are trade dependent on the EU while facing lesser institutional constraints, both legislative and judicial. The results are similar to explaining treaty ratification, but the interaction is substantively larger for OP ratification among repressive countries, highlighting the increased costs repressive leaders face to allowing individual petitions. Individual standing in the overseeing body of the ICCPR is one example of non-state actor access in international institutions, which is an important component of understanding institutional design and compliance.
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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Presented at: ISA 2025, PEIO 2025, and Biennial Conference on International Law and the Social Sciences (American Society of International Law), APSA 2024
Presented at: APSA 2025
Presented at: EPSS 2026, APSA 2026
Presented at: SERN Fall 2025, OPSC Fall 2025