Effects of International Human Rights Law on State Behavior

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ID: 338324
2026
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Abstract
Emeritus Professor The history and concept of human rights are both controversial. Scholars identify at least four different origins for the idea: (1) ancient religious and philosophical conceptions of justice, as found particularly in the Greco-Roman and Christian philosophies of natural law; (2) 17th- and 18th-century European ideas of natural rights and their practical manifestations in the American and French Revolutions; (3) the incorporation of human rights into the UN Charter of 1945 and the adoption by the United Nations of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; and (4) the rise of the human rights movement in the 1970s. The question of the effects of international human rights law on state behavior arises from the following facts: the United Nations has sponsored a number of international human rights treaties; all states have ratified at least one of these treaties and thereby undertaken binding legal obligations to comply with their requirements; and many people believe that state compliance with these treaties is poor. Social scientists were slow to investigate this question empirically, but from the 1980s, the social science of human rights began to pick up, from the turn of the century with increasing conceptual and methodological sophistication. This has not led to a social-scientific consensus on the effects of international human rights law on state behavior, but there is a consensus that these effects depend on certain mediating variables, such as the level of democracy, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, an autonomous civil society, the level of economic development, an absence of serious internal and external threats, and a supportive culture.
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Authors Michael Freeman
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Journal Oxford University Press eBooks
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/9780197859148.003.0387
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197859148.003.0387
Keywords Keywords not found

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