Abstract
The determinants of compliance with human rights treaties likely vary according to the right in question, yet heterogeneity in the pathways through which ratification affects various human rights outcomes has received limited attention. This paper first develops an account of treaty compliance that incorporates the intrinsic benefits to the state of compliance, regime costs associated with certain rights, the political costs that NGOs, judges, and others are able to impose for non-compliance, and the fiscal and economic costs of compliance. The paper argues that for child survival rights, fiscal and economic costs are likely to be dispositive, and that as a result richer countries are more likely to comply. The paper then uses an instrumental variable approach to investigate whether ratification of the Convention of the Rights of the Child was associated with stronger effort at the country level on child survival rights. It finds that ratification of the CRC was correlated with a subsequent increase in immunization rates, but only in upper middle and high income countries.
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Notes
Conversations with World Bank staff working on immunization, November 2010.
The one declaration related to health was from Singapore, which held that “The Republic of Singapore considers that articles 19 and 37 of the Convention do not prohibit . . . (b) measures and restrictions which are prescribed by law and which are necessary in the interests of national security, public safety, public order, the protection of public health or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. . .” In other words, the declaration indicated Singapore’s desire to place an even higher priority on child survival rights, relative to other rights of the child, than does the Convention. See http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-11&chapter=4&lang=en#EndDec
The State Party Reports from the first session of the Committee on the Rights of the Child are available at http://tb.ohchr.org/default.aspx?Symbol=CRC/C/3/Add.2
Other control variables, such as NGOs or other civil society participation in the CRC, state conflict, and judicial independence, were considered; but these were ultimately not included because of the number of missing observations. Sample sizes would have fallen significantly, particularly for the sub-samples split by income level, which are crucial for the approach taken here.
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I would like to thank Afroza Chowdhury, Jessica Wintfeld, and Brett Stark for fine research assistance; and Beth King, Nita Rudra, Hans Peter Schmitz, Erik Voeten, Jim Vreeland, participants at the Political Economy of International Organizations meeting (Monte Verità 2008), and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. The views and findings of this paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank or its Executive Directors.
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Gauri, V. The cost of complying with human rights treaties: The convention on the rights of the child and basic immunization. Rev Int Organ 6, 33–56 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-010-9100-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-010-9100-7