Research suggests that civil society mobilization together with the ratification of human rights treaties put pressure on governments to improve their human rights practices. An unexplored theoretical implication is that pressure provokes counter-pressure. Instead of improving treaty compliance, some governments will have an interest in de-mobilizing civil society to silence their critics. Yet we do not know how and to what extent this incentive shapes governments’ policies and practices regarding civil society organizations. We argue and show—using a new global database of government-sponsored restrictions on civil society organizations—that when governments have committed to human rights treaties and, at the same time, continue to commit severe human rights abuses, they impose restrictions on civil society groups to avoid monitoring and mitigate the international costs of abuses. Authors’ note: Kristin M. Bakke and Neil J. Mitchell acknowledge generous funding from the British Academy (grant number SG152265). The authors would like to thank the following for helpful feedback on this project: Niheer Dasandi, Dom Perera, William Reed, James Savage, Scott Straus, and Gary Uzonyi, the International Studies Quarterly editors and anonymous reviewers, as well as colleagues in the UCL Conflict & Change research cluster, participants at the UCL Global Governance Institute’s 2017 workshop on “Restrictions on Civil Society and the Free Flow of Information,” the members of our panels at the 2016 annual meeting of the APSA in Philadelphia and the 2018 annual meeting of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, and seminar and workshop participants at the University of Birmingham, the University of Essex, the University of Glasgow, and Oxford University

中文翻译：

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当国家镇压人权维护者时

研究表明，动员民间社会以及批准人权条约给政府带来了改善其人权做法的压力。一个尚未探索的理论含义是压力会引起反压力。一些国家的政府将提高民间社会的动员能力，以使批评家保持沉默，而不是提高条约的遵守程度。然而，我们不知道这种激励如何以及在多大程度上影响了政府关于民间社会组织的政策和做法。我们争论并表明，使用由政府资助的对民间社会组织的限制的新的全球数据库，当政府承诺遵守人权条约并同时继续严重侵犯人权时，它们对民间社会团体施加了限制，以避免监测和减轻滥用的国际成本。作者注：克里斯汀·M·巴克（Kristin M. Bakke）和尼尔·米切尔（Neil J. Mitchell）承认来自英国科学院的慷慨资助（授权号SG152265）。作者在此感谢以下对本项目的有用反馈：Niheer Dasandi，Dom Perera，William Reed，James Savage，Scott Straus和Gary Uzonyi，《国际研究季刊》编辑和匿名审稿人，以及UCL的同事冲突与变化研究小组，UCL全球治理研究所2017年研讨会的参与者，主题为“对民间社会的限制和信息的自由流通，