The effect of regime change on human rights treaty effectiveness - A quantative study

Sammanfattning: International law is well known to lack enforcement mechanisms similar in effectiveness to those that exist on the domestic level. Many scholars have tried to explain how international law can still constrain state behavior. I look at one such theory, and attempt to formulate hypotheses for how states should be expected to behave around and after regime changes with respect to their human rights obligations. These are then tested quantitatively using publicly available datasets. I find that there is no statistically significant difference between the human rights trend in these circumstances for ratifiers and nonratifiers of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its Optional Protocol.