Past studies have made major contributions to the knowledge about the eectiveness of IHRT. Key causal variables were identied and theoretical expectations about the dif-fering compliance patterns between democracies and non-democracies were empirically conrmed.
Yet, empirical research so far relied on aggregate indicators of repression by employing the dataset of the Political Terror Scales (PTS) that measures government respect for human rights. This repression index summarises data on disappearances, political murder, torture and political prisoners into one aggregate indicator of the physical-integrity-rights situation in a given country and year. Such an operationalisation of HR violations is not appropriate if one investigates compliance with a specic IHRT like CAT that prohibits torture, but in fact does not promote a ban on killings or disappearances.
Hathaway (2002) conducted the only study that explicitly used torture records to assess compliance with CAT. However, her analysis was criticised by Goodman and Jinks (2003), who argued that governments could easily substitute repressive tactics if an IHRT like CAT forced them to stop torture. Hence, a simultaneous control of the other subsets of PIR violations, i.e. killings, disappearances and imprisonments, ought to be undertaken. Liese (2006) conducted a comparative qualitative analysis on the eects of CAT on the national HR situation and found evidence for strategic government choices.
Namely, torture may be substituted with disappearances. Also repressive governments tend to restrict the activities of domestic nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), who are determined to monitor national compliance with a ratied IHRT (ibid.).
Besides the PTS dataset and several qualitative studies, a new global research project on government respect for HR was introduced by Cingranelli and Richards (2007) in the late 1990's. This dataset oers disaggregate measures of physical-integrity-rights violations as well as other political and civil rights (CIRI dataset). The present study seeks to reinvestigate compliance with CAT using the CIRI dataset. I will explicitly employ the CIRI measure of torture records, while simultaneously controlling for substitution eects in terms of personal-integrity-rights violations. Furthermore, this analysis examines the likelihood of side eects from a legal CAT commitment that may arise if political or societal claims against the government for the right not to be tortured are raised in the aftermath of CAT ratication. Those side eects would occur if a government restricted societal activism in terms of free speech and press, as well as free assembly and association.
Additionally, the present analysis also oers a robustness test of past research by em-pirically testing theoretical expectations on patterns of compliance with CAT on a new dataset. This approach does not only compare the explanatory power of the PTS and CIRI datasets. Thanks to the global but disaggregate measures of government respect for HR from the CIRI dataset, the present study is also able to investigate large scale trends in the eects of an IHRT on HR abuse with regard to dierent subsets of human rights.
Model and Hypotheses
Chapter Outline:
The following chapter aims at developing a theoretical model of the eect of ratication and membership in the United Nations Convention against Torture on a government's human rights practice by relying on theoretical arguments introduced in Chapter 3. The theoretical discussion takes account for previous ndings in research on the eects of international human rights law. It presents the approach, underlying assumptions and causal mechanisms in order to deduce the hypotheses that will empirically be tested in Chapter 6.
International human rights law aims at improving and enhancing respect for human rights in the world. But does it have the desired eects on the state practice of repressive governments?
I argue that the ratication of CAT and state membership in this human rights treaty may trigger various short- and long-term reactions of governments, and may therefore account for some variation in global human rights conditions. Specically, I expect that governmental reactions to the eect of CAT do highly depend on the specic domestic situation with respect to the actual level of torture, the degree of autocracy and the activities on part of the political opposition or non-governmental actors in a given country. My theoretical model proposes that societal dynamics connected with the ratication of and membership to CAT may stimulate incentives for governments to alter repressive strategies and to substitute dierent forms of human rights violations with one another.
In order to unfold my theoretical argument, I will rst present the assumptions that guide my analysis. Subsequently, I will address several fundamental questions. I will be discussing, why governments violate the personal integrity right of freedom from torture. A model developed by Most and Starr (1989) and Poe (2004) will be adopted.
Then I am going to propose assumptions about the incentives to commit to the binding law of CAT, specically in the case of ruling governments that are torture-prone. In a further step, I will derive my expectations about the eect of CAT membership on the use and level of torture in the state parties. In a nal step I will address the question
of policy substitutability with reference to other forms of human rights violations dif-ferent from torture. Here, I will put forward hypotheses, in how far CAT ratication and membership may yield violations of other personal-integrity and political rights by repression-prone governments. This chapter concludes with a short discussion of possible alternative explanations.