Abstract

Vera Shikhelman’s recent article on the implementation of the views of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (HRC) took a valuable first step towards addressing the question why states do, or do not, comply with adverse treaty body views. In this contribution, we contend that parts of the chosen theoretical and methodological approach are somewhat problematic, however, and ultimately weaken the overall strength and reliability of Shikhelman’s findings. Theoretically, we question whether hypotheses developed in the context of studying compliance with international law and legally binding court judgments can be transferred to legally non-binding views without adjusting for potentially consequential differences in their legal status. Methodologically, we note certain issues concerning the data generated by the HRC’s follow-up procedure and its use in Shikhelman’s analysis, and suggest that statistical methods that take into consideration the time dimension of implementation processes, notably survival analysis, yield analytically more convincing causal inferences. We provide illustrative results of such a methodologically revised approach to examining compliance with adverse HRC views that reveal more fine-grained insights into the temporally unfolding processes of implementing such decisions.

中文翻译：

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遵守联合国人权条约机构“观点”的研究面临的挑战和陷阱：对维拉·希克曼的答复

摘要

薇拉·希克曼（Vera Shikhelman）在最近关于联合国人权委员会（HRC）意见执行情况的文章中迈出了宝贵的第一步，朝着解决国家为何遵守或不遵守不利条约机构观点的问题迈出了重要一步。在这一贡献中，我们认为所选择的理论和方法论方法的某些部分是有问题的，但是最终削弱了希克曼的发现的整体实力和可靠性。从理论上讲，我们质疑在研究是否遵守国际法和具有法律约束力的法院判决的背景下提出的假设，是否可以在不调整其法律地位可能产生的必然差异的情况下，转变为不具有法律约束力的观点。从方法上讲 我们注意到与HRC后续程序生成的数据及其在Shikhelman分析中的使用有关的某些问题，并建议考虑到实施过程的时间维度（尤其是生存分析）的统计方法产生更具说服力的因果推论。我们提供了这种方法修订的方法的说明性结果，该方法用于检查对HRC不利意见的遵守情况，这些意见揭示了对实施此类决策的时间展开过程的更详尽的见解。