Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics

This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction; 2. Why international law? The development of the international human rights regime in the twentieth century; 3. Theories of commitment; 4. Theories of compliance; 5. Civil rights; 6. Equality for women: education, work, and reproductive rights; 7. Humane treatment: the prevalence and prevention of torture; 8. The protection of innocents: rights of the child; 9. Conclusions.

About the Author :
Beth Simmons is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Massachusetts. She received her PhD from Harvard University in the Department of Government and has taught international relations, international law, and international political economy at Duke University, North Carolina, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. Her book Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years, 1924–1939, was recognized by the American Political Science Association in 1995 as the best book published in 1994 in government, politics, or international relations. She has worked at the International Monetary Fund with the support of a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship (1995–6), has spent a year as a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (1996–7), spent a year in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, California (2002–3), and is currently a Fellow at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University. Her new book is entitled Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2009). Simmons was elected in April 2009 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Review :
'Mobilizing for Human Rights is a magisterial work of scholarship. It substantially advances our understanding of human rights law in domestic and international politics. Due to its exceptional rigor, this book will help settle some of the most highly contested debates, and will surely spark new ones. It constitutes an outstanding achievement for interdisciplinary studies.' Ryan Goodman, New York University School of Law 'Mobilizing for Human Rights brilliantly combines theory and systematic empirical analysis to demonstrate how international human rights law affects state policies by altering the domestic political environment. Beth Simmons has written what will become a classic work integrating the study of international relations with that of domestic politics.' Robert O. Keohane, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University 'This is a very powerful study of the impact of international law and the evolution of an international human rights regime. As Simmons notes, the development of such a regime has been a major change in world politics since World War II. Her book provides one of the most well articulated theories of why the human rights regime has evolved as an international treaty system. And it presents one of the most in depth empirical studies of the major elements of that regime. It advances the novel argument that governments sign and comply with human rights treaties because they mobilize domestic groups to demand such behavior. This book will make a major contribution to our study of world politics by showing that international law can matter and that the recognition of human rights can change the behavior of governments.' Helen V. Milner, Princeton University 'Simmons has written simply the most important new work by a social scientist on international law and human rights. This rigorous, persuasive, and theoretically eclectic book should be required reading for any scholar or graduate student interested in the topic.' Kathryn Sikkink, University of Minnesota 'This is one of the most important books on international human rights in decades. For more than thirty years, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to use regression analysis to show that human rights treaties make a difference. In this book, Harvard Professor Beth Simmons cracks the code, developing a well-grounded theory of political contexts in which signing a human rights treaty should yield improved human rights on the ground, and then offering rigorous statistical tests that confirm the theory. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand when and how human rights law works.' Professor Richard H. Steinberg, UCLA School of Law 'This book marshals theoretical arguments and empirical evidence to show that, under certain conditions, a state's public law-like commitment in the form of agreeing to an international human rights treaty has a noticeable positive impact on domestic human rights outcomes.' International Affairs