Committed to Rights: Volume 1
UN Human Rights Treaties and Legal Paths for Commitment and Compliance

How states commit to UN human rights treaties, not only whether they do so, is crucial to improving human rights.

Audrey L. Comstock (Author)

9781108821582, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 April 2023

241 pages
23 x 15 x 1.5 cm, 0.351 kg

'Comstock's [work] provides the international relations and international law literatures with a clear and important takeaway: the different legal pathways states take to commit to human rights treaties matter. The questions raised about the selection into commitment types are fruitful topics for future research to complement this book's bold emphasis on expanding scholarship's view of treaty commitment and its impact on compliance. This work will have a broad impact on the scholarship of international law, human rights, and compliance.' Rachel J. Schoner, Law and Politics Book Review

International treaties are the primary means for codifying global human rights standards. However, nation-states are able to make their own choices in how to legally commit to human rights treaties. A state commits to a treaty through four commitment acts: signature, ratification, accession, and succession. These acts signify diverging legal paths with distinct contexts and mechanisms for rights change reflecting legalization, negotiation, sovereignty, and domestic constraints. How a state moves through these actions determines how, when, and to what extent it will comply with the human rights treaties it commits to. Using legal, archival, and quantitative analysis this important book shows that disentangling legal paths to commitment reveals distinct and significant compliance outcomes. Legal context matters for human rights and has important implications for the conceptualization of treaty commitment, the consideration of non-binding commitment, and an optimistic outlook for the impact of human rights treaties.

1. Introduction
2. On ratification: rethinking a ratification-centered approach to international law
3. Legal paths for human rights treaty commitment and compliance
4. Signature: a first step in a two-step commitment process
5. Accession: late commitment and treaty negotiations
6. Succession: new states, old laws, and legitimacy
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], Political control & freedoms [JPV], Politics & government [JP], Society & social sciences [J]