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When the targets are members and donors: Analyzing inter-governmental organizations’ human rights shaming

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Abstract

Research on the factors and considerations which drive human rights shaming focuses on non-governmental organizations (NGO). This article analyzes an intergovernmental organization’s (IGO) shaming. The article reviews the factors associated with NGO human rights shaming. The article then considers the potential association between these factors and IGO shaming, and the differences between IGOs and NGOs in this context. The potential associations are tested empirically using newly compiled data on the UN’s convention against torture (CAT) committee’s concluding observations country reports, and various specifications and regression methods. The results indicate that voting with the U.S. in the United Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA) is significantly associated with getting a more positive review from the CAT committee and this result is robust in various specifications. Results also indicate that the UN CAT committee’s shaming is associated with media coverage of human rights issues in the reviewed country and with trade and FDI volumes. The article draws conclusions regarding the linkages between funding, information sources and membership structures on the one hand and shaming approaches on the other.

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Notes

  1. This article analyzes all the concluding observations reports which were available online in October 2017 and were published between 2002 and 2017. It should be noted that new reports are publicized as soon as they are ready and each round of scraping yields additional reports. Figures 1 and 2 plot non-zero observations of the reports.

  2. The unit of observation in the formal treaty alliance dataset is treaty-dyad-year, resulting in multiple observations per country-year unit in a small number of cases. These few observation are exclude from the estimation.

  3. The regions are: The Middle-East; North-America; Scandinavia; South-America; Western-Europe; Africa; the Asia-Pacific and Central and Eastern Europe.

  4. This measurement was developed by Keefer and Stasavage (2003) and the coverage was extended in the World Bank’s database of political institutions (Keefer 2012). It is a measurement which equals one if a country holds competitive parliamentary elections and zero otherwise and is then incremented by one for every additional check on the executive.

  5. These include: the conflict measurement, the PTS score, the polity score, HRO presence, media coverage of human rights in the observed country, aid, GDP, FDI, population size and trade rates.

  6. Since the software does not tolerate missing observations missing data points are imputed using the R based Amelia software (Honaker et al. 2011).

  7. This measurement was developed by Keefer and Stasavage (2003) and the coverage was extended in the World Bank’s database of political institutions (Keefer 2012). It is a measurement which equals one if a country holds competitive parliamentary elections and zero otherwise and is then incremented by one for any additional check on the executive.

  8. These variables are lagged by an additional year to reflect sequencing between treaty ratification and production of the reports

  9. The coding of this variable relies on publications of torture allegations which are published as soon as they are revealed, not an annual basis. Therefore this variable is lagged an additional year to test a delayed association between torture allegations and UN reports.

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  1. Department of Sociology Political Science and Communication, The Open University of Israel, 1 University road, Ra’anana, Israel

    Sara Kahn-Nisser

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Kahn-Nisser, S. When the targets are members and donors: Analyzing inter-governmental organizations’ human rights shaming. Rev Int Organ 14, 431–451 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-018-9317-4

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